by Jon Dillingham

It is not a good time to be a Muslim in the United States. McCarthy-like congressional hearings, FBI infiltration, prosecution of political dissent, anti-mosque rallies (not limited to Park 51) and downright Islamophobic hatred are all targeting American Muslims.

An NPR investigative report Thursday night added one more brick in the wall: a pair of Communications Management Units (CMUs) — secretive prisons where more than two-thirds of the inmates are Muslims. (Only 6 percent of the national prison population is Muslim, according to the article.)

In these CMUs, inmates have almost zero communication with the outside world — less than half the phone and visit time of “supermax” prisons — and everything they say, do and write is recorded via a new $14-million dollar surveillance system.

The CMUs were first brought to light by the alternative media, but NPR adds four crucial layers to the story: 1) the prisoners are denied the right to group prayer, 2) they are denied the right to challenge their placement at a CMU, or even to view the evidence that has landed them there, 3) officials quoted in the NPR story claim the inmates have been put in CMUs because they have recruited or radicalized other inmates, and 4) the prisoners are recruited by authorities after their release to snitch on other Muslims (read part two of the story).

Even if we were to ignore lawyers' and inmates' claims that the CMUs were opened illegally, and that many prisoners are innocent, and that even those who are guilty are not dangerous threats, just the fact that Muslims are being targeted for neutralization and persecution should give us pause. NPR has done its job by taking the time to tell this cautionary tale. All too often the press defers to sources who would have us treat Muslims as guilty until proven innocent, and this deference is even more pronounced in the case of Muslim prisoners. But compassionate investigative reporting keeps us on the level: even if Muslim convicts are guilty of murder and terror, they are not below the law, and deserve its protection.

Watch this video of an anti-Islam demonstration in Orange County. If you already did, it merits a second viewing. When our Muslim citizens are called terrorists, wife-beaters and rapists, and the vengeance-fueled mob that spits these violent epithets is endorsed by an elected official who suggests that local Marines should kill Muslims, is the persecution of Muslim Americans something the press can afford to ignore? Revealing such abuses, even (or maybe especially) when the abused are incarcerated, is the news media's job. Thankfully, NPR got it right this time.

Jon Dillingham has written about a range of issues — from the legacy of war to local sports — as a journalist based in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. He's now studying propaganda in foreign policy coverage as an M.A. candidate in Specialized Journalism at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism.

by Bethany Firnhaber

A few weeks ago, hundreds of protesters stood outside the Yorba Linda Community Center hurling insults at Muslim families making their way inside to attend a fundraiser for the Islamic Circle of North America Relief, a New York-based non-profit. Syed Waqas, a spokesperson for the organization, said the money raised would help start social service programs to fight homelessness and hunger in the area and to build women's shelters.

The rowdy protesters–a mix of members from various local hard-right groups, including the North Orange County Conservative Coalition and the Tea Party meet-up group “We Surround Them OC 912“–were upset at what they perceived as a ruse that would allow “radical Muslims” Imam Siraj Wahhaj and Amir Abdel Malik Ali to raise funds for Hamas and Hezbollah. The group hurled hateful invective at their targets, and the story made it into the Orange County Register and the local TV news. But other than a few local blogs, no one else picked up on the story and the events went largely unnoticed.

Now fast forward to the present.

On Wednesday, the Council on American-Islamic Relations posted a YouTube video of chants and speeches at the protest event. By the end of the next day the video had more than 160,000 views; as of this posting there have been about 300,000. A few major news outlets had picked up on the video by Thursday night, including the Guardian, Salon.com and the Daily Beast.

The problem with most of this coverage begins with the initial story that ran in the Orange County Register. The short day-of article lacked important context – religious and otherwise – to help readers understand what had happened in Yorba Linda.

The article fell into the usual trap of he-said-she-said reporting – an unfortunate default mode in coverage of non-Muslim angst over issues related to Islam (the Park51 fracas, for example). This feint toward “balance” tends to underplay or overlook the viciousness of people like Villa Park Councilwoman Deborah Pauly, who in the video from the Yorba Linda protest said she knows “quite a few Marines who would be happy to help these terrorists to [an] early meeting in paradise.”

