by Brie Loskota

The great American political experiment has passed many milestones along the path toward a more inclusive society. Kennedy broke barriers for Catholics, Geraldine Ferraro for women, Lieberman for Jews and Obama for African-Americans. But there are a few stubborn biases that just won't budge. Mormons, in particular, have faced persistent prejudice when it comes to running for president. According to the latest from Gallup, “Americans' reluctance to support a Mormon for president has held close to the 20% level since Gallup first measured this in 1967, and long after historical biases against voting for blacks, Catholics, Jews, and women have dwindled.” 

With two members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in contention for the Republican nomination, the current election season (as if the last one ever ended) promises to put their religion squarely in the foreground. But is the story here really about Mormonism?

The reporting around the Gallup poll has focused largely on what it means for Mitt Romney and John Huntsman, whose candidacies give the numbers a near-term political relevance. A brief in the Los Angeles Times points out that the bias toward Mormons is actually fairly partisan, encompassing 18 percent of Republicans but more than a quarter of Democrats. But that's where the story ends for the LA Times. 

This kind of cursory coverage tends to gloss over a number of interesting and potentially interrelated facts. First, all subgroups were consistent in their anti-Mormon sentiments except those with no college education, 31 percent of whom would not vote for a Mormon, as opposed to just 12 percent of college graduates. That's at least worth some reflection, but the Times, along with other news outlets, missed the opportunity to help us interpret this datum. 

The NPR story about the poll, by contrast, focuses on the two candidates but also adds an important comparison: “[O]nly atheists, and gays and lesbians, are treated more skeptically than Mormons. Thirty-two percent of those interviewed said they would not vote for a gay or lesbian for president. Close to half of the respondents would shun atheists.” If an atheist or an openly gay person were running, we might be paying closer attention to these data. But as we've learned over the past decade–when we were surprised by a number of dramatic events that seemed almost inevitable in retrospect–it's important for reporters to pay attention to salient details that the rest of us might be overlooking.

For example, where are Americans on electing a Muslim? Seems like an obvious question, but you wouldn't know the answer from the Gallup poll. In that vein, the GOP's first debate featured a number of statements that would seem to violate the Constitution's provision that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” So much for the Constitutional renaissance in conservatism; I guess you have to read more than just the Second Amendment. 

It will be interesting to see how developments in the national election compare to the political scene in Kentucky. The ballot in the Blue Grass State will include a Jewish candidate for lieutenant governor, and the major figures have all vowed to move the debate away from personal religiosity and toward positions and values–though that vow of civility hasn't kept a few good old-fashioned anti-Semitic statements from making their way into the fray. Still, the story highlights the fact that political races, and the news media coverage thereof, can rise above the identity-based pigeonholing of candidates.

That said, it's still up to reporters to look behind the curtain, under the fig leaf and beneath the poll numbers.

Brie Loskota is Managing Director of the Center for Religion and Civic Culture at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. She also serves as the program officer for the CRCC Pentecostal and Charismatic Research Initiative, a program that seeks to spur new research on one of the world's fastest growing religious movements.

by Chris Tokuhama

“There are some genuinely bad people who would like to infiltrate our country,” Newt Gingrich asserted during the first Republican Presidential Debate in New Hampshire, “and we have got to have the guts to stand up and say 'No.'”

By now, Gingrich's comments have made the rounds, spreading across blogs, mainstream news outlets and, of course, “The Daily Show.” Positioning Muslims alongside Nazis and Communists as modern-day fifth columnists, Gingrich has once again stoked anti-Muslim sentiment in the name of patriotism.

Although Gingrich's polemic raised a few eyebrows, it was not all that surprising given his recent stance on the subject. Highly visible in a movement that would label American Muslims as forever foreigners, Gingrich seems to have crafted himself into a conservative candidate who is particularly willing to exploit simmering Islamophobia for political advantage. Despite the recent spate of coverage, Justin Elliott notes that mainstream news media have generally shied away from what might very well be the real story: the strategic evolution of this particular brand of rhetoric by Gingrich.

