by John Adams

“We are heading to a special meeting with a high-ranking Hamas leader to discuss the Israeli – Palestinian conflict from a Palestinian leadership point of view,” said our translator and guide as the 15-passenger van sped through the West Bank.

I pictured a squat cement building filled with cammo-clad militia toting AK-47s as suicide bombers were being fitted for backpacks. Then, a few minutes later, my frame of perception shifted as I found myself and my fellow journalism grad students sitting around a large conference table as senior Hamas MP Mahmoud al-Ramahi entered the room dressed in a nice suit and a pink shirt. Ramahi took a seat at the head of the table and in a gentle tone began telling his story. He spoke with passion, conviction and purpose. The through-line? His desire for a place to call home.

“We, as Hamas, will never recognize the right of Israel to exist,” Ramahi said during the interview. “We recognize the existence of Israel. There is a big difference between the 'existence of Israel' and the 'right of existence.'”

I left with a different view of Hamas. If they didn't have halos, they no longer had horns. My encounter with Ramahi had complicated the picture–in a good way. If some of the Palestinians condoned violence against Israel, others didn't. And by no means was Israeli conduct–with American-backed Israeli power dominating the scene–irrelevant to the ongoing problems in the region. So imagine my surprise when I learned that Ramahi was arrested this week by Israeli forces. The soft-spoken leader who had encouraged us to look deeper as journalists was once again behind bars, and I wanted to know why.

The mainstream news media in the U.S. were oddly silent on the arrest of Ramahi and 11 others in the West Bank. Nowhere could I find a thorough explanation for the arrests.

Yahoo! News reposted an AFP release about the arrest that said, “Ramahi had been detained 'for being involved in recent Hamas activities' and taken in for security questioning, according to an army spokeswoman.” Describing detentions as a “matter of national security” seems to trump all.

Haaretz told a little more of the story by saying that Ramahi is the “fourth-ranking member of the parliament, responsible for many administrative and procedural matters.” More importantly, Haartz added, “With his arrest, Israel now has almost all of Hamas' West Bank leadership in custody.”

Yet in the U.S., this wasn't a big story, not even a blip on the radar. Why? Did Israel adroitly shape the American news cycle? How do the culture of media organizations and the appetites of information consumers figure into the equation?

The Week That Was:

On Monday, the German foreign minister visited Gaza and condemned the Israeli-Egyptian blockade of 1.5 million Palestinians living in the coastal strip, saying, “It's unacceptable and must end.” The Los Angeles Times covered the German foreign minister's visit. According to the Times, however, the foreign minister also condemned Hamas for the capture of Sgt. Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier captured by Hamas-allied militants in a cross-border raid in 2006. Shalit is still a prisoner of Hamas and a huge rallying cry for Israeli citizens. Ramahi was one of those arrested for allegedly planning the Shalit capture and had been in prison for almost four years on his release early in 2010.

On Tuesday, Hamas and Fatah leaders met in Damascus in an attempt to “narrow divisions that have damaged the Palestinian cause.” This has the potential of being a huge story because Israeli forces do not want the Palestinians to stop fighting among themselves. But there was no coverage of the Hamas and Fatah “peace talks” in the New York Times or the Los Angeles Times

In the West Bank on Wednesday, Israeli military personnel arrested a dozen Hamas leaders because of “security concerns.” This threw a wrench in the peace talks between Hamas and Fatah, as their discussion turned to the “appropriate” response to the round-up. Again, no coverage in the New York Times or the Los Angeles Times.

On Thursday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he was “serious” about peace talks with the Palestinians as he met with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Of course, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times had extensive coverage (the LA Times had five stories about the peace talks) of this “great step toward peace in the Middle East.”

Did Israel manipulate the American news coverage by planning the arrests the day before the big “peace chat” knowing that U.S. coverage would focus on the talks and not what Israel is doing behind the scenes? Was Netanyahu giving lip service to Clinton with his “serious on peace” claim, all the while reassuring his political base that life will continue as is with the ongoing arrest of Hamas leaders in the West Bank? Moreover, did Netanyahu actually invigorate his base with the arrest of a Hamas leader with ties to the Shalit case? And was the arrest of Ramahi a way to gain a negotiating chip for Shalit?