The absence of this kind of context and detail in the original story infected subsequent coverage of CAIR's posting on YouTube; most outlets that picked up the newly-released video simply provided a link to the Register as background. Consequently, the Guardian failed to mention why the protesters had assembled in the first place. More egregious still was the Daily Beast, which dropped the video into its site with no more than a short scene-setting sentence (no outside links, nothing!). Salon.com did a better job, but still fell short by relying too heavily on the skimpy context in the first Register piece.

In an era when anyone can publish anything to the Internet, it is vital for journalists to provide readers with the necessary background information to help them understand the events that are shaping their world. It's also important to understand how journalism influences culture by what it includes in, or omits from, the picture. When Muslims protest something they perceive as a threat to Islam, the coverage often frames them as scary, intolerant and dangerous. Until CAIR widened our perspective, the ugliness of the protesters at Yorba Linda was simply left out of the frame.

Bethany Firnhaber is a student in the Master's in journalism program at USC Annenberg. She is interested in reporting on issues of social responsibility and human rights, especially across international borders.

by John Adams

Rob Bell, one of the Top 10 most influential evangelicals, according to ChurchReport.com, is about to release his latest book, titled Love Wins, which explores the question of the afterlife. It's causing quite a stir among Christians–Roman Catholics and mainline Protestants as well as evangelicals–because of its perceived universalism. Bell believes that all humankind, including non-Christians and LGBT people, may be saved through Jesus Christ and ultimately live in harmony in God's Kingdom.

Bell is one of the most influential religious teachers/preachers/writers/videographers who isn't associated with the old guard. His opinions and teachings, as seen in the upcoming book, are controversial and give voice to younger Christians–as well as the growing ranks of religious “Nones“–who see God and the role of the church in a completely different light.

Debate over Love Wins on religious blogs has, more often than not, centered around whether Bell is a heretic. The Twittersphere is abuzz with the story, placing #RobBell as a top-trending topic ahead of the Middle East, Justin Bieber and Charlie Sheen. Back-and-forth Facebook comment battles are commonplace and have set friend against friend in many cases.

The Christian world has definitely noticed this bubbling ferment in the American religious mix, but the mainstream news media have mainly steered clear of the fracas, except for back-page religion blogs on CNN and The Washington Post. 

It's understandable that for Christians this story has legs, but why should anyone else care?

Aside from Pope Benedict, Rick Warren and Billy Graham, Bell might just be the most influential religious leader of our time, and he's a front-runner in trends that could dramatically reshape American religion, politics and culture. Specifically, this controversy might signal a struggle within evangelicalism that could dwarf the battle over gay rights.

Recent mainstream news media coverage of Christianity has largely focused on sexual abuse among Roman Catholic clergy, Ted Haggard's scandal, Pastor Terry Jones' Quran-burning stunt and sensational commentary from Jerry Falwell and Pat Roberston. So why aren't journalists outside Christian media outlets covering this topic? Are they worried about getting tangled in “religious speak” or talking about hell? Or is it just easier to report on scandals, controversy and sensationalism rather than the complexities and personalities involved in changes that are just beginning to unfold?

Regardless of whether they choose to cover this lightning-rod of an issue right now, journalists should be prepared to start reporting on hell, universalism and young evangelicals' angle on the Bible. We should also begin to think about how Bell's theology might affect politics, from the ideological priorities of “values voters” to inter-religious relations and hot-button issues like homosexuality and abortion.

Above all, journalists should clean out their religious Rolodexes. Everyone knows what John Piper, Pat Robertson, Rick Warren and the rest of the old guard have to say. The religious landscape is changing, and some of the main agents of that change are simply being ignored by the mainstream media.

John Adams worked as a pastor for 12 years before leaving his church to pursue journalism. He earned a master's in online media from USC Annenberg, and is focused on sports journalism and the web world. He works for NBC Los Angeles as a web editor and content producer. He has published articles on SI.com, WSJ.com, USAToday.com, MSNBC.com and TreeHugger.com to name a few.

by Kevin Douglas Grant

Sometimes new revelations blow stories wide open, provoking a reporting frenzy by the press at every level.  Julian Assange's sexual assault charges in Sweden are just one example of this.

But sometimes a revelation doesn't fit with the established narrative, and therefore doesn't quite make the cut. Or it becomes so blown out of proportion that it comes to dominate the story. In coverage of the anti-Semitism threading through the revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa–epitomized by the Lara Logan attack–both under-reporting and journalistic hyperbole are happening at once, depending on where you look.

