by Dalia Hashad

Next week, Palestinian leaders will appeal to the United Nations in a bid for state recognition. Media reports have focused on the array of possible outcomes and their consequences. Leaders of the occupied territories might request full U.N. recognition, including voting rights, but that move would face a certain veto by the United States in the Security Council. The more likely option is a far less powerful shift in status by the General Assembly, in which the Palestinians would ask to be upgraded from a non-member observer “entity” to a non-member observer “state”–essentially, the “Vatican option.” News commentators correctly point out that this looks a lot more hopeful for the Palestinians. In the General Assembly, the majority rules, and in this largely symbolic vote that would make Israel and the U.S. the odd men out.  

The U.N. story is not the only prominent instance of Palestinians' trying to make themselves visible to the citizens of a hyperpower and its Middle East client state, who tend to ignore Gaza and the West Bank unless rocks are thrown and rockets launched. Ominously, there has only been a smattering of mostly Bay-area media chatter about the sudden decision by Oakland's Museum of Children's Art (MOCHA) to pull the plug on an exhibition of artwork by school-age Palestinian children. “A Child's View of Gaza,” previously scheduled to open next weekend, had been a year in the making. MOCHA's board chair insisted that the sudden cancellation is “not a judgment of the art itself or related to any political opinions.”

Unsurprisingly, the story runs a lot deeper, as reflected in a tweet from the Jewish Federation of Greater East Bay: “Great News! 'The Child's view from Gaza' exhibit at MOCHA has been canceled thanks to some great East Bay Jewish community organizing.” While some bloggers and advocacy organizations noted the interference, major outlets remained largely silent. As the search ensues for a new space to display the art depicting the experiences of young Palestinians, it remains to be seen whether the news media's silence will allow continued suppression of the Palestinian story.

As the Arab Spring continues through this fall and winter, it's reasonable to ask how we Americans will choose to interact with Muslims and Arabs in the second post-9/11 decade. Of course, the answer to that question hinges on whether Americans choose to see Muslims and Arabs as real people. And that, in turn, has everything to do with the stories that our news media choose to tell. Or not tell.

Dalia Hashad is an attorney specializing in human rights and civil rights. She has also been a host and co-executive producer of “Law and Disorder,” a weekly talk-radio program.

by Jacques Berlinerblau

The dust-up this past weekend over Mayor Michael Bloomberg's decision not to feature clerical speakers at the 9/11 memorial service in New York has now thankfully settled. Even though the conservative Christian “outrage machine,” as Americans United for Separation of Church dubbed it, went into overdrive, Bloomberg seems to have weathered the storm.

Having witnessed many of these memorial services I am always awed by their solemnity; astonishingly, you can actually experience silence in lower Manhattan. The families and friends of the many victims walk about the neighborhood in a lachrymose daze. No sane American would think to turn such an event into a new front in the nation's ongoing culture wars, but with the cooperation of news media organizations who are as fearful of offending them as the politicians who court their favor, conservative Christians did just that.

The complaints that the mayor had waged “a de facto jihad” on religion or exhibited “mindless secular prejudice” are preposterous. If any speakers at the event had been prohibited from invoking God or faith, then the sound and fury that gushed up from the conservative blogosphere would have been warranted. Indeed, Secularists such as myself would have also protested such a prohibition. Why? Because the defense of expressive liberties is central to the history and mission of American Secularism.

Of course, Bloomberg imposed no such prohibition. His restriction was on the participation of clergy, not on discussions of faith on the part of individual citizens. The many religious references expressed by the participants, including President Obama, belied the assertion that the event planners were akin to the Soviet Union's infamous League of the Militant Godless.