These glaring omissions in American news media coverage of the situation in Israel-Palestine is partly a consequence of the fact that many Americans don't care if people who are a part of “known terrorist organizations” have their rights violated in our government's global effort to “promote national security.” But in an ideal world, journalists shouldn't frame their stories to accommodate their audience's indifference to the facts on ground. Are our news media concerned with the fairy-tale of peace in the Middle East only as long as the Palestinians get stuck with the role of the boogeyman, or do they care enough to report the despair as well as the distortions coming from both sides of the wall that partitions the state of Israel?

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 is the co-founder of thesportsunion.com and currently 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 Dalia Hashad

This week, while President Obama was in Indonesia trying to repair the damage that the previous administration did to the United State's image in the Muslim world, former President George W. Bush set about trying to rehabilitate his own image.

Bush broke his post-presidency silence to promote Decision Points, his new book, released on Tuesday. Having left office with a 22 percent approval rating, the lowest in presidential history, Bush's interviews with Oprah Winfrey and NBC's Matt Lauer clearly illustrate his determination to “(re)shape his political legacy.”

The earliest buzz focused on an incident that Bush improbably and shockingly perceives as “an all-time low” in his presidency. During a televised concert for Katrina relief, rapper Kanye West proclaimed, “George Bush doesn't care about black people.”

Bush told Matt Lauer, “I didn't appreciate it then. I don't appreciate it now … I resent it, it's not true, and it was one of the most disgusting moments in my presidency … I faced a lot of criticism as president. I didn't like hearing people claim that I lied about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction or cut taxes to benefit the rich. But the suggestion that I was racist, because of the response to Katrina, represented an all-time low.”

On Oprah, Bush said, “Yeah, it hurt … I don't know why someone would accuse me of being a racist. There is no justification for that whatsoever … you don't call a man a racist.”

Many commentators in the news media have rightly responded to this narrative with incredulity. Alternative lists of “low points” have proliferated and include incidents–the deployment of white phosphorous in Fallujah and the use of mercenary security forces, for example–that are far more important to preserve from the memory hole than Kanye West's 10-second on-air diss. And, as Alex Pareene points out on Salon.com, there's something slightly crazy about (a) Bush's feeling that a rapper's pique was the worst moment of a presidency that included 9/11 and (b) the fact that the are a significant number of white people who sympathize with him.

But there is another reason that this leitmotif in the former president's press junket is disturbing. Much of the world views George W. Bush as decidedly “anti-Muslim.” He unleashed unpopular and devastating assaults on two Muslim countries and presided over an administration that rolled out policy after policy that demonized Muslims, Arabs and South Asians on the basis of religion and national origin, not criminal conduct. Not without reason, Bush was called a racist and a bigot on a regular basis. Why should Kanye West's critique of his character stand out from the chorus of criticism that Bush received in response to a presidency marked by war, torture, corporate profligacy and global economic destabilization?

A cynic might say the former is meant to distract from the latter.

Perhaps the most troublesome aspect of this spectacle is the willingness of mainstream news media to collude with the former president in his sleight-of-hand. That journalistic participation in the construction of an illusion is apparent not just in much of the coverage of Bush's book tour but in reports on President Obama's visit to the largest majority-Muslim nation in the world. While the current president's Asian itinerary is framed, in part, as an effort to “reshape American relations with Muslim nations,” journalists often neglect to remind us why Obama finds himself in the position of trying to “eradicate years of mistrust.”

At a time when virulent Islamaphobia has become entrenched in the national culture, it is worrisome that the news media aren't reminding Bush–and the rest of us–about his grim record of anti-Muslim bias. Former presidents are expected to rewrite history; journalists are supposed to help us keep the story straight.

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.

Sunday's New York Times article on schools' efforts to end bullying seemed an “aw shucks” case-study of the law of unintended consequences. School districts, eager to stop the kind of harassment that led to a recent spate of gay teen suicides, are teaching tolerance. Sounds good, right?

But portraying homosexual relations as normal rubs religious conservatives the wrong way.

“Of course we're all against bullying,” one Montana minister told the Times. “But the Bible says very clearly that homosexuality is wrong, and Christians don't want the schools to teach subjects that are repulsive to their values.”

