by Nick Street

Lee Siegel's essay on resonances between the Beats and the Tea Partiers in last Sunday's New York Times Book Review is a brilliant exercise in religious and political genealogy as well as a signpost for reporters. There are more stories to be told about Tea Party movement, which is both more madcap and less out of touch with realities on the ground than most reporting in the mainstream news media has allowed.

In some important ways the loose coalition of malcontents aligned with Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin is a lot like devotees of UFO mythology. That other community of self-righteously marginalized conspiracy-theorists is also having its day in the sun: there's “The Event” (NBC's mash-up of “Lost” and “The X-Files”), a refreshingly levelheaded new book on the subject by journalist Leslie Kean and a bumper crop of amateur UFO videos, many of which have become eyeball magnets on YouTube.

But the deeper connection between the Tea Party movement and believers in little green men is the fact that some ardently held yet improbable myths animate many of the partisans in each group. For the former, it's the notion that Barack Obama is secretly a Muslim. For the latter, it's the idea that government agencies in most advanced countries are conspiring to keep us in the dark about the extraterrestrials walking (or flying or teleporting) among us.

In the case of the Tea Partiers, most legacy media have tended simply to report these and similar claims unchallenged. Progressive bloggers and journalists, on the other hand, have sniffed out the underlying racism in a lot of the rhetoric and followed the movement's money trail to a number of intriguing sources.

Still, there's another Tea Party-UFO link to be made.

In a recent interview, Rice University's Jeffrey Kripal—a professor of religious studies who currently specializes in the paranormal and popular culture—recounted an observation from Jacques Vallée, one of the first scientists to make a serious study of UFOs as a social phenomenon: “The true believers are wrong because they mistake their perception for the stimulus that's really out there, and the skeptics are wrong because they deny that there's a stimulus out there.”

Whether the anchor-point of a social myth is the belief in UFOs or the belief that President Obama is a secret agent of Islamic imperialism, it's important for reporters to remember that, even if the believers' assertions are easily debunked, the collective fear that inspires the myth doesn't come from nowhere.

A recent Pew Forum poll suggests that the economy, jobs and healthcare top the list of concerns for conservatives and liberals alike, yet many Tea Partiers are apparently motivated to act in ways that cut against those vital interests by—what?

Like keeping track of the thread of radical individualism in our living history, finding the source of the spiritual and political disquiet that animates our most destabilizing social myths would be a true public service.

Nick Street has worked as a contributing editor at Patheos.com and Religion Dispatches. His writing on science, religion, sexuality and culture has also appeared in the Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, the Jewish Journal and the Revealer. He is a resident priest at the Hazy Moon Zen Center in Los Angeles.

Judith Weisenfeld

If the recent cluster of suicides of young gay men weren't enough to draw our attention to the under-reported consequences of homophobia in our culture, we also have the brutal attacks in the Bronx and the antediluvian remarks of New York's GOP gubernatorial candidate to remind us that the self-righteous facade of anti-gay sentiment often masks a deep and disturbing tendency toward violence.

The news that homophobic intimidation had driven Tyler Clementi and Justin Aaberg to take their own lives moved relationship- and sex-columnist Dan Savage to inaugurate the “It Gets Better” project.  Savage began by producing a short video with his husband in support of teens who are bullied because they are or are perceived to be gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender. He then invited others to contribute to the project, which now features hundreds of videos, including many by celebrities. Most compelling, however, are those by average GLBT adults talking about their lives and showing the possibility of happy futures for young people who might feel hopeless.

The frequency with which contributors raise the issue of religious attitudes about sexuality is striking and, while the story that emerges is often of rejection by religious parents or leaders, the nuance with which the amateur videographers address these questions is remarkable. Indeed, these videos prove much better at illuminating the complexities of life for religious GLBT people than, for example, the recent press coverage of the accusation that Bishop Eddie L. Long, pastor of the 25,000-member New Birth Missionary Baptist Church and outspoken anti-gay crusader, had coerced four young men from his Longfellows Youth Academy into having sex with him.