This was a victory for defenders of the First Amendment, but it came amidst an unbelievably long losing streak. Bloomberg managed to stare down the Christian Right, but the truth is that Secularism (by which I mean the Enlightenment-era notion that state and ecclesiastical power should be kept separate) is mired in an abysmal losing streak. This theocratic sea-change is apparent in developments ranging from the expansion of George W. Bush's Office of Faith-Based Initiatives under Barack Obama to devastating setbacks in the United States Supreme Court's interpretation of the religion clauses and a decade-long plague of religious pandering in the rhetoric of politicians. I have been writing about secular issues for nearly ten years and, save perhaps the Dover “Intelligent Design” case of 2005, I can think of few other exceptions to this broader theocratic trend.

Ironically, the victory at Ground Zero was made possible by the willing non-participation of Roman Catholics; once Archbishop Dolan of New York noted that he had no difficulty with Bloomberg's decision, the game was over. The main lesson here for American Secularists–and for the journalists who should be covering these issues in greater depth–is that the energy and strategic vision of the “Christian Right” are ultimately rooted in the interests of white conservative evangelicals. They are the vanguard of the movement. When they team up with “co-belligerents” (to use theologian Francis Schaeffer's memorable term) such as conservative Catholics and Mormons, they are nearly unstoppable. When, however, they act alone they tend to look utterly partisan, if not a bit wacky.

It's important to realize that in his hometown Bloomerberg is not perceived as being hostile to religion. In fact, he has cultivated cordial and often friendly relations with many religious groups. So while Richard Land of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission may consider New York the “epicenter of secularism,” the facts on the ground are a bit more complicated than either Land or the reporters who follow his lead can fully appreciate.

Most politicians in America cannot be as fearless as Michael Bloomberg, whose largely progressive constituency and considerable personal fortune afford him the rare luxury of being able to abide by his First Amendment convictions. How many other politicians in the United States share Bloomberg's views on separation of church and state? And among those who do, how many are willing to lock horns with the powerful Christian Right as Bloomberg bravely did on what should have been a quiet day of national mourning? These are questions that more journalists should be asking.

Jacques Berlinerblau is associate professor and director of Jewish Civilization at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He is the author of The Secular Bible: Why Nonbelievers Must Take Religion Seriously (Cambridge) and the forthcoming How to Be Secular: A Field Guide for Religious Moderates, Atheists and Agnostics (Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt).
 

by Kevin Healey

The New York Times Magazine's recent photo-portfolio of Ground Zero steelworkers contains no explicit religious imagery. Likewise, the accompanying articles and interviews by Randy Kennedy, Dean Robinson and James Estrin make no explicit mention of religion. But as one commenter notes, Damon Winter's photos are “a poignant visual elegy to American workers past and present.” Coupling textual themes of nation, race and class with visual themes of determination, strength and hope, this multi-media piece in itself constitutes an exercise in civil religion. The subtlety of the piece's quasi-religious imagery is precisely what allows it to perform important cultural work. But what is gained—or lost—when journalism embraces such themes?

Joseph Mitchell's 1949 piece, “The Mohawks in High Steel“—mentioned in passing by the Times—provides an insightful point of contrast. Appearing as a long-form piece in the New Yorker, Mitchell's story of the Mohawk steelworkers is a useful lesson in religion reporting. Detailing their legacy in construction work, which led them from Canada to the U.S. in the early twentieth century, Mitchell deftly highlights the centrality of religious faith and practice among the so-called “Praying Mohawks.”

His account is eerily familiar. After the 1907 Quebec bridge disaster in which 33 Mohawks died, mourners marked their graves with crosses made from steel girders. Using steel from the collapsed bridge, their widows placed a life-sized cross in a local church “to show their Christian resignation.” Unlike the steel cross at the 9/11 Memorial Museum, however, these symbolic gestures did not initiate a mass-mediated national debate. Meaning remained local and particular. More importantly, Mitchell makes clear that for these men—who would form the backbone of the steelworkers unions in Brooklyn and elsewhere—the tension between religious and racial identity is seldom resolved.