That statement begs for deeper reporting, but like most mainstream news outlets, when it comes to probing conservative religion and religious belief, the Times seldom wants to go there. For example, some of the biblical passages condemning homosexual acts–most notably Leviticus 20:13–prescribe death for the persons committing the acts. How does the minister in the Times article reconcile what the Bible “clearly says” with the imperative to protect all children, both gay and straight, from violence? And how do the First Amendment's clauses respecting religion figure into the mix?

Teaching tolerance is not a simple matter if the takeaway is that all people deserve dignity and respect regardless of religious, racial, ethnic or sexual differences. For Times readers–most of whom, it's safe to say, believe that pluralism and open-mindedness go hand in hand–it's a particularly hard lesson. But tolerating difference is not the same as condoning it, which is why the Montana minister and many others want to stop schools that “promote acceptance of the homosexual lifestyle” maybe even more than they want to stop bullies.

Ultimately the problem for religious conservatives isn't just about homosexuality; it's about tolerating any state-sanctioned deviation from what they consider the norm. From this perspective, any constraints on religious speech in the public sphere, especially when it comes to sexual mores, is a violation of the First Amendment's clause respecting the free exercise of religion.

But that's not a dilemma that Times readers associate with the America of their day-to-day experience. Rather intolerance of others is someone else's problem – it's the French who don't want schoolchildren wearing religious garb, it's Saudis who won't let Christians build churches in their country, it's Iranians who believe in a worldwide Jewish cabal. They don't realize that beyond their bubble of blue lies a vast sea of red where an increasing number of conservative voters see the promotion of the liberal values of “tolerance” as an effort to establish secularism as the official American civil religion.

If the absolute conflict of religious absolutes seems to increasingly define global politics, it's also starting to define our own political culture. Americans, especially self-styled secularists, seem unaware of the religious values to which they are absolutely bound: civility, self-determination and individualism. Despite some glaring historic exceptions (indigenous Americans, African Americans, Catholics, Jews, Asians, South Asians), our credo has been live and live—and in the twentieth century the circle seemed to grow. But times are changing and what happens when tolerance is no longer tolerated? The Times raises the question, but we need a lot more reporting on possible answers to it.

Diane Winston

by Richard Flory

What is particularly striking in the aftermath of Tuesday's historic election is that there is no consistent religion storyline. Observers have alternately argued that there is no values or faith story in the 2010 election, that the Tea Party is really a cover for the pro-big business “Christian Nation” promoters, or that the stunning win by Republicans is due to the “End Times” worldview of its right-wing Christian base.

While these angles on religion in the 2010 election are true as far as they go, they mask other developments and raise important questions, not only for why this election turned out the way it did, but for what may happen in 2012.

A survey report published before the election, from the Public Religion Research Institute, shows that almost one-half of those who consider themselves part of the Tea Party movement also consider themselves part of the religious right or conservative Christian movement, and that they are much more likely to be social conservatives rather than libertarians on social issues.

Early efforts to tease out the patterns of this election's vote among religious people seem to confirm PRRI's findings; the percentage of Protestants and Catholics who voted Republican increased by several percentage points in this election, as compared to 2008. In general, the more a person goes to church, the more likely they will be to vote Republican. But at the same time, most people say that their faith doesn't shape their positions on such important issues as immigration, the environment, or poverty.

This raises a pair of important questions: What exactly were people voting for? What role does religion play in how they cast their ballots? Most commentators suggest that the shaky economy and the increasing influence of the government in society drove the election toward the Republicans. Formulated this way, values were trumped by economic concerns, regardless how important “values” are to voters.

But if the membership of the Tea Party is largely made up of Republican values-voters, reporters should be asking questions about how values, economics and religion are related. Does economics really trump values, or are values really about “me” and my beliefs as opposed to “them” and their needs? Was the apparent economic vote of the 2010 midterm election really a proxy for underlying values concerns, or even prejudices, whether racial, religious or class-oriented? Reporters should keep an eye out for how these shifting concerns and political alliances play out as the economy recovers and we head toward the 2012 presidential election.

Richard Flory is associate research professor of sociology and senior research associate 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).