The Eddie Long story is a tangled one, with threads that include complex stances on sexuality within black churches, the profligacy of prosperity preachers and, most important, clerical abuse of parishioners' trust. Insofar as Long has preached that those who violate divinely-ordained gender roles, including gay men and lesbians, deserve death, charges that he may have engaged in activities he has vilified is noteworthy. The men's contention that Long used church funds to pay for jewelry, lavish trips in a private jet and other gifts raises important questions about the nonprofit status of his church. And the claim that Long abused his spiritual authority by telling the young men that their particular sexual relationships were “justified by the Holy Scripture and ordained by God” also deserves closer examination.

Unfortunately, media coverage has been quick to sensationalize the same-sex element of the story, sometimes conflating homosexuality with sexual abuse or pedophilia and relying on simplistic tropes about the uniform homophobia of black church members and leaders. This is not to say that black churches have not been hostile and sometimes damaging arenas for GLBT people. Still, the approach in some of the coverage of the charges against Eddie Long is reminiscent of the media's failure to provide a complex analysis of the role that religious African-Americans played in the 2008 vote on Proposition 8, California's anti-gay marriage ballot initiative.

If the allegations against Eddie Long turn out to be true, there may, indeed, be great drama in the fall of such a problematic figure. In any case, the sensationalized coverage continues to position homosexuality rather than homophobia as the cause of the problem and does little to provide careful analysis of the complicated place of religion in the lives of many GLBT people. Especially in light of the recent suicides and brutal attacks on GLBT people, which only underscore how high the stakes are, we must do better. The moving video messages submitted to the “It Gets Better” project provide an obvious starting point.

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 John Adams

Bless me Father, for I have sinned.

It was Saturday night, Sept. 18, and I was nearing the end of a grueling 16-hour shift when a headline came across the wires that caught my attention: “CHURCH MASS SUICIDE HOAX.” It was the second story in the past couple months that really caught my attention.

A quick read of the “early edition” article indicated that a mass suicide ceremony was well underway at a local church. Within an hour, the wires revised the claim that it was merely a hoax; the group of five adults and eight children were officially “missing.”

The murky details sprinkled throughout the copy only deepened the confusion over this potentially explosive story until a statement from Los Angeles sheriff's captain Mike Parker gave the media everything needed to justify hysteria and excuse our shoddy reporting.

“We've got a group here that's practicing some orthodox and some unorthodox Christianity,” Parker declared. “Obviously this falls under the unorthodox.” And that was the hook that I, and everyone else, used in our headlines:  “Police: 'Cult-Like' Figure Sought in Possible Mass Church Suicide Plot.”

By attaching the word “cult” to the story, we instantly destroy the credibility of the leader and the religious movement, providing credibility to the potential threat of unexplainable deviant behavior and excusing the shut-down of the thinking portion of our brain.

Instead of questioning the feeble details of the story, we linked to the Jim Jones and Heaven's Gate narratives as pointers to the likely conclusion of this “tragic event.”  And with a wink, wink and a nudge, nudge we tacitly reinforced the idea that all religious people are inherently crazy.

If a “regular” church group heads out for a spiritual retreat and leaves their cell phones at home and writes letters indicating they will be meeting Jesus and glimpsing lost loved ones in Heaven, it doesn't mean suicide is imminent. Rather, it means they don't want distractions from the outside world when they clear a space to “connect” spiritually.

On the other hand, if a “fanatical” group (or shall we just say “cult”) does the same thing, then we frame the story differently; in that case, crying wolf is not only necessary but a matter of journalistic duty. The only problem is, we seldom stop to ask who gets to determine whether a group is “regular” or “fanatical.”
 