Perhaps the American public is partly at fault for this sad development as it clamors for briefs that cater to the widespread appetite for moral outrage and hungers for stories that satisfy the desire for spectacle. In an ideal world, journalism would temper rather than cater to these inclinations, though many in the profession seem to be neglecting their duties in this regard. More than a simple lack of coverage, there seems to be a fundamental absence of curiosity and critical-mindedness among journalists when sources–particularly politicians–make assertions about their religious beliefs or the beliefs of others.

And yet religion obviously continues to exert a powerful influence on our politics. With Rick Perry hosting an event for governors called “The Response,” and Welton Gaddy of the Interfaith Alliance calling for a reduction in religion's political presence, it appears that the upcoming election cycle will see a deepening and sharpening of the negotiation between the public and private aspects of religion in American public life.

Despite the potential collapse of the private/public dichotomy, are journalists encouraging people to think about the role that religion plays in both of these spheres? Has our news coverage been affected by an upswing in atheism's popularity? Religion, faith and spirituality all bridge the gap, with values formed in private undoubtedly affecting actions undertaken in public.

Why, then, do many journalists hesitate to probe the potential political impact of belief, leaving a particular individual's religious assertions unquestioned when a fuller understanding of the sources and consequences of his or her convictions would serve the public interest? Rather than avoiding the issue entirely, reporters should make the investigation of religion a routine practice—and thereby provide their audiences with the information and critical tools they need to understand the consequences of the choices they make in the voting booth.

Chris Tokuhama is a doctoral student in the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, where he is pursuing media/cultural studies with a concentration in Gothic Horror as an articulator of cultural anxiety. A biologist by training, Chris currently endeavors to understand transformative bodies through lenses as varied as narrative studies, media and religion, a process that has resulted in an upcoming chapter in The Hunger Games and Philosophy focusing on issues of authenticity in celebrity. Follow his quest to find the perfect cup of coffee on Twitter at @TrojanTopher.

Su'ad Abdul Khabeer

“He's Back!” quipped the headline of a news report on yesterday's congregational hearings, sponsored by New York Rep. Peter King (R-NY), on the alleged threat of terrorist recruitment in U.S. prisons. Whether that opener is read ominously or with glee, Representative King is indeed back, and with him comes another round of coverage on American Muslims and terrorism that is analytically impoverished.

Yesterday's hearing was the third in a series on the supposed creeping menace withing the ranks American Muslims; the first, titled “The Extent of Radicalization in the American Muslim Community and that Community's Response,” was held in March. Although the news media's interest in this story may have waned a bit since “The Book of Mormon” opened on Broadway and “Rango” was tops at the box office, the content of the coverage still fits into a well-worn pattern—pushing punditry rather than fact.

Numerous media outlets have reported on the hearings and, as they should, explained King's primary argument, which goes something like: There are “Good Muslims,” BUT for far too long we have been ignoring the many “Bad Muslims,” including prison inmates and radical Muslim prison chaplains who are hatching plots to destroy our freedoms. Unfortunately, that's where most of the reports end.

There is generally neither analysis of King's arguments nor fact-checking of his claims–nor, for that matter, is there sufficient attention to the fact that not one of the witnesses at the current hearings are former inmates or chaplains. Rather, as one blogger at The Nation put it, they're “hand-picked” by King. It is worth noting that this blog report did exactly what most other news stories failed to do: analyze and check the facts.

Furthermore there is a clear a counterpoint to the narrative told by King. This was laid out in a statement prepared by 50 advocacy groups arguing that the hearings advanced a claim of prison radicalization based on isolated incidents and therefore insufficient proof of any widespread threat. The hearings simultaneously ignored very real issues of racial disparities, exploding incarceration rates and recidivism in the U.S. prison system. Moreover, despite the fact that one of the four witnesses, Bert Useem of Purdue University, also said that there is insufficient proof of an overwhelming terrorist threat in U.S. prisons, this counter-narrative was muted in most of the coverage.

Sadly this is not a singular event but symptomatic of reporting on U.S. Muslims and the fear of homegrown terrorism. Time and again, it appears that ideologically driven narratives—which are often simpler and more sensational—dominate coverage that tends to shortchange perspectives grounded in the complexity of facts. This results not only in poor media analysis but further encourages the scapegoating of American Muslims, an activity that has lately come to preoccupy certain segments of this nation.

