by Brie Loskota and Nick Street

Woody Allen recently opined in the New York Times that “there's no real difference between a fortune teller or a fortune cookie and any of the organized religions. They're all equally valid or invalid, really. And equally helpful.”

Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, might agree.  Michelle Boorstein of the Washington Post chronicles the editing process that gave us the bible of AA, known as the Big Book. With the original copy finally coming to light, notes in the margins show how Wilson left behind the particularistic language of God and Jesus Christ and opted for a more readily adaptable “God of your understanding” or “higher power” as the source of spiritual strength in the recovery process. With these few word changes, Wilson opened up the community of recovery to everyone from members of the Chabad movement to citizens of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Earlier this year, in a CNN piece about the spiritual but not religious trend, BJ Gallagher remarked that “twelve-step people have a brilliant spiritual community that avoids all the pitfalls of organized religion.” Gallagher, author of popular self-help books like The Best Way Out is Always Through, pinpoints the recovery movement's particular strength in the fact that “there are no priests or intermediaries between you and your god.''

So is AA the real culprit behind the “spiritual but not religious” trend that some say is destroying institutional religion? Have we finally created a religious Esperanto that speaks to all? What does the story about the origins of the Big Book tell us about debates between particularism and “cafeteria-ism” in the United States?

First, it's a reminder that the tension between institutional loyalty and radical individualism in American religious life is nothing new. But a second–and more interesting–lesson is that while religious movements are distinctive in their particulars, the social ferment of our media-saturated, pluralistic age is also making the boundaries between movements more porous. And non-doctrinaire practices like meditation, yoga and the twelve-steps are facilitating a steadily increasing number of boundary-crossings between those movements.
   
Like any religious book, AA's sacred text was compiled with a specific audience in mind. The difference between Bill Wilson's project and the Bible (or the Koran or the Buddhist sutras) is that, rather than anchoring a spiritual community to a particular notion of God or an authorized set of teachings, the Big Book attracts adherents whose only common point of reference is a particular experience of suffering. Addicts from a wide array of traditions–including secular humanism–have created community around this shared difficulty and adapted the Big Book's lessons to their own cultural and ethical frameworks. 

What should journalists make of all this? On the one hand, Woody Allen gets it completely wrong. Religions are different and the differences matter. That basic truth arguably animates most of the conflicts in the world today–from the debate over same-sex marriage to the fate of Israel-Palestine to the deep animus between American globalism and radicalized Islam. But, as the Big Book reminds us, in another sense the auteur of deeply thoughtful work like “Annie Hall” and “Crimes and Misdemeanors” knows whereof he speaks. Seeking a way out of suffering is a fundamental human experience, and reporters get closer to the heart of their stories when they ask who's doing the suffering and why.

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.

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.

by Samuel Chu

Christine O'Donnell, the newest Tea Party darling, caused a stir with her surprising win in the Delaware Republican primary for the U.S. Senate. Since her win, news stories about her non-mainstream beliefs and practices have surfaced almost daily, ranging from her opposition to masturbation to her alleged dabbling in witchcraft. Her subsequent statements and the news media's coverage of her unlikely candidacy point to an unfortunate tendency to hold politicians, especially on matters of faith, to an unreasonable and even undesirable standard.

In an age where religious flux and spiritual exploration are increasingly the norm, should politicians have to account for all the mountaintops and alleyways they've visited over the course of their seeking?

Ms. O'Donnell has responded to questions about her religious commitments by saying that “rigid moral views” were part of a youthful past. “I was in my 20s and very excited and passionate about my new-found faith,” she confesses. “But I can assure you my faith has matured. And when I go to Washington, D.C. it will be the Constitution on which I base all of my decisions, not my personal beliefs.” Many of us in public life would hope that our beliefs have matured since high school, and that those changes are seen as evidence growth, not fodder for sensational headlines.

No less revered–and contentious–a political figure than Gandhi said, “My aim is not to be consistent with my previous statements on a given question, but to be consistent with truth as it may present itself to me at a given moment. The result has been that I have grown from truth to truth.”

Yet the tendency in our news media culture today is to cast any declaration of spiritual commitment in the most extreme and polarizing light; in other words, we reduce faith to its most simplistic form and deem it insusceptible to change. This “gotcha” approach to reporting on religion in politics ignores the fact the we are a nation of seekers and exposes journalists to the criticism that they are incurious about and often biased against those who profess ardent religious belief.

YouTube, Twitter and online culture in general have made it almost impossible for anyone to escape his or her past statements and practices. Reporters, of course, have an obligation to hold people accountable for their positions, but they do not have to value sensationalism over substance. When deciding what kind of utterance deserves attention, we ought to remember that what makes for a good headline doesn't always tell the whole story.