Some of the Mohawk descendents of the Quebec disaster appear in the Times' photo-portfolio. In contrast to Mitchell's piece, however, in the Times piece the local and particular give way to a broad narrative of national identity. Tensions dissolve into an imagined unity. At the construction site, Randy Kennedy tells us, one hears Don McLean singing “American Pie” while “men in hard hats decoupaged with flag decals are bobbing their heads to the beat.” Damon Winter compares his experience with these steelworkers to his work as an embedded photographer in Afghanistan. “Up there,” Winter says, “I felt like: 'I'm on an embed. I'm totally on an embed,'” noting that the construction work is “run with that same kind of military precision.” Working with such strong and courageous men, Winter confesses, is “amazing.”

As Kennedy notes, “The affinities between ironworkers and photographers themselves run deep. Both professions are defined by the compulsion to go where most people won't go and see with their own eyes what most people will never see.” In fact, both are also in the business of construction. Here, Winter's portraits of muscle, skin and steel—and the articles that accompany them—invoke familiar themes of patriotism, militarism and masculinity. In paying homage to these “cowboys in the sky” on the anniversary of a religiously-infused national tragedy, the Times piece props up the edifice of American civil religion.

In many ways this is a praiseworthy task. In a different mode, though, journalism serves to de-construct such grand narratives, exposing the tensions beneath their surface. It's worth noting, for example, that many of the politicians who are invoking the cross are also spearheading policies that strike at the heart of organized labor. What is it like for the steelworkers at Ground Zero to be valorized as national heroes just as labor rights are under attack? One is left to wonder. But that's an irony worth exploring—for any reporter willing to take Joseph Mitchell's inspiring, if quirky, lead.

Kevin Healey received his Ph.D. from the Institute of Communications Research at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His dissertation is titled “The Spirit of Networks: New Media and the Changing Role of Religion in American Public Life.” Kevin's research on media and religion appears in Journal of Mass Media Ethics, Cultural Studies<=>Critical Methodologies, and Symbolic Interaction.

by Judith Weisenfeld

The first substantive session of my undergraduate seminar at Vassar College on the topic “Gods of the City: Religion in New York” was to take place on the afternoon of September 11, 2001. I had selected a number of readings for that week to explore whether and how religious life in cities might be unique. Is it useful to speak of such a thing as “urban religion” and, if so, what are its characteristics?

The first piece the students were to read for the course was the chapter on “Walking in the City” from Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life, which begins with a meditation about looking down at Manhattan from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center. For de Certeau, this perspective on the city produced the false sense that one was a “voyeur-god,” able to scopically contain the diversity and complexity of the ever-changing city below. Our goal was to dive into that diversity.

Obviously, the religious landscape my students encountered during the course of their fieldwork and site visits that semester was powerfully different from what they would have experienced prior to September 11, and we spent a good deal of time thinking together about whether the differences were simply of intensity of expression or differences of kind. Or, perhaps, both.

The activity around the shrines and memorials that people created in the immediate aftermath of the attacks struck us all as both particularly powerful and decidedly different from official religious expressions, both in their spontaneous production and the ephemeral nature of the material culture involved. These were not memorials like the portrayals of individual victims in the New York Times' “Portraits of Grief” series or as found in the official memorial produced through long negotiations aimed at satisfying the needs of diverse parties and, ultimately, unlikely to do so. Rather, these were handmade memorials, expressions of bewilderment, grief, faith and need for connection.

Union Square in Manhattan became a central site where people gathered for comfort and began to write or draw and to deposit candles, flowers, flags and posters to honor missing loved ones. At the time, the New York press gave useful attention to Union Square and to other spontaneous memorials in the city, examining the social and religious functions of home-made shrines in an electronic age.

The press also attended to the emotion and politics surrounding the dismantling of spontaneous memorial sites, the removal of posters of the missing tacked on a wall at Grand Central Station, on the side of the now closed St. Vincent's Hospital in Greenwich Village, at Trinity Church downtown and on lampposts and phone booths across lower Manhattan. Various museums began collecting the ephemera, which resulted in exhibits like the New-York Historical Society's “Missing: Streetscape of a City in Mourning” in the winter of 2002. The “Tiles for America” project at the corner of 7th Avenue and 11th Street in Greenish Village is probably the last remaining communal spontaneous memorial in Manhattan, and it is unlikely to survive in its current form because of the MTA's plan to construct a subway ventilation plant on the site.