Of course this is not how it has to be, only how it is. Journalists can produce richer reporting. To start, rather than rehearse the dogma of the day, they might compare the assertions of all the key players and present the evidence that supports–or refutes–each set of claims. That would be a true public service.

Su'ad Abdul Khabeer is an assistant professor of Anthropology and African American Studies at Purdue University. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Princeton University. Her dissertation, “Hip Hop is Islam: Race, Self-Making and Young Muslims in Chicago,” uses ethnography and performance art to explore the ways Chicago Muslim youth negotiate their religious, racial and cultural identities through hip hop. Her writing has appeared in The Muslim World and the edited volume, Black Routes to Islam. In addition to her academic work, Su'ad's poetry was featured in the anthology Living Islam Out Loud: American Muslim Women Speak She is also a Senior Project Adviser for the award-winning documentary, “New Muslim Cool.”

by Sandi Dolbee

Newsweek's cover story this month about the mainstreaming of Mormonism is another reminder of how religion coverage has become the Detroit of journalism — largely abandoned as a specialty beat and left to generalists, who, like absentee landlords, try to sell their stories by linking them to pop culture, reality TV or edgier topics, like a new iPhone app for God.

“The Mormon Moment: How the Outside Faith Creates Winners” epitomizes what ails both print and broadcast news — an epidemic of declaration over exploration, particularly when it comes to writing about religion. The story is salted with sweeping overstatements like “the Mormon Church is the General Electric of American religion” and “the distinctiveness of the Mormons is actually the secret of their success.” As proof, it attempts to connect the LDS-related dots in the zeitgeist — from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to HBO's “Big Love” and the hit Broadway musical, “The Book of Mormon.” The magazine's cover illustration has the face of Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney planted on the body of one of the play's actors, who is jumping jubilantly into the air. Here's the flip side: Reid, a Democrat from Nevada, has been in Congress for more than a quarter-century (hardly a breaking story), “Big Love's” touting of polygamy has drawn official church ire (for reinforcing “long-outdated stereotypes”), and the Tony-winning “Book of Mormon” is a sometimes-vulgar parody of the faith's famously white-shirted missionaries (one song drops the F-bomb on God).

In a recent interview with Jon Stewart, Bill Moyers lamented the “mere smoke of opinion” (a quote from Henry David Thoreau) that clouds much of today's journalism. I thought of that as I read Newsweek's exhortation that prominent Mormons are “wrong to ignore questions about their faith” and should take advantage of this “unprecedented opportunity to dispel misconceptions, blunt biases, and make real progress.” Smoke of opinion? It's downright carcinogenic.

Ironically, Newsweek doesn't follow its own advice, missing the same-said opportunity. They could have dug deeper, prodding church members to explore exactly how their faith fosters their “distinctiveness” and “success.” A sidebar, featuring blurbs from nine “Everyday Saints,” attempts to do this — but the snippets are dime-thin: a mother said her religion helps her “understand how to be a woman in the modern world,” a young man credits his faith for making him realize “that every person on earth has a right to their own self worth and dignity.”

Both statements beg for follow-up examples and context, especially considering the church's stands on women in the priesthood and same-sex marriage (it opposes both). A skilled religion reporter knows how to address these nuances without taking unnecessary jabs at a tradition that six million Americans hold sacred.

In her column on Page 3, editor-in-chief Tina Brown says Walter Kirn, the lead writer on the project, was raised a Mormon. Kirn's bio on the same page says he converted to Mormonism at age 12 and was active until age 17. Helpful information or pandering? McKay Coppins, one of the other writers, blogged about the experience on his Web site: “As a practicing Latter-day Saint, I was able to contribute ideas and insights, as well as a good deal of the reporting and writing.” Everyone involved “was very respectful of the LDS Church and its teachings.” That's wonderful. Respect is fundamental. But so is equipping readers with the facts, details and insight needed to draw their own conclusions. Otherwise, it's just religion journalism lite. Tastes great; less filling.

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 Courtney Bender

“Let's put aside the question of whether the people behind the bill to ban circumcision in San Francisco are anti-Semites,” Rebecca Newberger Goldstein suggests in a Washington Post blog. Instead she asks readers to consider the “big question” at the heart of the matter: “[W]here do the rights of a parent, specifically their rights to practice their religion, end in relation to the rights of a child?”