Samuel Chu is the executive director of California Faith for Equality. A first generation immigrant from Hong Kong, he currently serves as board chair for One LA-Industrial Areas Foundation and 1010 Development Corporation. Samuel is also a fellow at the Center for Religion and Civic Culture at the University of Southern California.

Last week, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat told a SoCal audience that religion reporters need to take theology seriously: theology has consequences.

Differing from his professional peers who see the world through a political lens, Douthat said many people are motivated by beliefs about metaphysical questions. Paying attention to these beliefs would yield richer, more complex stories than the “he said, she said” political narratives that are news outlets' stock in trade.

I agree with Douthat, but it's not just religion reporters who need to take theology seriously. All reporters do. In recent years, religion has spilled off the church page, flooding arts and entertainment, science and medicine, education and welfare, sports and, yes, politics with a tidal wave of news. For the few full-time religion reporters still in place, it's too much to cover.

Douthat suggested reporters spend less time tracking the secular manifestations of religion and more time considering the ways that beliefs affect behavior. As a case in point, he asked if the prosperity gospel's rising popularity helps explain the financial overreaching that fed the housing boom and subsequent mortgage fiasco. Few news outlets followed that story, though Time wondered whether some Christians confused Countrywide's ARM with their Heavenly Father's.

But what about folks like Angelo Mozilo, Countrywide's former president? Or other bankers, hedge fund managers and toxic mortgage purveyors whose greed and shortsightedness helped plunge the country into the longest recession since the 1930s? What was their theology and did it, in Douthat's words, have consequences?

Could some of them been Pentecostals following prosperity teachings? Or were others ethically unmoored atheists? Still others may have been half-hearted Jews or Christians, whose perfunctory practice and attenuated beliefs offer negative proof of theology's importance.

But most reporters don't look to elites when reporting on theology's consequences. Rather, they focus on cultural others or the hangers-on at society's margins. The former may be values voters, creationists or suicide bombers—but their deep-seated convictions label them as different from us. The latter are believers whose faith has blinded them to embezzling clerics, predatory pastors and risky investments—leaving them losers in the game of life.

But what about wealthy bankers, well-connected lawyers and world-famous scientists? How about Broadway babes and Hollywood fat-cats? Resolute reporters and clamoring columnists? If theology has consequences, and I agree it does, journalists need to track their own and neighboring tribes' beliefs and behaviors even as they set off to investigate others'.

Theology and its consequences aren't “out there,” abstract and nebulous. To borrow a phrase from Madge of the old Palmolive commercials, we're soaking in it.

Diane Winston

by Kevin Healey

Last year, Keith Olbermann repeatedly compared Glenn Beck to Harold Hill, the instrument-toting con-man from “The Music Man.” The comparison seems even more apt after Beck's Restoring Honor rally; borrowing a bit of mojo from his prominent evangelical guests, he sounded more like a tent revivalist than a TV news personality. The next viral hit on YouTube just might be a mash-up of Beck's rally speech and Robert Preston's rendition of “Ya Got Trouble.”

In fact, Beck has described himself as an entertainer, even comparing himself to a “rodeo clown.” Financially speaking, though, Beck is no joke. Just this past year, Glenn Beck Inc. generated $32 million. As critics point out, Beck's multimedia empire is “branding and monetizing the face of Angry America at a rate that would make Sarah Palin blush.” That's saying something, considering Palin's six-figure speaking fees and her contracts with Fox News and Discovery Channel. Much like Beck, Palin has become a singular national industry.

Unlike the self-consciously manipulative Harold Hill, though, Beck and Palin are regarded by their loyal followers as unsurpassed in their sincerity. Even Alex Zaitchik, who wrote a scathing biography of Beck, suggests that his raw emotionalism “doesn't make him a charlatan. He believes almost all of what he says.” Much the same can be said of Palin.

In contrast to Jeremiah Wright, especially, Palin and Beck's rise to stardom shows that while voices of prophetic social critique are often demonized, leaders espousing a mixture of religious apocalypticism, American exceptionalism and free-market fundamentalism can achieve rapid success these days. As Omri Elisha recently suggested on this page, this peculiar fusion of theology and economic ideology demands far more scrutiny from journalists who wish to understand the extent and effect of Beck's (and Palin's) influence.