By Sunday afternoon–after authorities spent many hours and untold taxpayer dollars searching via foot, horseback and helicopter–the small group led by Reyna Marisol Chicas turned up in a park, praying (with frustratingly unphotogenic earnestness) for the spiritual revival of their city.  Oops, we did it again.

We, the news media, took an unremarkable religious event and made it “sexy.” The effort to sensationalize the devotional practices of Chicas and her followers, like the larger disgrace of our coverage of Pastor Terry Jones and the “International Burn a Quran Day,” gave legs to a story that otherwise would have had nowhere to go–and rightly so.
 
Once again, we journalists made a difference, but in all the wrong ways.
 
The city of Gainesville gave Jones a bill for $180,000 to pay for security costs surrounding his threats to burn Qurans. Will Chicas also have to foot the bill for the search party and the hours of overtime? Better to ask to what degree the news media are culpable for “inciting the frenzy” in both of these stories. Maybe Jon Stewart is right: Americans–and journalists in particular–just need to take it down a notch and restore sanity.

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

“Islam: Questions and Answers,” a recent special edition of ABC's “20/20,” promised to shed light on America's most misunderstood religion. That promise went woefully unfulfilled. In fact, riddled with misinformation, confused logic and racist rhetoric, the show struggled to get anything right. From the B-roll images of exploding buses and fiery protests to host Diane Sawyer's grating mispronunciation of “Moozlems,” at countless places where there was an editorial or stylistic choice between nuance and sensationalism, the wrong decision was made. 

Even the first (and best) of the show's five segments hinted at a later descent into troubling territory. Sawyer's primer on the basics of Islam was augmented with clips of elementary school students sharing their childish understanding of the religion. This “from the mouths of babes” version of religious education left one wondering whether ABC News didn't trust their audience's ability to digest a straightforward explanation of Islam from scholars or religious leaders.

Instead, the show abruptly introduced some of the most polarizing critics of Islam as experts on the varied religious lives of 1.5 billion Muslims. There was no effort to help the average viewer understand that people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Irshad Manji are not famed for their even-handedness but are rather commentators known for their vehement criticism of mainstream Islam. More shockingly, Pamela Gellar, a founder of the nation's most strident anti-Muslim hate group (with the motto: “Islamophobia is the height of common sense”) was presented as a legitimate source on Islam.

It is simply dismaying to think that a supposedly reputable news organization would tap as an “objective” authority the woman credited with sparking the late-stage controversy on Park51 and famous for her campaign to convince Americans that President Obama is a closet Muslim who is secretly using his presidency to “foster America's submission to Islam.”

Even the show's language and line of inquiry exhibited an indifference to objectivity. In the vein of questions like “When did you stop beating your wife?” Sawyer's explorations–such as, “We wanted to know….whether, in the name of piety, Islam is treating women as just property, as second class citizens in a culture controlled by men”–sounded more like editorializing than objective inquiry. At the top of this segment, an unidentified voice answered Sawyer's question with the statement, “In too many Muslim communities, women are being forced to veil themselves,” without presenting facts or even anecdotal evidence to support the claim. As a veiled woman smiled for the camera, the voiceover warns viewers, “A personable American in a niqab is an appealing image, but it is far from the norm.”

In other words, don't let this brief intrusion of reality disabuse you of your uninformed opinions.

At the end of the show, reporter Brian Weir wondered, “If Islam is truly a religion of peace, and terrorism is mostly driven by politics, why aren't there as many non-Muslim terrorists? After all, plenty of poor Christians live in the Middle East and disagree with American foreign policy.” Putting a question mark at the end of a statement loaded with unexamined assumptions doesn't qualify as an open-minded query. Along the same lines, a weary-sounding Diane Sawyer asked, “Where are the moderate voices…Why not have a million-man march on Washington of moderate Muslims?” I know several people who were interviewed for this program–all of them peace-loving, intelligent, articulate, community-minded individuals: in other words, “moderates.” None of them had more than a minute of screen-time.