The upcoming opening of the official 9/11 Memorial and Museum certainly merits the media attention it will undoubtedly receive. Reporters, however, should not forget the importance of the production of spontaneous shrines and memorials to the grieving experiences of many New Yorkers. Although the memorials and shrines themselves proved to be ephemeral expressions of urban religion, the tenth anniversary of the attacks presents an opportunity to revisit unofficial, communal and grassroots modes of mourning.

Judith Weisenfeld is Professor of Religion and Associate Faculty in the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University. She is the author most recently of Hollywood Be Thy Name: African American Religion in American Film, 1929-1949 (University of California Press, 2007).

by J. Terry Todd

One of the most fascinating instances of 9/11 memorializing is the push for the canonization of Father Mychal Judge, a Franciscan priest and New York Fire Department chaplain who is listed in official records as New York's Victim #0001. The story of Father Mike represents one of the few instances in which religion figures into 9/11 in a relatively uncontroversial way–though there is certainly the potential for controversy. And the steady push for his sainthood in some quarters is arguably abetted by the attention news media have devoted to him and the deep emotions evoked by his memory.

On the morning of September 11th, while at home in a midtown Manhattan Franciscan friary, Judge heard about the unfolding emergency on his FDNY radio and raced to the World Trade Center. After he dashed into one of the towers to help rescue the fallen and pray over the dying and the already dead, Father Mike was hit with falling debris and died of blunt trauma to the head.   

A photograph of Mychal Judge's lifeless body being carried out of the rubble is one of the most haunting images to emerge from 9/11 reportage. Taken by photojournalist Shannon Stapleton, the picture is strikingly different from the day's other images of burning towers and falling debris. While Stapleton's photograph depicted both the grief and intimate heroism of the day, it was also able to transform – for those looking with Christian eyes – Mychal Judge into the figure of Jesus. Some compared the image to Michelangelo's Pieta, but for me the photograph echoed Ruebens' and Van Der Weyden's deposition of Christ from the cross, where Jesus' grief-stricken friends cradle his crucified body in their arms.

At a funeral mass celebrated by New York's Cardinal Edward Egan on September 15, Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Senator Hillary Clinton and other dignitaries recalled Father Mike's good deeds and gregarious ways, especially his deep affinity and kindness for the poor and the homeless, for alcoholics like himself – Mychal had quit drinking in 1978 – and his early ministry among people with HIV/AIDS. In a city reeling from grief and looking for heroes, Father Mike was there, just as big in death as he was in life. His apotheosis had begun, and calls for sainthood soon mounted.

On the first anniversary of 9/11, Father Mike's friends began what was to become an annual ritual, the Father Mychal Judge Walk of Remembrance, retracing the final route that Father Mike took from midtown to the World Trade Center on 9/11. Mychal's Message, an organization focusing on the needs of the homeless, was also founded in 2002 as a way to honor Father Mike and his ministry to New York's homeless population. The portion of Manhattan's West 31st Street that runs past the Franciscan church and friary where Father Mike lived was christened Father Mychal Judge Street. A commuter ferry is also named for him. Then there are the media productions – newspaper and magazine articles and a number of books, including an illustrated children's volume, a book of prayers and a biography, The Book of Mychal by Daily News columnist Michael Daly. Finally, three documentaries follow Father Mike in life and death, including “Saint of 9/11,” a beautifully made film that premiered at the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival.
 