It is a tall order to put aside any of the questions prompted by a ballot measure in San Francisco that would ban circumcision for males under the age of 18. For journalists the issue presents an enticing and daunting tangle of topics: children's rights, parental rights, the rights of religious minorities (and majorities), anti-Semitism, Nazism and Stalinism, female genital mutilation, AIDS, gender disparities in religious traditions, the “strange bedfellows” effect of Muslims and Jews joining together on the issue and the silliness of northern Californian liberalism, to name just a few. (There is also an apparently limitless supply of bad puns masquerading as headlines.)

Goldstein, a philosopher by training, is well within her disciplinary métier as she makes her claims about what the ballot measure is really all about. But a contested practice like circumcision is rarely about just one thing or another. All of the various parts are, in fact, part of the story. To focus only on, say, the bizarre and viscerally horrifying anti-Semitism of the “Foreskin Man” would mean overlooking the ways that various interested parties make claims for and about religion in the public sphere.

Fortunately, reporters don't have to decide what this ballot measure is really about. They can – and I think they should – instead note the ways that all the factions try to frame their positions. On the one hand, Jewish leaders assert their basic right to practice an important religious ritual – and recall persecution in the Soviet Union (the incarceration of mohels, or worse) as a cautionary tale. They are also often eager to point to recent medical studies showing that circumcision may have health benefits – even though the studies they cite are mostly focused on HIV transmission rates in sub-Saharan Africa.

On the other hand, the small cadre of activists that has promoted the proposal in San Francisco, along with the authors of “Foreskin Man,” argue that their opposition is not about religion (the villain of the first issue of the comic was Dr. Mutilator, for example) but rather about the rights of children to their bodies. At the same time, we can note that their consistent use of the term “male genital mutilation” connects their project to the much more widely supported political condemnation of female genital mutilation – an issue that clearly has its own religious reverberation; FGM's connection to Muslim-majority African nations links the practice to religion in problematic and occasionally incendiary ways.  

And then there are, naively or otherwise, people like Jena Troutman, the doula who introduced and withdrew a similar ballot measure in Santa Monica. “It shouldn't have been about religion in the first place,” she said. “Ninety-five percent of people aren't doing it for religious reasons, and with everyone from the New York Times to Glenn Beck focusing on the religious issue, it's closing Americans down to the conversation.”

Troutman – like Goldstein – wants to have a particular kind of conversation, where the interests of religion, medicine and secular rights are all clearly definable and distinguishable. Thankfully, reporters covering this story have for the most part refrained from trying to tidy things that are inherently messy. That said, it's still important to note the different ways that religion, religious practice, science and the surprisingly slippery notion of “rights” figure into the arguments that make this story a story in the first place.

* * * * * *

Courtney Bender is an associate professor of religion at Columbia University. She is the author of the forthcoming The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination (Chicago, 2010) and Heaven's Kitchen: Living Religion at God's Love We Deliver (Chicago, 2003) as well as the co-editor (with Pamela Klassen) of After Pluralism: Reimagining Religious Engagements (Columbia, 2010).

Many news outlets marked the 30th anniversary of the discovery of AIDS—or more accurately the first reports of five otherwise healthy homosexuals in Los Angeles who had contracted a rare cancer—with stories on the medical and scientific aspects of the disease. “The AIDS war still rages,” according to the Los Angeles Times, while the San Francisco Chronicle noted “strides in care” and the Atlanta Journal Constitution reported “hope for a cure.”

Others supplemented medical pieces with first-person accounts of living with the disease or explorations of AIDS' impact on culture and society.

Was religion mentioned? Deep down in several pieces, reporters remarked that some religious conservatives remain opposed condom use and others still call AIDS “the wrath of God.”

Yet glossing over the entangled relationship between religion and AIDS, or simply consigning that history to conservative sound bites, overlooks crucial links between the impact of the epidemic and changing coverage of sexuality. It also occludes shifts in the GLBT community's public profile as well as important theological developments in mainline Protestantism and other progressive denominations and traditions.