Several days after Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak resigned, the New York Post reported that a 200-person crowd had chanted “Jew Jew!” as it sexually assaulted Logan. By the time that part of the story emerged, the American public had already bonded with Egypt in pro-democratic solidarity. The revolution was a good thing, as long as fundamentalist Muslims didn't come into power.

The anti-Semitic component to the attack, which is intertwined with rabid anti-Israeli sentiment, was corroborated by the Times of London and the Daily Mail in the U.K. but traveled no further through the mainstream American news machine.  It was effectively buried here, through negligence or for convenience, despite the fact that widespread anti-Semitism in Egypt is well documented.

In 2003, the BBC reported that Holocaust denial and anti-Semitic humor “appear to be quite typical among journalists in Egypt.” In 2009, the New York Times reported that after Egypt's minister of culture Farouk Hosny lost his bid to become head of UNESCO, “Egyptian newspapers and government officials presented the defeat as a sign of Western prejudice against Islam and the Arab world, the product of an international Jewish conspiracy.”

It appears that only conservative bloggers have taken the time to gather photographic evidence of the same beliefs on display during the current Egyptian revolution. The Israeli media, on the other hand, have focused incessantly on the images as part of a larger fear about what revolution in Egypt will mean for Israel. For them, the popular revolt against Hosni Mubarak was a dangerous event that should be viewed with great wariness, even alarm.

In the New Yorker, David Remnick recently published an analysis of Israel's most liberal newspaper, Haaretz, which worked to debunk paranoid myths about Egypt. He described the work of military reporter Anshel Pfeffer:

As a defense reporter Pfeffer understood why a threat to the peace treaty with Egypt would cause high anxiety in the military command in Israel, yet he also saw that what was being broadcast and published at home did not reflect the reality in Tahrir Square. “The more tabloid populist side of the Israeli media was intent on searching for anti-Israeli, anti-Jewish manifestations. Out of the ten thousand signs on the square, there were maybe two with a Star of David written across Mubarak's face–and that was what was shown.”

Surely a middle ground could be achieved, wherein the anti-Semitism angle is probed without unduly dominating the narrative.

Indeed, most Western news media missed a similar story of prejudice in Tunisia and many appear to be missing it in Libya. Under Italian control during World War I, Libya enacted anti-Jewish laws that anticipated those of Nazi Germany. Under German and then British rule, then again after the Six Day War, a series of pogroms drove most of the original 21,000 Jews out of Libya. Col. Muammar Gaddafi confiscated all Jewish property when he came to power in 1969, and by 1974 almost all Libyan Jews had fled.

More recently, an American cable obtained by WikiLeaks detailed an anti-Semitic campaign by the Libyan government against the Marks & Spencer department store in Tripoli.  The store was accused of being a “Zionist entity” that supported the “killing of Palestinians.”

There is reason to believe that this type of scapegoating is much more common within these dictatorial regimes than it is among the general public, but anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic notions undoubtedly figure into the revolutionary ferment that is now bubbling up in many Middle Eastern and North African societies.

The Israeli media has largely overshot the mark, while the American media has largely neglected its duty to report this element of a larger story. There is still time to find the right balance.

Kevin Douglas Grant, hailing from Chicago, Illinois, is a second-year graduate journalism student at USC's Annenberg School. He has a passion for Web technology, matters of social justice and good coffee.

by Maura Jane Farrelly

The government of Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad al Khalifa justified opening fire on more than 2,000 Bahraini demonstrators by claiming that the action was necessary to bring the country back from the “brink of a sectarian abyss.”

Relations between Sunni and Shia Muslims in Bahrain have, in fact, been marked by a considerable degree of tension for quite some time now. Around 65 percent of the country's 738,000 Muslims are Shiites. For more than 200 years, however, Bahrain has been ruled by a dynasty that favors the country's Sunni minority when it comes to housing, employment and a host of other economic and social matters.

But to what extent are the protests taking place in Pearl Square “sectarian?” The Crown Prince definitely wants the international community to see the demonstrations from this perspective (as well as to accept that the Shia protestors are being backed by their co-religionists in Iran). And certainly the interpretive frame he's presenting to the world is a familiar one for Westerners. We may not be able to tell the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite, but we can tell that they hate each other – and that their hatred almost always leads to violence.