There had been calls for Judge's canonization even before “Saint of 9/11,” but the film's title provided a jolt of energy to the cause. At the same time the documentary probably stopped the process in its tracks, given the Vatican's efforts to purge the priesthood of gay men. The film was co-produced by Equality Forum, an LGBT advocacy group, and New York-based LGBT activist Brendan Fay, a close friend of Father Mike. In the months after 9/11, Fay and other LGBT activists had begun to speak publicly about Judge's sexual identity and his longtime support of Dignity, a gay Catholic group. In “Saint of 9/11,” former NYFD Commissioner Thomas Van Essen related how Father Mike had spoken freely about his sexual orientation, even as he had hidden the fact from the NYFD rank-and-file. 

Some Catholics denounced the outing of Father Mychal, accusing LGBT activists of politicizing Judge's heroic death, a charge that doesn't square with the deep spiritual sentiment that Judge has stirred among some LGBT Christians. He is already St. Mychal in two small gay-friendly Catholic denominations in the United States, both of which are independent from Rome. The Orthodox Catholic Church of America elevated Judge to sainthood in 2002, and its Lexington, Kentucky parish is named St. Mychal the Martyr. In Dallas, the local parish of the North American Old Catholic Church is the Church of St. Mychal Judge.

By all accounts, as Barbara Bradley Haggarty's Labor Day NPR story reminded us, Father Mike possessed an uncanny ability to bring people together across the great fissures in American life – social, economic, political, racial and ethnic. He counted among his friends Wall Street traders and homeless people, queer Catholic activists and conservatives within the Church, firefighters and artists, Republicans and Democrats. In a bitterly partisan age, perhaps one miracle we can attribute to the Saint of 9/11 is showing that such a life is possible. It's a good story, and whatever the future holds for Father Mike's canonization in the Roman Catholic Church, the news media are doing a good job of probing why saint-talk around the memory of Father Mike shows no signs of abating.

* * * * * *

J. Terry Todd is Associate Professor of American Religious Studies at Drew University. The author of many articles on religion in 20th-century America, Terry is especially interested in religious conflicts over family life and sexuality, and how Christian ideas and practices shape U.S. politics and mass media.

by Becky Garrison

Given the ongoing controversy surrounding the inclusion of a cross-like structure at the 9/11 Memorial Museum, reporters might consider other religious and spiritual angles on how 9/11 victims are memorialized.

As noted in the September 2 broadcast of PBS's Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, questions about what constitutes “sacred space” at Ground Zero and the proper treatment of human remains continue to complicate the good intentions of those involved in commemoration efforts. Some 9/11 family groups claim that the museum has not kept them informed regarding the inclusion of artifacts and over 9,000 body parts in the museum's collection. Information about this issue can be found here.

When touring the museum, observe how 9/11 victims are memorialized when compared to other memorials such as the 9/11 Pentagon Memorial and the Oklahoma City National Memorial Museum. Repeated requests by family groups to list on the memorial all uniformed personnel, the tower and floor number or flight number for all civilians, plus the age of the individuals and other individualized information, have been denied. Also, some 9/11 families have voiced concerns regarding the lack of safety provisions put into place during construction of the 9/11 Memorial Museum. When soliciting responses from 9/11 family members about the memorial, reporters should be aware that a faction of that larger group has established foundations that are connected to the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. Thus they are likely to support the plans set forth by the LMDC rather than aligning with the wishes of other 9/11 family groups.  

Reporters need to be careful not to craft a religion-based conflict where one does not exist. Case in point: the New York Daily News reported that a group of atheists protested the renaming a street “Seven in Heaven” to commemorate seven fallen FDNY firefighters. According to David Silverman, president of American Atheists, his group was contacted for a reaction to the renaming by the news media. While they rendered their opinion when asked, they did not initiate a protest against this street sign.

When covering the 10th anniversary, reporters should examine the funding streams behind the commemorative merchandise being marketed at or near Ground Zero. A particular angle that has not received much media scrutiny remains the commercialization of 9/11 by Trinity Church. The gift shop at St. Paul's Chapel carries an array of 9/11-themed merchandise, but since closing their well publicized recovery effort, the church has not been involved in championing post-9/11 concerns such as health care for first responders, the determination of what constitutes sacred space at the former World Trade Center Site and Fresh Kills landfill or the ongoing recovery of human remains during construction of the Freedom Tower and the 9/11 Memorial and Museum. In a similar vein, some political groups are selling 9/11 commemorative merchandise as a way to generate support and revenue for conservative causes and candidates.