When AIDS emerged in the early 1980s, the decades-old campaign for gay acceptance, rights and non-discrimination had achieved some notable victories. Newspapers covered the new gay scene, profiling a subculture with its own bars, clubs, music and freewheeling sexual mores. (That this “gay community” was depicted as predominantly white, urban and middle class deserves its own media critique.) At the same time, journalists followed a growing religious backlash against gay rights, crystallized by Anita Bryant's 1977 drive to repeal a Dade County, Florida non-discrimination statute. Bryant's “Save Our Children” campaign alleged that homosexual behavior endangered children and was an unacceptable affront to biblical morality.

These two types of stories—gays as hedonists and gays as a social menace—were more sophisticated spins on homophobic news stories from the 1950s and 1960s that almost invariably framed gay life in terms of deviancy and perversion. Arguably, this coverage merely reflected or echoed widespread discomfort with same-sex relations (most reporters shared the same preconceptions as the public), whereas stories in the '80s tended to evince the news values of sensationalism and conflict.

The first reports of a mysterious cancer afflicting otherwise healthy gay men seemed neither controversial or titillating. But as the contours and scope of the disease became clear, the story suggested both. Why were gays susceptible to this terrible epidemic? Religious conservatives had a biblically based answer: immorality.  

Many of the early human-interest stories incorporated this condemnation. Either a religious conservative was quoted saying AIDS was a divine punishment or an AIDS patient or family member voiced shame and guilt that explicitly stemmed from a sense of God's anger.

At the same time, other Christians were beginning to articulate an alternative religious response. They told reporters that God loves AIDS patients, and that Jesus would be ministering to them. These beliefs were quoted as a counterpoint to conservatives, but as the decade progressed and journalists wrote more about coping with AIDS and caring for the afflicted, stories that offered a religious angle on “Why me?” and “What should I do?” proliferated.

By the 1990s, many Roman Catholic and mainline Protestant churches had direct experience of people with AIDS, either as congregants, clergy, friends or family. Articles about their experiences documented their (often evolving) beliefs about the disease—it carried no divine stigma and could strike anyone—as well as about gays, whom God loved too. Moreover once sexual contact was discovered to be an avenue for transmitting the disease, journalists reported that some churches were initiating conversations about safe sex, and others were distributing condoms.

Did working through their theological response to AIDS help mainline Christians come to accept GLBT people as God's children, equal members of the congregation, deserving of ordination and entitled to the sanction of religious and civil marriage? Likewise did reporting on mainline Protestants' beliefs about gays and activities around AIDS predispose news consumers to rethink their own opinions? Or, on other hand, did hearing Falwellian assertions about gay immorality harden some hearts and convert others?

Academics wrestle with the question of whether journalism reflects public opinion, shapes it or does a little of both. Insofar as religion influences attitudes about sexuality—which it does directly to the faithful and indirectly, through cultural osmosis, to many others—coverage of religious responses to homosexuality provides a glimpse into living history. It also offers a way to chart broader and deeper currents of cultural change.

How could assessments of AIDS at 30 fail to look at the dramatically altered landscape of our cultural discussions? In 1981, for example, few Americans would have taken seriously the possibility of gay marriage—including many gays, who would have scoffed at the notion that mirroring what they saw as an inherently (hetero)sexist, monogamous lifestyle could be a milestone on their own path to liberation. What caused the change? AIDS for one, evolving religious opinion for another and—arguably—the news media's role in bringing both developments to public attention.

Diane Winston

by Judith Weisenfeld

Numerous recent events have illuminated issues around sexuality in African American communities, including NBA star Kobe Bryant's shouting an anti-gay slur at an official during a game and the firestorm over a Psychology Today article declaring black women “less attractive than other women,” among others. But while the mainstream news media have recognized a largely unprecedented opportunity to ask questions about religion and black sexuality, the results have been largely predictable. Rather than examining these events in relation to the broader issues of race, sexuality and religion in America, most of the stories have emphasized the political and relied on the trope of religious African Americans as uniquely homophobic.  