Why? One typical non-Muslim interviewee suggested that Muslims are so extreme that if any rational adherents of Islam dared to speak up, “They may have to wear a bulletproof vest to do it.” Is that a fact, or was ABC playing to the kind of ignorance and fear that gooses ratings at FoxNews? The voices of the moderate Muslims on ABC's cutting room floor speak volumes.

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.

Much wailing and gnashing of teeth followed the recent release of the Pew Forum's survey of Americans' religious knowledge. The news that, on average, most of us know only half the answers to questions on the Bible, global faith traditions and religion in civic life reveals (pick one) a lax commitment to diversity; a blind spot in religious education; our fear (or at least our willful ignorance) of people not like ourselves; or yet another failure of the public school system.

But really, how important is it to know that Jonathan Edwards was an 18th century revivalist or that nirvana is the Buddhist experience of freedom from suffering? The focus on factoids obscures a central challenge of the 21st century: negotiating the absolute conflict of multiple religious absolutes.

That's a hard lesson for many Americans, whose deepest religious value is a laissez-faire tolerance for religious difference—except when those differences threaten the small “c” conservative status quo, as Muslims, Mormons and some gay Christians can attest. But sociologists say the trend overall, and especially among the young, is to live and let live. In American Grace: How Religion Unites and Divides Us, authors Robert Putnam and David Campbell call that the “Aunt Susan effect.” Aunt Susan may be a lesbian, Sufi or atheist, but her innate goodness makes it hard to believe she'll spend an eternity in hell.

“You know that your faith says. . . she's not going to heaven, but I mean come on,” Putnam recently told NPR. “[It's] Aunt Susan, you know, and if anybody's going to heaven it's Aunt Susan. So every American is sort of caught in this dilemma, that their theology tells them one thing, but their personal experience tells them to be more tolerant.”

The authors say increased tolerance may explain why so many Americans claim no religious affiliation. According to Putnam and Campbell, a growing number of young people are enacting a “quiet backlash” against the increasing identification between conservative religion and the Republican Party by simply opting out. The number of “nones,” as the unaffiliated are called, used to hover around 5 percent of the population. Now between 35 and 40 percent of younger Americans say belong to this group.

American Grace looks to be a treasure trove for coverage on religion and American life. Among its findings are that young people are more opposed to abortion than their families but more accepting of gay marriage; that Jews are the most broadly popular religious group in America today; and that personal interfaith ties are growing. All these developments sound much more promising for intelligent reporting than the river of recent laments about religious illiteracy.

In fact what's most vexing about Americans' religious illiteracy barely made headlines. Armed only with our ignorance, are we ready for a world that daily manifests the absolute conflict of multiple religious absolutes? Writers like Graham Fuller and Eliza Griswold argue that religion is a side-show for geopolitical issues ranging from water rights to territorial claims–but tell that to Hindus and Muslims in Northern India or to equally angry Jews, Christians and Buddhists around the world. Even if cynical leaders do use religion manipulate the masses, it's critical to understand why it catches and compels so many people. Knowing a bit of theology and religious history is good a first step.

Will PBS' new series “God in America” help our religious ignorance when it airs this week? The six-hour special seems to celebrate both the majesty of American religious diversity and the mystery of our abiding religiosity. “It's all good” is the underlying message. But what's needed is not another romantic narrative about religion, politics and pluralism in the United States. Instead we need solid journalism that informs us about our messy world, its conflicting faiths and our own responsibility to facts on the ground—even if most of us don't know a chuppah from a hookah.

Diane Winston

by Richard Flory

Left behind: cell-phones, wallets, the deed to a house and farewell letters to relatives that ended, “We're going to heaven to meet Jesus.” It all spelled “cult” to officials in Palmdale, a parched city of 150,000 where L.A.'s urban sprawl meets the Mojave Desert.