As reported in the Village Voice, a range of people, companies, charities and other agencies have found ways to benefit from one of the nation's worst disasters. Some individuals like Scott Shields of the Bear Search and Rescue Foundation crafted a story that initially enthralled the news media and the public, though he was later convicted and served jail time for fraud. Along those lines, reporters should be mindful that an organization may continue to drum up support for 9/11 related projects they “hope” to accomplish that as of yet have not been approved by the proper authorities. For example, there are no formal permits authorizing the development of a Garden of Forgiveness at Ground Zero despite the claims of  the Forgive to Give website (formerly the Garden of Forgiveness).

According to the Foundation Center in 2006, over a third of the more than 300 charitable organizations fast-tracked for recognition by the IRS in the days following September 11, 2001 are no longer functioning. Checking a reliable charity watchdog site such as Charity Navigator or the American Institute of Philanthropy can help reporters to ascertain the legitimacy of a particular organization.

The 9/11 events that illuminate the faith-based spirit of solidarity that arose during the recovery effort include the Mychal Judge Walk of Remembrance, the Tunnel to Towers Run/Walk, the 9/11 Unity Walk and the 9/11-related programming sponsored by Prepare NY.

Becky Garrison is a panelist for the Washington Post's “On Faith” blog. Her additional writing credits include work for the Guardian, Killing the Buddha, Sojourners, Religion Dispatches, the Revealer, Geez magazine, the High Calling, and U.S. Catholic.

by Caryle Murphy (courtesy of Global Post)

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — For more than three decades, Saudi Arabia has used its vast oil riches to host foreign students in the kingdom, build schools and mosques abroad, distribute the Qur'an in different languages and send funds to Islamic organizations wherever Muslims are in need.

This global outreach was meant to secure Saudi leadership of Sunni Islam globally while proselytizing on behalf of the kingdom's ultraconservative brand of Salafi Islam, Wahhabism.

But a decade after 9/11, this proselytization drive has seen major changes, scholars of the Salafi movement say.

Al Qaeda's 2001 assaults against the United States and its violent insurgency in the kingdom from 2003 to 2006 forced the Saudi government to impose stricter controls on funding sent to Islamic groups abroad, tone down some of the harsher rhetoric of Wahhabism, and broaden its outreach to non-Salafi, mainstream Muslims, according to these experts.

It is impossible to know how much money has gone into this national effort since it began in the late 1970s. The kingdom does not publish official figures on its promotion of Islam abroad. Moreover, it is done by a variety of actors working independently of each other, including clerics, princes, government officials and wealthy businessmen. Most estimates, however, assume that billions of dollars have been spent on this venture.

Angered by evidence collected after 9/11 that some Saudi-funded Islamic charities were collaborating with Al Qaeda, U.S. officials demanded that Saudi Arabia stop financing these groups and halt the flow of private funds to terrorist organizations overseas.

Riyadh was initially uncooperative, especially when it came to Islamic charities, partly because they doubted the U.S. allegations, and also because charities are key vehicles for proselytizing. Eventually, however, it put in place tougher banking restrictions and anti-money-laundering laws.

Meanwhile, the Arab Spring has created new uncertainties in Saudi Arabia's relationship with Salafi groups in the region, highlighting how Salafism's expansion around the world has led to greater diversity and a weakening of Saudi leadership within this religious trend.

“Most Salafists would look up to Saudi Arabia and have a lot of respect for Saudi sheikhs and quote them extensively,” said Stephane Lacroix, a French expert on the movement and author of “Awakening Islam: The Politics of Religious Dissent in Saudi Arabia.” “But you also do have dissident Salafi movements that disagree with Saudi Arabia. Not everyone who is Salafi is pro-Saudi.”