On the other hand, media coverage of the out-of-court settlement that anti-gay activist Bishop Eddie Long reached with four men who accused him of sexual coercion has been refreshingly straightforward, in contrast to the sensationalist tone that dominated coverage when the allegations first surfaced. Membership in Long's church has declined in the months since the suits were filed, and while he still has the support of most of his congregations, it is likely that his megachurch has been forever changed. The difficult situation involving Long, the young men and the church's former and current members presents an opportunity for sustained analysis of discourses about sexuality in black churches that reporters should pursue.

The media itself became the focus when CNN anchor Don Lemon came out as gay. Some commentators interpreted Lemon's decision as a cynical ploy to attract attention to his new autobiography; others saw it as a response to MSNBC talk show host Rachel Maddow's call for other gay news personalities to be open about their sexuality. Lemon, who has written about growing up Baptist and attending Catholic school, has not only talked of his sense of a general Christian opposition to homosexuality but has also traced the roots of an intractable black homophobia to black churches. Syndicated queer columnist Rev. Irene Monroe's response affirming Lemon's assessment represents one set of reactions, while other columnists in the black blogosphere have raised questions about Lemon's representation of African American attitudes toward homosexuality. Michael Arcenaux charged Lemon with “throwing blacks under the bus” and called for readers to situate homophobia in black religious circles in the broader context of American religious views on religion and sexuality.  

Two events that received far less media attention had the potential to yield a more nuanced view of religious opposition to homosexuality in black communities. Both were “coming out” stories –of Pentecostal gospel singer DeJuaii Pace, who came out on the Oprah Winfrey Network series “Addicted to Food,” and former Villanova basketball player Will Sheridan, who came out on ESPN. With Pace, viewers saw someone still uncertain about how to understand her sexuality in relation to her religious beliefs but who chose to come out to her mother and sister in a conversation that was at once painful and theologically rich. Sheridan spoke openly about his sexuality in order to encourage others to share their stories, but he also recounted a painful struggle with his father, whose religious objections to homosexuality moved him to break ties with his son. The two men eventually reconciled, with Sheridan's father attributing his ability to come to terms with his son's sexuality to “the power of prayer.”

Attending to stories like these about the lived experiences of families and religious communities in relation to race, gender and sexuality can provide richer sources for complex interpretation than the predictable turn to electoral politics or attitudes on “gay marriage.” Reporters should take heed.

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 Richard Flory

The past tumultuous few years for the Crystal Cathedral have included the retirement (and un-retirement, then subsequent re-retirement) of the Schuller pater familias; the son's inheriting the family business only to be replaced by his sister (his sister!); the church's filing for bankruptcy—a process that exposed both the nepotistic hiring practices and high salaries enjoyed by church employees—and a recent “covenant” that looked to outside observers like a ploy to root out gay men and lesbians from the choir and church orchestra. And now the Crystal Cathedral has entered into an agreement to sell its property in order to exit bankruptcy and pay off the $50 million debt it has amassed.

It's not exactly clear from recent reports how the sale of the property will actually be consummated or how it will net the amount of money necessary to pay off all of the organization's creditors. The church has apparently worked out a deal to sell the property for $46 million to a Newport Beach developer, who will then lease it back to the church for $212,000 per month. The church can eventually re-purchase the property within the next four years for $30 million. Somebody is going to lose money on this deal, although it is not exactly clear who that might be at this point. An in-depth investigation of the church's finances, including how this real estate deal is structured and who is involved, would be an excellent place for reporters to begin digging into the big business of the Crystal Cathedral and other megachurches whose eras may be coming to an end.

Beyond the specifics of the property sale, some observers are making the argument that the plight of the Crystal Cathedral heralds the impending demise of the megachurch and that smaller, niche-marketed congregations will ultimately take its place in the American religious economy. Others say that the Crystal Cathedral has always been an outlier in the megachurch world and, as such, should not be taken as a harbinger of doom for the 1,200 other megachurches across the country.

Regardless of the future form(s) of Christian churches in the U.S., the current mess from which the Crystal Cathedral is working to extricate itself does expose several issues that virtually every megachurch will have to deal with at some point. Megachurches are big businesses that require significant operating capital, including salaries for staff and the maintenance of enormous physical plants. Further, they operate in a highly competitive religious marketplace that often includes nearby competitors (there are 15 megachurches within 10 miles of the Crystal Cathedral and over 100 in the rest of Southern California). Probing both the internal dynamics of these organizations as well as how external cultural changes contribute to their success or failure is important if reporters want to help their audiences understand the ongoing role of megachurches in their communities and in the larger social landscape.