S. Brent Plate

Clint Eastwood's latest offering, “Hereafter,” a speculative, cinematic glimpse at what lies at the end of human life, is the latest in a series of recent films that explore and provoke questions about what it means to be human. And like “Hereafter,” many of them reflect an uptick in our personal and collective anxieties about the “end”–about the individual experience of death but also fears about the end of Homo sapiens in general.

Current hit films like “Hereafter,” “Twilight Saga: Eclipse,” “Monsters,” “Paranormal Activity 2,” and “Iron Man 2,” among others, each in its own way points to the post-human. Are there other sentient creatures in the universe? Are there unseen beings walking among us? Are we evolving? If so, into what? All of these are, of course, questions that religious traditions have been grappling with for ages.

“Hereafter” looks at human life by exploring death, the possibilities of communicating across the great divide; part of what defines us as humans is both our mortality and our ability to reflect on our mortality. “The Twilight Saga: Eclipse” is just one of the many entries in the vast vampire franchise which also deals with questions of death and mortality, about how to communicate from death to life and back again.  

“Monsters,” like the many preceding alien-invasion flicks to which it pays homage, wonders again about lifeforms beyond this planet, reflecting both our fascination and our dread at the idea that there are other mortal creatures who also possess self-consciousness. “Paranormal Activity 2,” meanwhile, puts the alien right next to us. Both films reflect the scientific, humanistic and theological question: Are we alone?

“Iron Man 2” lets us wonder about high-tech prostheses and what transcending the limits of our biological bodies might entail, spiritually and psychologically. At the same time, the film prompts us to realize how human bodies are already becoming integrated with technology in radical ways, with our smart phones, medical implants and increasing reliance on military and commercial robotics.

Films have long traded in these interests and anxieties, but there currently seems to be an intensification in our appetite for cinematic fare peppered with death, other-worldliness and ambiguity about embodiment. While we can peer into a telescope or a microscope to reach the edges of the universe known to the empirical mind, science usually leaves us at loose ends when it comes to questions about what lies beyond our abilities to perceive and conceptualize. Religious institutions and practices have traditionally stepped in to answer those questions, but in an age of spiritual flux, popular art often fills the existential gap.

What does this mean for reporters? The images on the screen at the cineplex may originate from the projection booth, but they're also reflections of some of the narratives unfolding in the minds of the audience and society at large. That's why people go to the movies. So when you're scouting for story ideas that hook into contemporary concerns about war, terrorism, technology, social instability and (of course) death, don't forget the religion angle. And buying a ticket to the latest Hollywood blockbuster is a good way to find it.

S. Brent Plate is visiting associate professor of religious studies at Hamilton College. He is the author/editor of several books, including Religion and Film and Blasphemy: Art that Offends. He is co-founder and managing editor of Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art, and Belief. He recently organized “Stations,” an exhibition on religious art, for Hamilton College's Emerson Gallery.

Time magazine's recent story on a religious freethinker in Uganda is in some respects a very good read. Bright, breezy and upbeat, the article explains how James Onen, a former Pentecostal, has started a blog and a discussion group to encourage open debate on religion.

The article notes how “Onen's efforts have, inevitably, led to some grumblings in the local media” in the famously–even notoriously–conservative country, and that several clergymen have begun to question his efforts. But the reporter frames Onen's work as a reasonable reaction against Uganda's religious excesses: witchcraft, spiritual warfare, the prosperity gospel, faith-healing and harsh anti-gay legislation.

What's missing from the story is the reality that the religious expressions passingly referenced—whether spiritual warfare or a “draconian anti-gay bill”—are fundamental to the country's current sociocultural composition: Uganda is in the midst of becoming a prototype for a new synthesis of right-wing religion and politics, both American and African. That important bit of contextual scene-setting is missing from Time's feel-good piece about religious freedom in Uganda.

Writing last year in Religion Dispatches, Nick Street (full disclosure: Nick is also the managing editor of this website) described Uganda–a country on the frontier of Islam and Christianity in Africa governed by an evangelical president-for-life–as “an experiment in right-wing social thought.” Uganda's anti-homosexuality bill, which seems posed to pass, would imprison or kill the country's gays.

There is no shortage of information about the intersection of conservative American evangelicalism and Ugandan political activity. A new study by Kapya Kaoma, an African Anglican priest, documents how and why American culture wars have been exported to Uganda.