In recent months, for example, some Egyptian Salafis discarded the orthodox Saudi Salafi stance of shunning politics and formed a political party. “The reality on the ground has changed,” Egyptian Salafi spokesman Sheikh Abdulmunim Al Shahhat told the Saudi newspaper Asharq al Awsat. “And the fatwa now is to participate” in the political process.

Meanwhile, Syrian Salafis have actively supported the protracted revolt against President Bashar Al Assad, another flouting of Saudi-style Salafism, which demands blind obedience to existing rulers, no matter how tyrannical.

These developments are “very un-Salafi-like because Salafis do not usually engage in politics,” said Martin van Bruinessen of Utrecht University's religious studies department. (Continue reading at GlobalPost.)

Caryle Murphy is Saudi Arabia correspondent for GlobalPost and a 2011 Knight-Luce Fellow for Reporting on Global Religion. A longtime reporter for the Washington Post, Murphy has been a foreign correspondent in southern Africa and the Middle East. In 1990, while serving as the Post's bureau chief in Cairo, she was in Kuwait when Iraq invaded the emirate. She remained there for almost a month, part of that time in hiding from Iraqi troops. In 1991, she was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting and the George Polk Award for Foreign Reporting for her coverage of Iraqi-occupied Kuwait and the subsequent Persian Gulf War. She was the 1994-1995 Edward R. Murrow fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Murphy is the author of Passion for Islam (Scribner 2002), which explains Islam's contemporary revival and the roots of religious extremism in the Middle East.

by Sandi Dolbee

The polarizing notion that the United States is a “(Judeo-)Christian” nation–and the reluctance of politicians and media types to challenge or complicate that idea–is nowhere more apparent than at Ground Zero.

First, some background. As Courtney Bender has written in this column, a lawsuit against making the National September 11 Memorial and Museum a permanent home for the steel cross that once stood over the ruins of the Twin Towers, along with the upcoming tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks and the soon-to-open memorial, create a virtual trifecta of religion stories.

After Sept. 11, 2001, workers removing the remains of the World Trade Center found a 17-foot, t-shaped piece of steel beam, which they hoisted over the site. The cross stood sentry throughout the clean-up work, becoming a powerful symbol of resilience amid the death and destruction. Five years ago, it was moved to a nearby church, where it continued to be displayed until earlier this summer, when it was transferred to the commemorative museum scheduled to be dedicated on Sept. 11.

Enter the New Jersey-based group American Atheists, which has filed a lawsuit arguing that displaying a Christian symbol–a.k.a., the cross–at a museum receiving public funds is a violation of the separation of church and state. In response, the 9/11 foundation told ABCNews.com that the museum also will display a Star of David forged from the collapsed buildings as well as a Jewish prayer shawl donated by the family of a victim.

Really? Is that the best we can do? More than 2,600 people from 77 countries lost their lives when the Twin Towers collapsed after being rammed by hijacked jets. And with that global village comes a global tapestry of religions: Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and Buddhists, along with Christians and Jews. Some, no doubt, were atheists or Nones (as in no religious affiliation, not the sisters in sensible shoes).

It may take a bit of digging, but there are rich stories to be told in chronicling the religious backgrounds of the victims and looking into how those beliefs figure into the lives of the loved ones who survive them. Limiting religion coverage on this anniversary to a fight over a cross and the seemingly perfunctory addition of a Star of David is insulting–and inaccurate.

But wait. There's more.

The tenth anniversary of the attacks falls on a Sunday, the predominately accepted Christian Sabbath. How about a story on what ministers are planning to preach on that day? Will they be addressing the interfaith mosaic of our suffering–and our healing? Will they be exploring whether this horrific day made us better people? Or will they be raising other, yet-unanswered, questions?

The casualties of 9/11, their families and the rest of us deserve the best our news media can give us–including an accurate and complete representation of American spiritual life. A better trifecta of religion stories would examine how we explain the traumatic events of a decade ago, what our efforts to commemorate that time say about us and whose experiences tend to get left out of the picture.