News stories about the 13 missing persons–all immigrants from El Salvador–amplified fears that members of another doomsday sect intended to take their own lives. Even after police found the group unharmed in a local park, the follow-up story in the Los Angeles Times reprised the apocalyptic theme of earlier coverage.

As the Times would have it, end-of-days religious beliefs are more common to poor and displaced people who are looking for some measure of hope in what seems an otherwise desperate world. Millennialism, in this telling of the story, becomes a balm for the poverty and oppression of a minority of Christians by holding out the possibility of a better life in the hereafter.

Which overlooks the fact that four out of five Christians expect Jesus to return to Earth one day—and that one out of five anticipates the Second Coming in his or her lifetime.

This failure to see the deep, broad roots of religious belief is not uncommon. At a recent public discussion of his new book, A World Without Islam, author Graham Fuller made a similarly vexed point about conflicts between Islam and the West. For Fuller, what appears to be a titanic struggle between religious civilizations isn't about religion at all, but is instead a struggle for political and economic power in which religion is incidental to the process.

Throughout the discussion, Fuller's conversation partners–Rabbi Reuven Firestone of Hebrew Union College and Dr. Maher Hathout of the Muslim Public Affairs Council–agreed with Fuller's assessment and offered thoughts on religion that echoed the theme of the stories about the missing church members. For Firestone, Hathout and Fuller, religion provides a sense of belonging and moral identity for individual adherents, but has no power to influence events beyond the experience of the individual.

Neither the analysis in the Times nor the conclusion of Fuller and his fellow panelists accounts for the persistence of religious belief as a motivating force in global conflict—and American public life. The Tea Party movement, global terrorism, Israeli territorial disputes and debates over the content of social studies textbooks in Texas public schools are all animated by religious beliefs that are held not just individually but collectively and that often cut across socioeconomic and even racial lines. Any angle on religion that sees belief as something that motivates particular individuals but not the group is literally missing the forest for the trees.

This means that journalists need to look closely at how religious belief motivates people to act in a variety of contexts. On the battlefield, in the voting booth, at the homeless shelter—and even at the multiplex and the shopping mall—religion nudges people into action in ways that are both obvious and less overt. As in the coverage of the supposed cultists of Palmdale, religion is probably not simply a peripheral factor in an isolated story. It may, in fact, point to a much bigger narrative.

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).

by S. Brent Plate

I currently teach a course called, “Religion and Modern Art.” When I mention this to people, they usually look puzzled. “How can you study that? Modern artists aren't religious!”

Most reporters who cover the arts share this perplexity, though a growing awareness of the religious dimensions of electronic media—particularly television—is beginning to inform coverage of other forms of artistic expression. With the huge “Abstract Expressionist New York” exhibition opening at the MoMA next week, I'll be curious to see whether any critics pick up on the spiritual aspects of the pieces on display.

Journalists, academics, the general public and even artists themselves are often befuddled by the relationship between religious expression and modern art. On the one hand, when art and religion are invoked in the same sentence, some minds race quickly to Renaissance images of the Madonna and Child. Or to the kind of “religious art” that might adorn the walls in a pastor's study or a pious grandmother's living room.

Others might alight on scandal, on Andres Serrano's “Piss Christ” or Chris Ofili's “Holy Virgin Mary,” thinking modern art only works against religion. True enough, this kind of controversy seems to be evergreen and everywhere (check out recent stories from Spain, Australia and right here in the U.S.).

Some commentators are willing to see a nebulous “personal spirituality” at the nexus between modern art and religion that does nothing to threaten or even particularly challenge the viewer. Apart from Holland Cotter's usually astute observations in the New York Times, few arts journalists really appreciate the variety of ways that art can be religious above and beyond the use—or misuse—of traditional signs and symbols.