According to people who are blogging and tweeting on the ground from Bahrain, however, the situation may not be as sectarian as Khalifa and his minions would like the world to believe. While it may be that these bloggers have an interest in getting the international community to see the demonstrations as secular, even if many of the protesters are motivated by faith, the fact remains that human rights observers and some Western journalists, too, have reported that the demonstrations have not had sectarian undertones (or if they have, that the sectarianism has been coming primarily from Sunni supporters of the monarchy).

Still, some editors, producers and anchors in the U.S. seem to be having trouble accepting that a protest largely composed of one denomination against a government dominated by another may not actually be “sectarian.” And what's interesting is that those obtuse editors, producers and anchors don't work for the outlet you might expect (you know… the one that couldn't seem to talk about recent events in Egypt without mentioning the words “Muslim Brotherhood”).

NPR has had a surprisingly unsophisticated – and even careless – approach to this question of how sectarian the protests in Bahrain have been. Last week, Neal Conan devoted half an hour of “Talk of the Nation” to the demonstrations, interviewing the network's own Deborah Amos, along with Michael Slackman of the New York Times. The heading NPR chose to give the segment was “Sectarian Differences Underpin Bahrain Protests,” and that's certainly the premise that Conan brought to his interviews. We learn in his introduction that there are a number of “important differences” between the protests in Bahrain and the ones in Tunisia and Egypt. The only difference Conan saw fit to mention, however, is the fact that Muslims in North Africa are “almost entirely Sunnis,” while the residents of Bahrain are primarily Shiites “who have long chafed under the rule of the Sunni minority.”

But we don't hear about this chafing until nearly eight minutes into the segment, largely because sectarianism isn't what Michael Slackman wants to talk about. He is more interested in the demonstrators' determination to be peaceful (at least until they were fired upon) and their quest for democracy, the rule of law and greater economic opportunity. When prompted by Conan to discuss sectarianism among the protesters, Slackman's only observations have to do with the religious bigotry of the police, who apparently assured him at one point that they were only “'trying to get the Shiites'.”

Conan's efforts later in the show to get Deborah Amos to assign a sectarian agenda to the protests prove similarly unfruitful, though that doesn't prevent him from telling his listeners that the show will be exploring the “long-time Sunni-Shia tensions” in the region.

Steve Inskeep, too, found himself perpetuating the sectarian frame in his interview with George Washington University's Marc Lynch about “Sectarian Tensions in Bahrain.” Despite this headline, Lynch makes it clear that he believes the demonstrations are “not a sectarian rebellion,” and he tells Inskeep point-blank that the sectarian frame is “not a very useful way of thinking about what's going on there.”

NPR's sloppiness would not be so problematic if other American news outlets were questioning the role of sectarianism among the protesters and really exploring whether Crown Prince Khalifa's expressed concerns have any merit. But they're not. And that's a shame – because Khalifa is no fool.  He knows that since 1979, Shia sectarianism has been a bogeyman for American foreign policymakers. He also knows that American voters are not going to want the sailors of the Fifth Fleet to be stuck in the middle of a denominational battle between Muslims.

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 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.

by Brie Loskota

A few weeks ago I walked into my hometown Ralph's grocery store in a suburb of Los Angeles and found Homeboy Industries chips and salsas in the deli section. Delicious, hot, crispy and full of ethical goodness–yum! Just in time for the Super Bowl, Homeboy rolled out its new partnership with the supermarket chain, which has garnered a lot of attention over the past few weeks. The stories about this new entrepreneurial venture by one of L.A.'s beloved non-profits, including the piece in yesterday's Los Angeles Times, have focused on the business of changing lives through jobs and economics. But most of the reporting leaves out important angles on religion, which means we're only getting part of the story.
 
The obvious missing piece in much of the coverage is the religious provenance of Homeboy Industries and the faith of its founder, Father Greg Boyle. But it isn't just that the stories are overlooking religion; the marketing of the organization and its products also tends to obscure the spiritual roots of the organization. A recent post at GetReligion.org points out that one has to drill down pretty far not just in most press coverage but also on the organization's own website to learn about its Catholic origins.  

Cause-related marketing has a track record of helping businesses and non-profits express their core values in order to encourage consumers to feel good about their purchases. The history of faith-based entrepreneurship also includes stories about economic development programs that have successfully used the rules of the marketplace to provide economic stability and self-sufficiency to the institutions and the individuals they serve. Given Homeboy Industries' rich history and the inherent draw of feel-good products, why would a brand with so much soul have decided to keep its religious history out of sight?  And, more to the point, why would reporters not want to pull back that curtain?