Sandi Dolbee is the former religion and ethics editor of the San Diego Union-Tribune. Nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for her beat coverage, she also is a two-time recipient of Religion Reporter of the Year, the Religion Newswriters Association's top award. She is a past president of the RNA, which represents reporters who cover religion in the secular media, and has received fellowships to study religion and ethics issues at USC, the University of Maryland, New York University and the University of Cambridge in England.

by Maura Jane Farrelly

The New York Times' Executive Editor Bill Keller struck a nerve when his weekly column in the Times Magazine called for journalists to pay “closer attention” to what the GOP's candidates for president “say about their faith and what they have said in the past that they may have decided to play down in the quest for mainstream respectability.”

Some conservative bloggers, such as Alana Goodman at Commentary magazine, were upset that Keller, “who never expressed much curiosity about Democratic presidential candidates” during his tenure as editor of the Times, was now “suddenly burning to find out more about the Republican field's religious beliefs.”

Others, such as Ed Morrissey of The Week, immediately homed in on Keller's unfortunate inability to distinguish between the conservative Roman Catholicism of Rick Santorum and the Protestant evangelicalism of Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry. The original version of Keller's article – which was posted online on Friday, August 25th – mistakenly asserted that Perry, Bachmann, and Santorum “are all affiliated with fervid subsets of evangelical Christianity.”  Santorum, however, is the son of an Italian immigrant and attends a Latin Rite Mass outside Washington, D.C. Although Keller's error was corrected in the online version, the hard copy of the magazine – which came out on Sunday – still identified Santorum as an evangelical.

And then other conservative bloggers like John Hayward at Human Events appealed to the lowest common denominator in their laments, noting that “nowhere in [Keller's] essay does he get around to wondering if a presidential candidate's fervent Muslim beliefs would be as problematic as Michele Bachmann's or Rick Perry's Christianity.” The point is moot, of course, as no one running for president in 2012, Republican or Democrat, actually possesses “fervent Muslim beliefs.” It isn't clear from his post, however, whether Hayward has actually accepted that fact.

But Hayward's obvious Muslim-baiting aside, the conservative blogosphere does have reason to be up in arms. The day after his column was released online, Keller did acknowledge the legitimacy of some of the anger, when he admitted in a twitter post that “we were late to Rev. Wright in '08, but we got there and did it well.” Keller has not backed away, however, from his willingness to compare faith in God to a belief in space aliens, or from his assertion that evangelical Christians and – in the corrected version – presidential candidates who belong to the largest Christian tradition in the world, i.e. Roman Catholicism, engender in voters “concerns about their respect for the separation of church and state, not to mention the separation of fact from fiction.”  

Keller was right to assert – as he did in his column's second paragraph – that “when it comes to the religious beliefs of our would-be presidents, we [i.e. journalists] are a little squeamish about probing too aggressively.” Too many reporters nowadays are afraid of looking like the evangelical and even mainline Protestants whose religious prejudices forced John F. Kennedy to vow in 1960 that he would not be taking his marching orders from the Vatican.

Many of the questions Keller proposes are perfectly appropriate ones – especially in light of the fact that some of the people serving as advisers to GOP candidates believe that only Christians should have authority over the country's secular institutions. But if too many journalists nowadays are timid when it comes to religion, too many of them are also unsophisticated when it comes to the topic, and Keller's tone revealed him to be one of them. Granted, his column wasn't as bad as Christopher Hitchens' sophomoric screed against faith, God is not Great. But Keller did reflect some of the same blindness that afflicts Hitchens – a blindness that manifests itself in an inability to see faith as anything more than base irrationality, and people who believe as anything other than deluded simpletons.

Maura Jane Farrelly is Assistant Professor of American Studies and Director of the Journalism Program at Brandeis University. In the past, she was a reporter for Voice of America and Georgia Public Radio. Her first book, Papist Patriots: The Making of an American Catholic Identity, will be published by Oxford University Press later this year.