Which is all quite amazing, considering that modern Western art is brimming with religious ideas, imagery, yearning and (yes) controversy. Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian broke with representational art a century ago for explicitly religious and spiritual reasons. Later in the century, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Agnes Martin and Yves Klein reduced formal art to lines and colors, again employing religious terminology in their reasoning. More recently video artists like Bill Viola, Gary Hill and Shirin Neshat have not only employed religious imagery but also aspired to induce religious experiences in their viewers. In fact, modern art's religious explorations have been the subject of several major exhibitions of the past decade, including “The Third Mind” in New York, “Traces du Sacre” in Paris and “Iconoclash” in Karlsruhe, Germany.

Two smaller current exhibits offer new perspectives on the religious and spiritual dimensions of modern art. The photographer Rick Nahmias spent several years documenting the religious beliefs and practices of marginalized people in California: prison inmates practicing Zen Buddhism, a transgender gospel choir, Muslim survivors of genocide in Cambodia. The audio-visual result, now on display at St. Norbert College in Wisconsin, is “Golden States of Grace,” a body of exquisitely beautiful black and white images that show people conducting rituals and communing with each other, but not in traditional sacred space.

A showing that might have caused a much greater stir than it did is Sandow Birk's “American Quran,” in its last week at the PPOW Gallery in New York. Inspired by Birk's own research into calligraphic Qurans, the ongoing project is a usually brilliant mix of chapters from Islam's sacred text and reflections on life in the United States. Perhaps if Birk had called his work the “Ground Zero Quran Project” it would have garnered more attention. But then, as often happens when religion and art veer away from a sharp focus on lived experience, the project would have become something other than—and much less than—what it really is.

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. 

by Su'ad Abdul Khabeer

In the past week, “the apology” has been presented as a salve to the current anti-Muslim hysteria plaguing the United States. The first apology was extended by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who apologized for “the wave of bigotry and simple nuttiness” that has targeted Muslims; a wave that he believes should “embarrass us more than you.”

In response, Ebrahim Moosa, an associate professor of Islamic studies at Duke University,  extended an apology for the “hurt, pain and loss” experienced by those who have been victims of terrorism in “OUR [Muslim] name.” Moosa goes on to chide Muslims that, without making such an acknowledgment, they cannot reasonably “ask the American, the British, the Spanish and other nations to apologize” for their roles in war and death in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan.

While these expressions of regret are no doubt sincere, the two-dimensional rhetoric of the apology misses the deeper story. More problematically, it also subtly perpetuates the idea that the great adversarial relationship between the Soviet Union and the United States has neatly been replaced by a global conflict between white, Christian America and non-white, “foreign” Muslims.

Kristof uses language commonly found in the news media when he tries to correct what “many Americans believe that Muslims are or do.” Even when it's used to express sympathy for Muslims in the United States, this language suggests that “American” and “Muslim” are two distinct categories. Specifically, the word “Americans” is usually shorthand for U.S. citizens who are not only white but Christian as well.

Thus in Kristof's analysis, the Americans who need to learn to differentiate between “good Muslims” and “bad Muslims” are the same Americans who have “mostly learned” not to treat blacks, Jews and other historically marginalized groups as an “undifferentiated mass.” Despite making explicit reference to “my fellow Americans,” Moosa also uncritically embraces this configuration of the conflict when he suggests that Muslims in the U.S. must apologize before asking anything of the “American nation,” despite the fact that the “nation” he refers to also belongs to the Muslims from whom he expects an apology.

The subtle conflict narrative reflected in these two pieces is dangerous and pervasive. What can journalists do to remedy this situation? One word: detail. Who do you mean when you refer (or a source refers) to Muslims? Similarly, who is included in the scope of the word “Americans”?

Not paying attention to these details effectively erases from the picture the millions of us who are both Muslim and American and preserves the invidious equation of American-ness, whiteness, and Christianity. Why is this dangerous? It plays into the hands of those who would compare U.S. Muslims to Nazis, deny American citizens their constitutional rights or attack other citizens for “looking Muslim.” At this point we don't need apologies; we need accuracy and clear-eyed attention to detail.