For example, reporters might ask, Are attendees only there because of a particular leader, or do other factors–music, programs, doctrine, location–matter more? Do issues related to leadership succession shape a given institution's appeal in the religious marketplace? And is there a way to gauge the tipping point at which the expense of running a large institution begins to degrade its sense of mission?

Offering audiences a fine-grained examination of whether and how megachurches will be able to remain competitive in the American religious marketplace is a way for journalists to show the intimate relationship between religious movements and trends in the larger social environments they inhabit. Are flourishing megachurches like neighboring Saddleback or Lakewood in Houston immune from the Crystal Cathedral's ills, or are they destined to catch a chill too. In any case, considering the degree to which history, politics, financial intrigue and family drama also come into play, the story of the Schullers' religious fiefdom is also just a really good story.

Richard Flory is associate research professor of sociology and Director of Research in the Center for Religion and Civic Culture at the University of Southern California. He is the co-author of Growing Up in America: The Power of Race in the Lives of Teens (Stanford, 2010) and Finding Faith: The Spiritual Quest of the Post-Boomer Generation (Rutgers, 2008).

by Lee Gilmore

As the pop-cultural consciousness turns slowly away from recent apocalyptic murmurings, the time is right to consider other live-wire stories that have not received adequate attention. In particular, questions about whether yoga and Islam “count” as authentic religions highlight the slippery (and porous) boundaries between religious movements. And, more broadly, the impulse to draw bright lines between “us” and “them” points to the overarching story: Concerns about identity, immigration, political power and religious freedom are symptoms of deepening social instability. Like the canary in the coal mine, religious disquiet usually signals bigger problems.

For starters, Andrea Jain, writing for Religion Dispatches, covers a convoluted legal story in Texas that hinges on whether yoga classes and teacher training should be regulated as “post secondary” or “career school” education, thus raising challenging questions about the discipline's spiritual dimensions. Is yoga simply another form of exercise or is it irreducibly religious, which would exempt instructors from regulation due to the proverbial separation of church and state?

Such quandaries touch upon larger cultural rumblings around yoga. While many yogis claim to be transmitting an authentic spiritual practice, some Texas Christians take their side, but not because they're doing handstands over the popularity of yoga. Rather, they harbor a deep suspicion about the unquestionably Hindu provenance of yogic practice and the potential danger they believe it poses for Christian souls. Meanwhile, some fundamentalist-leaning Hindus are attempting to reclaim yoga as their exclusive religious property, asserting that its spiritual authenticity is threatened when practitioners treat it merely as a means to physical fitness.

Instead of throwing the oomph out with the om, several Christian practitioners have developed a yoga alternative called “PraiseMoves,” designed for those who want to enjoy the discipline's physical benefits without risking their immortal souls. In this new system, some of the poses are based not on the traditional asanas, but rather on the shape of Hebrew letters (thus adding a strangely Kabbalistic element to the new practice).

Then there was the recent case in Murfreesboro, Tennessee in which some residents objected to plans to expand a mosque in the area. They contend that Islam did not qualify as a religion and (in an apparent instance of irony-impairment) that “the mosque violated [the plaintiff's] constitutional rights” insofar as they believed “the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro's members were compelled by their religion to subdue non-Muslims.”

Eventually the court determined that Islam counts as a “legitimate” religion which is thus entitled to First Amendment protections. The ruling further declared there was no evidence that Murfreesboro Muslims had in any way impinged upon the religious practices of the region's non-Muslims.

Lurking beneath each of these stories are the deep tensions around the entwined issues of identity, immigration, political power and religious freedom. While exclusivist Christians squirm over the degree to which “false” religions like Hinduism and Islam threaten their hegemony in American culture, secular liberals scoff at the apocalypticism of Harold Camping and his ilk, miscasting all Christians as deluded and irrational Bible-thumpers. While few truly expected the world to end on cue, these are times of great anxiety for people on every side of our various cultural divides, which means that the impulses to sharpen the boundaries of “authentic” religion and identify threatening “others” are likely to intensify. As are proclamations of impending doom.