The takeaway from Time's airy souffle of an article is simple: do your homework. When you're writing about global religion, there are usually more than one or two variables in the equation—especially when red flags like anti-gay legislation, spiritual warfare and the prosperity gospel are whipping in the breeze as the latest batch of American missionaries debarks at Kampala. True enough, the reality is that budget cutbacks make it hard for journalists to pursue in-depth reporting in places like Uganda. In the near term, we're hoping to help address that shortfall through the Knight Luce Fellowships for Reporting on Global Religion.

But in the longer term, reporters must grok that religious movements and institutions don't exist in isolation from politics, culture and economics; in very real ways, religion and the other elements in any given societal mix are often inseparable from one another.

Writing about a religious freethinker in Uganda without probing the deeply entwined roots of violence and evangelicalism in that country is like reporting on a couple of black college students sitting at a Birmingham lunch counter in 1963 without mentioning segregation or the civil rights movement.

There's more at stake than rudeness when the server at the lunch counter asks the college students to leave. And there's much more to James Onen's story than his hope that “logic and reason will keep the peace.”

Diane Winston

by Don Lattin

Talk about your flashbacks…

Blogging about media coverage of Prop. 19 takes my boggled mind back to those heady days in  the spring of 1973 and my own misadventures covering the Berkeley Marijuana Initiative, the first law in the nation that sought to decriminalize pot.

At the time, I was a 19-year-old reporter for the Daily Californian, the independent off-campus student newspaper at UC Berkeley. They say “write what you know,” so the editors at the Daily Cal put me on the marijuana beat.

The highlight of that campaign was the “Win a Kilo” contest, in which the initiative's sponsors raised funds by raffling off 2.2 pounds of an unnamed “green vegetable matter.” I was given the honor of chairing a blue-ribbon panel, which gathered one afternoon in the offices of the Daily Cal to test the kilo's contents. We somehow got it together enough to report in the next day's edition that the green vegetable matter was of the “highest” quality.

Today, nobody seems to be having that much fun covering Prop. 19, which seeks to legalize the recreational use of marijuana in California. What drama there is hinges on infinitesimal electoral fluctuations around the initiative; there have been lots of stories on polls showing the measure losing, winning, then losing again.

The absence of breast-beating on either side of the issue has made space for some thoughtful reporting, though the prevailing reactive (rather than proactive) journalistic ethos means that only a few news outlets have seized the day. The Contra Costa Times, for one, had a balanced piece on how marijuana may actually affect one's health – as opposed to the inflated claims of the medicinal pot proponents.

(Last year, the New York Times had a clear-eyed article that wasn't linked to Prop. 19 but focused on people who have an abusive or addictive relationship with pot.)

In a way, it's hard to grok what's happening–or, better, not happening–around California's marijuana initiative. Prop. 19 is the most talked about measure on Tuesday's ballot, but relatively little advertising money has been spent by either side. A few TV and radio spots have been running in the final week of the campaign, but this refreshing lack of paid propaganda has required voters to get their information from actual news analysis.
 
Imagine that!

For stories probing what the dearth of advertising means, check out these pieces in the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. There's been a little reporting on religious communities' perspectives on Prop. 19. The New York Times explored the varied responses from black churches and other leaders in the African-American community. Oakland  Bishop Salvatore Cordileone, whose  Roman Catholic diocese is ground-zero for “Oaksterdam University” and the legalization campaign, opposed the measure in an op-ed published by the Chronicle.
 
(Organized crime has the most to lose from the passage of Prop. 19, but it must be stressed here there is no known link between Bishop Sal Cordileone and Godfather Don Corleone.)

As for me, 37 years have passed since I covered the pot beat for the Daily Cal, but I still seem to have trouble taking all this very seriously. I just wrote my own op-ed for the Chronicle on how the passage of Prop. 19 will require all of us aging hippies finally to stop talking about glory days of the 60s counterculture.

And, no, I wasn't stoned when I wrote it.

* * *

Don Lattin is the author of The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America. (HarperCollins, 2010).

by Brie Loskota

With an important election looming, our constantly simmering political contest over “values” is once again at full boil.

Self-described “values voters” sparked furious debate following the 2004 exit polls. Liberals declared that God has no party. Conservatives saw a chance to cater to a collective yearning for morality in a world gone astray. The debate about what it actually means to be a “values voter” rages on, but new data from the Barna Group at least explains what the term doesn't mean. 