A study in contrast is Justin Bieber, with his God-given talent–and hair. Bieber's new movie plays up everything that the stories about Homeboy's chips and salsa seem to play down. By almost all accounts, “Never Say Never” is (no I haven't seen it) chock-full of religion, and coverage of the film usually includes at least a few lines about Bieber's religious upbringing and beliefs. Bieber is becoming a brand with religion as a marketable component, and Paramount is working that angle with an outreach strategy that includes targeting Christian churches and youth groups. There is even a movie-related curriculum that helps viewers discern God's plan for their lives. 

As an Entertainment Weekly article notes, “[M]arketing to Christian groups became quite popular post-'The Passion of the Christ'; like secular marketing campaigns, it's about making sure people who may not think a film has something for them see that it does.”

Is Justin Bieber selling God, or does a “God-glow” make us want to buy Justin Bieber? Why are the deep religiosity of Homeboy Industries' founder as well as the organization's Catholic roots and practices not part of the story, and not part of Homeboy's marketing?  When does religion sell and when does it detract from a brand, a person or an enterprise?  Does religion-branding resonate with some demographics (like fans of a high-achieving, fresh-faced teen icon) but not with others (like Homeboy's secular fellow-travelers who are also concerned about gangs, violence and poverty)? And does all of this come down to a difference between contemporary Catholic and Protestant approaches to evangelism?

Getting the answers to these questions might require some digging, but asking them might help us understand our deeper (and shallower) assumptions about religion and/in the market.

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.

What convinced men and women to trust the Buddha, follow Moses or fight alongside Mohammed? I'm not the only one curious about what people believe, why they believe it and how belief affects behavior. New Yorker writer Lawrence Wright confessed a similar interest during a recent interview with Terry Gross. Wright, author of the 1995 Saints and Sinners, a collection of essays on contemporary religious figures, was on “Fresh Air” to discuss his new profile of director/writer Paul Haggis and his break with the Church of Scientology.

Wright told Gross, “Scientology has always been intriguing to me because it's such a stigmatized religion. And why would people be drawn to something that has so many negative connotations around it? I thought there must be something that this religion offers them, and that's what I wanted to find out.”

Here's what struck me: Wright's description of Scientology as simultaneously stigmatized and compelling. It captures the frisson—the effervescence of revelation—that draws devotees and detractors to any new religion.

Did Joseph Smith elicit any less passion in the 19th century? Or Jesus in the 1st? Don't all new salvation stories begin in hope, proceed to persecution and end up forgotten or transmogrified?

I've read a lot about Scientology—including Janet Reitman's primo Rolling Stone piece and the St Petersburg Times' in-depth exposes—but I'd never understood why the movement called itself a church other than for tax purposes. Yes, it offered a path to self-awareness and a supportive community, but so does Weight Watchers.

But in Wright's close telling of Haggis' experience, Scientology's theology and missiology became clear. This was an aggressively evangelical religion that offered salvation and sodality to seekers who had no interest in traditional, institutional religions. Haggis turned to Scientology because it promised a better life; he stayed because it worked.

At first, Scientology “seemed to [Haggis] less a religion than a set of useful principles for living.” Only when he scaled the movement's evolutionary ladder were its innermost truths revealed. By then, Haggis was eager to learn the church's hidden wisdom, but the revelation was a bust. “If they'd sprung this stuff on me when I first walked in the door, I just would have laughed and left right away,” he told Wright. Still, he had invested thousands of dollars and many years in the process, and his personal and professional life were constructed around church teachings and connections. Despite his doubts, Haggis decided to take a leap of faith. Even if the teachings did not make sense now, they had and they would.

Wright's 25,000-word saga of Haggis' faith journey and eventual apostasy provides the best-yet look into Scientology because it takes the movement on its own terms as a religion. Wright explains how and why Scientology works as a system of beliefs, a set of rituals and a mythic narrative. He describes its salvific message, its messianic promise and the mindset of its beleaguered yet faithful community. He also reveals an unsettling truth: bracketing the church's alleged misdoings, Scientology's trajectory is not unlike other new religious movements through the ages.

Good journalism educates; great journalism stuns. Writing about the intersection of religion, culture and society rarely does either; most journalists bring too many of their own assumptions to the reporting. Wright, however, started with a simple question: Why do people believe something that is strange and unpopular? The answer—and its implications—are no less than stunning.