The public's continuing fascination with the recent “apocalypse, not” also demonstrates the extent to which popular discourses around religion cut across and blur traditional cultural boundaries. In disputes over the religious authenticity of yoga, Islam or even Christian millennialism, the real story may not be how to determine what counts as religion or not-religion, belief or non-belief. History shows that religious movements are always adapting and changing in response to new circumstances. Rather, the breakneck pace and globalized scope of these adaptations and changes are the bigger story that reporters should be following–along with social pressures that are providing the heat for all this ferment.

Lee Gilmore teaches in the Religious Studies and Anthropology departments at California State University, Northridge. Her recent book, Theater in a Crowded Fire: Ritual and Spirituality at Burning Man (University of California Press), explores the cultural and religious significance of the Burning Man festival and why many participants describe it as a spiritual and transformational event.

by Kevin Healey

Dominique Strauss-Kahn's religious identity has made news since 1991, when the Jewish Tribune reported that each morning he asks himself how he can be “helpful to the state of Israel.” He should have refuted the quote, he says, since it has only emboldened critics who deride him as “a leading French Jew” and a “devout Zionist.” Such views, coupled with allegations of aggressive womanizing, would surely trouble his political future. Just a few weeks before his arrest on rape charges, he told Liberation that he anticipated three problems for his Presidential bid: “Money, women, and my Jewishness.”

Indeed, after his arrest French officials argued that “the thought of a trap” or “smear campaign” could not be ruled out. Columnists suggested anti-Semitism might be a factor, citing comments from right-wing opponents like the National Front's Marine Le Pen, who condemned his behavior as “pathological.” Noting the relative lack of concern for Strauss-Kahn's accuser, The New Yorker's Philip Gourevitch quipped, “It seemed a good measure of the depth of France's political malaise that it took a Le Pen to show solidarity with the working woman against the Socialist Party's favorite son.”

And what about that “working woman”? Mainstream sources offer mostly brief descriptions: She is a 32-year-old, French-speaking immigrant from Guinea, a single mother living with her teenage daughter. Many reports mention her religious background but only in passing, describing her as a “good Muslim,” a “devout Muslim,” who “wears a headscarf.”

But as her neighbors and family invoke her religion in her defense, online discussions seethe with sexism and Islamophobia. At Free Republic, alongside discussion of whether his alleged victim is attractive, one commenter suggests “Strauss-Kahn should insist on Sharia rules. Four male witnesses or it never happened…” Another asks rhetorically, “Would a muslim [sic] lie to bring down one of the most powerful infidels on earth?” Indeed one commenter argues that “the maid might be in the employ of… some Muslim extremist group” that wants exploit escalating tensions by keeping Sarkozy in power.

As media coverage shifts to the rising backlash against the chauvinism of Strauss-Kahn's defenders, journalists should remember that in France, as in the U.S., sexism is rarely separable from racial and religious prejudice. While journalists rightfully dismiss conspiracy theories from anonymous bloggers, they would do well to heed the insights of scholars and op-ed writers who highlight the relationship between male chauvinism and anti-Muslim prejudice in French culture.

Joan Scott, author of The Politics of the Veil, argues that it is misguided to cite the “headscarf ban” as evidence of French commitment to gender equality, as one columnist does in a retort to Gourevitch's above-mentioned quip. In fact, French elites have often rejected feminism as a “foreign import,” arguing that women's power lies in their willing sexual objectification. Proponents of this view see “the sexual modesty implicit in the headscarf as proof that Muslims can never become fully French,” says Scott. Thus the headscarf ban encapsulates both misogyny and anti-Muslim prejudice, not their opposites. “How ironic, then, that the victim of Strauss-Kahn's alleged sexual assault was a Muslim,” Scott writes.

It is understandable that media coverage should expound on the implications of the demise of Strauss-Kahn, an international figure, for French politics and for Jewish communities around the world. But it would only compound the tragedy of this working woman's fate if coverage ignores the link between sexism and Islamophobia that his alleged attack has thrown into sharp relief.

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.