The Barna report describes the results of an open-ended survey asking Americans to identify the biggest contributions of Christianity to American society. The responses clustered around three main areas, in descending order of frequency: 1) helping/serving those in need, 2) evangelism, and 3) shaping or protecting morals and values.

While there are many rich nuggets to be mined from the report, one obvious highlight is the rift that responses 1) and 3) reveal in the prevailing American idea of “values”: helping the poor or serving the less-fortunate isn't what most Americans mean when they talk about morality. Instead, talk of “moral values” almost always refers to traditional notions of sex, marriage and family as well as opposition to abortion.

Significantly, younger believers were more likely to cite traditional expressions of compassion and altruism as Christianity's most important contributions to American culture. And they tended to line up with liberals and religious skeptics when it comes to not seeing the value in protecting what the older generation of Christians construes as “values.”

For the last few decades, conservative religious actors in the political arena have focused their efforts on promoting sexual mores rather than providing service to the downtrodden, a tactic which has diminished the moral authority of the institutions they represent in the eyes of many younger Christians. This trend is apparent in the Barna report as well as a recent Pew Forum study, which found that while many Americans look to their religious communities for guidance on sex-related issues, far fewer turn there for moral insight on issues related to immigration, the environment and poverty.

So what does this mean for reporters? The data from both Barna and Pew suggest growing inter-generational tensions around the issue of values and what it means to be religious. Will the rising generation of young believers find a home in existing denominations, form new spiritual movements or join the growing ranks of the religious “Nones”? Will they revive a social-justice oriented idea of “values”? What would that mean for current debates over sex, marriage and reproductive rights? The most important thing to realize from these surveys: your sources are out there, waiting for you to tackle these questions. Go get 'em!

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 Kevin Healey

As Judith Weisenfeld rightly notes, the many heart-felt contributions to Dan Savage's “It Gets Better” project provide some of the most nuanced discussions of the religious implications of homophobia. But what should we make of mainstream coverage of the recent cases of anti-gay bullying, violence, and suicide?

There is no lack of coverage highlighting the religious context of Tyler Clementi's death. Some is driven by Savage, who has peppered his recent CNN and New York Times interviews with condemnations of the Religious Right for espousing “antigay rhetoric” that creates a “climate of hate and fear.” But others make similar connections in the New York Times, the Salt Lake Tribune, the Christian Science Monitor, and the Nation. Clementi's suicide is mentioned in relation to Orthodox Judaism, Mormonism, and Fred Phelps's church; and in relation to the anti-gay positions of Senator Jim DeMint and Michigan Attorney General Andrew Shirvell.

On one hand, we may cheer such coverage for connecting the dots between religiously-based intolerance, anti-gay bullying, and teen suicide. On the other hand, this coverage highlights the tendency to pursue non-partisan “objectivity” by relying on event-driven news hooks. Why haven't journalists been highlighting the implications of anti-gay rhetoric all along? This problem lends new credence to recent arguments about the consequences of theology, the need for all reporters to take it more seriously, and the importance of acknowledging its presence even among elites in non-religious contexts. Journalists must connect the dots to reveal a deeper theology of culture, in a way that anticipates consequences rather than merely reacting to them. As if to answer the call, Religion Dispatches posted a piece with the headline, “Why Anti-Gay Bullying is a Theological Issue.” While the New York Times cited the piece, it did so in another event-driven article—this time about National Coming Out Day.

So how, exactly, should journalists take theology more seriously without resorting to doctrinal partisanship? An article in the Ottawa Citizen cites Lawrence Kohlberg's research on moral development, arguing that the actions of Clementi's roommate represent a broader set of “moral deficiencies” among today's youth. Indeed, Kohlberg and other researchers link moral and spiritual development in ways that may help journalists move beyond the impasse of “he said/she said” objectivity. If advanced stages of moral and spiritual development involve greater empathy, altruism, and love, then as theologian John J. McNeill suggests, “We can legitimately evaluate the validity of a religious belief system by its psychological consequences.”