Diane Winston

by Mary Slosson

Rep. Peter King (R-NY), chair of the House Committee on Homeland Security, predictably caused an uproar when he announced hearings to investigate the radicalization of the American Muslim community. While many media outlets have been content to cover the he said–she said tennis match between politicians who support the hearings and Muslim community advocates who are raising concerns, the Los Angeles Times ran a clear-eyed editorial Thursday that takes a stand for basic human decency.

The editorial board writes that “the problem is that King hasn't identified such a threat, and certainly not at a level that would justify singling out one religion to be targeted for special scrutiny.”

Los Angeles is home to two innovative community outreach police programs – one in the Police Department, the other in the Sheriff's Department – that work with the local Muslims both to protect them from hate crimes and to partner up in keeping tabs on the rare radical that may emerge in the community. Sheriff Lee Baca spearheaded the creation of the LASD Muslim Community Affairs unit, and commented on the hearings by saying:

I don't know what Mr. King is hearing or who he's hearing it from. Muslim Americans in the county of Los Angeles have been overwhelmingly astounded by terrorist attacks — like everyone else — and overwhelmingly concerned about a non-repeat performance of that kind, and are willing to get involved and help.

The Times' editorial notes the contradiction between the “anecdotal and sketchy” evidence King has presented to justify his hearings and the opinion of law enforcement officials like Baca who insist that these communities act as partners in crime prevention.

Furthermore, the Times writes, “[W]hile ordinarily no great harm is done when a hearing is based on inadequate evidence, the proceedings to be chaired by King are different. They appear to attribute danger and disloyalty to one particular religious group — a group that is, not incidentally, relatively unpopular at the moment.”

Indeed, the hearings raise fears that a backlash of violence against the Muslim-American community could be the result.

“When American Muslims are singled out for alleging being responsible for violent extremist actions, prejudicial and violence crime against innocent American Muslims across the country are the result,” said Nura Maznavi, Counsel for the Program to Combat Racial and Religious Profiling at Muslim Advocates, in a telephone interview with Trans/Missions.

Even Roger Cressey, former Director for Transnational Threats at the National Security Counsel, said that Congress was in dire need of a “mature debate” during his appearance at a Muslim Public Affairs Council-sponsored forum on Muslim American partnership with law enforcement on Capitol Hill.

Law enforcement often relies on tips from the Muslim-American community to catch those rare domestic extremists that do emerge. By alienating the very community these officials so desperately need to foster trust and collaboration with, the hearings threaten to exacerbate tension instead of lessen it.

Media coverage between now and the hearings – tentatively scheduled for March – should not be afraid to take a harder edge on calling out discrimination against the Muslim American community.

Mary Slosson is a freelance journalist based in Los Angeles, where she is an Annenberg Fellow at the USC Annenberg School for Communication Journalism. She focuses on international, investigative journalism and multimedia storytelling. She previous reported on international diplomacy, global health and the environment at the United Nations.

by Kevin Healey

As Richard Flory notes, politicians have parleyed economic insecurity into a new, religiously-infused “politics of fear” in which antipathy toward government spending merges with hostility toward outsiders. Witness: after the State of the Union address Sarah Palin, who famously defended racial profiling and anti-immigrant legislation, chided Obama for failing to understand that “individuals make America great, not the federal government.” Of course, the irony of such Tea Party rhetoric is that individual freedom only flourishes in the context of community. When the individual reigns supreme, the neighborhood inevitably suffers.

As Flory suggests, journalists must ask what role religion plays in nurturing the politics of fear. By the same token, we must ask what role religious communities—and journalists—can play in fostering the politics of possibility. That task is difficult at a time when public figures are loathe to appear smitten by “that hopey changey thing.” After the Tucson shootings, Bob Schieffer of “Face the Nation” noted conservatives' reluctance to use the term “job-killing” in reference to Obama's health care legislation, but wondered aloud, “Am I just being a Pollyanna about this?” Likewise, after the State of the Union, Congressman David Loebsack echoed Obama's call for bipartisanship but added, “I'm not a Pollyanna about this. It's going to be hard work.”

In light of Obama's “quasi-eulogy” for nine-year-old Christina Green, the reference to Pollyanna reveals a deeper tension. Before acquiring its pejorative meaning, the story of “Pollyanna” appeared in the Christian Herald as a parable demonstrating the redemptive power of love. But Pollyanna does not so much reassure us of our innocence as shame us for having lost it. She exposes the sins of hypocrisy and selfishness. In the film version with Hayley Mills, a minister and newspaper reporter are shamed into supporting the local orphanage, in defiance of the town's wealthy patron. Read: when religious communities and the news media fail in their neighborly duties, the wealthy consolidate power. Such themes persist. In the 2006 film “Sweet Land,” the local minister is shamed into blessing the love between two immigrants, in defiance of the town's powerful banker.

As theologian Walter Bruggemann suggests, we experience this kind of transformation in our worldview as a journey “from scarcity through abundance to neighborhood.” But since the rhetoric of scarcity has “an immense capacity to nullify the alternative and to obliterate the journey,” it must be made again and again. It is, in fact, “the key journey that all humans must make.” Journalists are no exception because, like churches and other religious communities, news media are at always risk of being captivated by the storyline of scarcity.

Such captivity is evident in the Wall Street Journal's op-ed, “The States Can't Afford ObamaCare,” or the Journal's horse-race coverage of Palin's response to the State of the Union. Instead of pairing “big government” scare-tactics with tea-leaf readings of campaign disclosure documents, journalists should press politicians to justify the rhetoric of scarcity and explain why mutual concern–the ethics of the neighborhood, as it were–is such a bad thing. Then we can shift from the pseudo-objective question, “Can we afford health care?” to the solution-oriented, “How do we ensure coverage for all?” More than a reiteration of Pollyanna's “glad game,” the latter question requires a mature, and risky, willingness to hope.

Kevin Healey received his Ph.D. from the Institute of Communications Research at the 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 Lee Gilmore

Americans yesterday partook of one this nation's most cherished and populist rites–the annual Super Bowl. Scholars and pundits have long and routinely noted the extent to which the Super Bowl is an expression of American civil religion. From the ceremonious opening rendition of the national anthem–replete with color guard, uniformed soldiers, athletes tearing up, heads bowed in prayer, and a gratuitous cut to George and Laura Bush in their box seats–to the communal joy and agony of the game itself, these ritualized gestures narrate and deeply tincture our tribal identity.

But for many (like, admittedly, myself) the actual game is secondary to the symbiotic consumer spectacle of the Super Bowl ads. As goofy as many of them are, these ads are a reliable bellwether of our evolving cultural identities. Advertisers seek to get ahead of cultural trends, attempting to both define and leverage the zeitgeist in the name of generating brand awareness. Often, those spots that are most successful touch upon some deep nerve, frequently by appealing to our (presumed) lowest common denominators–objectifying women with tiresome predictability or distorting and disparaging sexual otherness. But other ads spoke to our loftiest imaginative sparks and the higher ideals of the American dream.

Through the savvy magic of social media, the already famous Darth Vader ad garnered over 12 million views on YouTube before the game even started. Featuring a young Jedi discovering the magic of the force–if only to cast a charm on his clever and indulgent parents (as well as us viewers)–its subject matter ensured that it would be enthusiastically received by the geekish digerati, a key demographic if one wishes to propagate a vigorously viral Internet meme. The enduring popular appeal of “Jedi religion,” like the collective effervescence of the Super Bowl itself, speaks to the timeless human desire for real magic and connection to a mysterious unseen world.

Other ads unleashed an onslaught of crash and bang to promote a forthcoming bumper crop of dystopian disaster movies, suggesting a collective spiritual unease and disquiet in the face of the growing portents of environmental, geopolitical and economic apocalypse. But while the exoticized and exploited Tibetans may be dying (and what of Timothy Hutton's once illustrious career?), you can still savor their cultural essence for a recession friendly half-off.

Finally, like Michael Douglas's opening invocation of America's better angels–recalling, among other moments, the expansion of voting rights to women, JFK's call to service, and MLK's resonant dream–Chrysler's two-minute spot featuring Eminem sought not only to resurrect the idea of Detroit and the flower of American industry but to revivify the American dream.

The consumer ritual of the Super Bowl points to the pervasive and interlocking engines of media and meaning, which hand-in-hand shape and sustain the collective identities by which Americans recognize one another (and implicitly define outsiders). Social media is, to some extent, democratizing these civil religious rites, revealing and amplifying both the margins and the centers of public conversation. But above all else this epic annual event and the chorus of advertising that surrounds it are prominent signposts that indicate where our collective appetites and anxieties are currently leading us. Reporters would be wise to take note.

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.