Journalism is already imbued with latent theological concepts. Rather than buttressing the theological status quo, journalists should distinguish between voices that catalyze what Jeremy Rifkin calls “the journey to mature empathic consciousness” and those that thwart it. If we expect journalists to distinguish between legitimate arguments and mere nay-saying on an issue like climate change, for example, why not demand similar standards when religious leaders and their political allies speak out on gay issues? Just as the best journalism serves as a watchdog of democratic institutions, so too may it serve as a check on religious institutions struggling to maintain their own integrity in a time of sweeping political and social change.

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

Religion never registered in this season's installment of Mad Men. It didn't need to. The implications of faith, morality and Protestant privilege echoed through the episodes, delineating expectations about work and family, gender roles and even child-rearing. Off-screen in 1965, the Supreme Court Case Griswold v. Connecticut upheld women's right to contraception, the Rolling Stones spread “Satisfaction” and the Roman Catholic Church absolved present-day Jews for the crucifixion. LBJ declared the Great Society, Vietnam escalated and Watts burned. In each instance religious tropes and taboos that had seemed immutable were summarily overturned.

Key among these sacred cows was the assumption–or, more pointedly, the implicit article of faith–that everyone and everything had a preordained place in the divine scheme of things. The Bible didn't say exactly say so but it was there, if you read between the lines, in Paul's admonitions to women to be silent in public, in justifications for slavery, in the curse of Ham, in the commandment to honor parents (children who disobeyed were stoned), in David's taking of Bathsheba and in the many stories of male headship and female submission. For generations of American Protestant men who had understood themselves to be God's Chosen Ones, the implications were clear: white men rule.

But by the mid-60s, that comfortable consensus was cracking. Barriers dramatically fell in seemingly insignificant contexts: a seat on the bus, an oral contraceptive, a “raggedy-ass” country in Southeast Asia. Suddenly, even the smallest acts had consequences—a theme that Mad Men creator Matt Weiner explained as central to the show.

In 1960, Don Draper never seemed fully comfortable with Rachel Menken, the Jewish department store heiress with whom he had an affair. Seeing her as another “Other,” his uncomfortable kinship climaxed with a surprising proposal that they run away together. But five years later, Faye Miller's Jewish identity barely rates a mention. When she compliments Don's handsome punim (Yiddish for “face”), Don barely arches an eyebrow. Could it be that the Herbergian trinity–Protestant, Catholic, Jew—has, ten years after the publication Herberg's seminal essay, finally taken hold?

But even though Faye's religious heritage has not prevented her from working with Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce (remember the discomfort when Ms. Mencken sought to hire Don's old firm instead of a Jewish one?), her gender remains an issue. To differentiate herself from the “girls” in the secretarial pool, she insists on being called “Doctor,” dresses professionally (jackets, no cleavage) and discourages, at least for most of the season, flirtations or sexual banter.

Faye, like the other women in the series, follows a script with stage direction taken from the Bible. It's not just the Madonna/Magdalene divide. Despite the physical expectations set up by the characters, the bodacious Joan is far from a whore and the virginal Peggy is anything but chaste. Their images belie their capabilities: both women see—and usually play–office politics better than their male co-workers. But an ingrained religious worldview makes it hard for them to be anything but handmaids and helpmeets. Both break barriers by surpassing the expectations of the mad men; nonetheless, they're still shackled to gender roles. 

But Peggy and Joan have it easy compared to the wives. Betty, Jane and Trudy are stuck playing Mary and Martha. Expected to keep house and content themselves caring for children, redecorating the living room and servicing their husbands, they have little to do but shop or quietly go crazy. When the Aquarian Age finally dawns, how many of these anesthetized women will turn on, tune in and drop out? Will others read Mary Daly, enroll in an Episcopal seminary or learn to worship the Goddess?

Today, as it was in the 1960s, the upper echelons of Madison Avenue don't take religion seriously. It's useful for networking, classifying and stereotyping, but its impact is limited to what's useful in boardrooms or traded in bedrooms. Looking back on Don Draper's world, we can see how misguided that assumption was. The civil rights movement, the pro-life campaign, the rise of the religious right, the growth of Islamic nationalism and the crusade for GLBT equality touched more lives than any campaign for Honda or Lucky Strikes could ever hope to do. How many reporters, like the mad men in Sterling Cooper Draper Price, likewise miss what's right in front of them?

Diane Winston