Like Palin, who dodged questions about her Pentecostal background, Beck has persuaded evangelicals like James Dobson and Richard Land to overlook his Mormon faith. But Beck's apocalyptic views trouble many Mormons, even as his Mormon faith troubles some evangelicals. Meanwhile Palin has ties the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) and “spiritual warfare”—movements that “have troubled even some Pentecostal Christians,” as Laurie Goodstein reports.

If these movements sound unfamiliar, Bruce Wilson suggests, it's because “much of the journalism on religion and politics to come out over the last decade has missed massive, global changes in Christianity that carry profound political implications.” Independent research groups are stepping up to the task. As Omri noted, Media Matters has done the work of connecting the dots between Beck and Newt Gingrich in support of initiatives like Pray and Act. Wilson's own Talk2Action links Pray and Act to NAR, and NAR to Palin. Many mainstream news articles—including Goodstein's cited above—rely on groups like Talk2Action.

Such research is important since, in the hands of stars like Beck and Palin, the fusion of apocalyptic theology and neoliberal economics assumes a mundane, consumerist guise: a magazine, a top-selling book, an entertaining cable show, a blog entry worthy of a Facebook wall post. To suggest an answer to Omri's question from Tuesday: these are the materials by which religious communities are becoming embedded in Beck's and Palin's webs of influence—the instruments through which ideology circulates. But as Harold Hill learned, people often don't care what sound an instrument makes, as long as they get some credit for playing along. Rather than a single gumshoe reporter, it may take networks of diligent researchers to figure out just where this band is marching.

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 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.”

by Omri Elisha

When lists start to appear ranking the “Top 10 Religion Stories of 2010,” Glenn Beck's Restoring Honor rally will almost certainly be among them. But amidst the hype surrounding his efforts to reinvigorate theocentric civil religion, more attention should be paid to the question of whether Beck's entry into the realm of public theology will actually have any noteworthy influence on how religion is conceived and practiced in local communities and faith networks, and what that influence might be.

Journalists and commentators described the atmosphere at Restoring Honor as more like a “religious revival” or “church picnic” (as if the two were one and the same) than a political rally, though few overlooked the game-changing significance of the renewed affinity between the religious right and Tea Party activism. Moreover, prominent evangelical leaders and Christian bloggers responded to the strong undertones of Christian nationalism (and the participation of figures like Richard Land, James Dobson and John Hagee) by debating whether conservative Christians can or should get over the fact that Beck is a Mormon. However you slice it, there was clearly a whole lotta religion going on.

But if there really is a story about religion here, and not just politics, then how exactly do everyday religious people fit into it? How are religious communities and practitioners at the grassroots becoming embedded in Glenn Beck's ever-expanding web of influence?

Consider, for example, the intended impact of Beck's anachronistically titled “Black Robe Regiment.” This loosely constituted interfaith battalion of clergy – assembled with guidance from conservative evangelical heavyweight David Barton, and supposedly “thousands” strong – is meant to represent a position of moral consensus, a unified front of religious elites committed to a culture war in defense of constitutional liberties perceived to be at risk. That much is easy to ascertain. 

What remains unclear is whether Beck and his partners aim to facilitate specific strategic initiatives, apart from the usual “let's go out and spread the word,” in order to advance the Black Robe agenda beyond the level of public rhetoric. Exactly how are the ideological purposes of this group going to circulate within and among religious communities, penetrating the lives of the millions of Americans who actually attend revivals and church picnics? Will they figure into the worship services and communal rituals where the ideas and sentiments that shape distinct religious identities are reinforced?

Also unclear is the extent to which Beck is spearheading a new coalition or building on existing right-wing movements and Christian nationalist projects already in full gear. Is he picking up where the Christian Coalition and the Moral Majority of the 1980s left off?
 
Being a member of the Black Robe Regiment may well require religious leaders to do more than attend motivational conferences and occasionally deliver sermons about liberty and national renewal from the pulpit. High-level networking and public preaching among prominent conservative figures is already noteworthy, to be sure, but in order to assess whether the Black Robe Regiment amounts to something more than a few well-connected clergy seeking to enhance their profile, journalists as well as scholars need to investigate the social mechanisms “on the ground” that are actually being set in motion–or not–before the political relevance of Beck's initiative can be truly and fairly assessed.

In other words, if Glenn Beck (America's fourth most-admired person in a recent Gallup survey) is determined to use religion to establish himself as something more than a media pundit, then journalists must probe exactly how intends to do so, as well as asking what other interests are being served in the process.

Omri Elisha is assistant professor of anthropology at Queens College of the City University of New York. He has written several articles on American evangelicalism as well as the forthcoming book, Moral Ambition: Mobilization and Social Outreach in Evangelical Megachurches, to be published next year by the University of California Press.

by Nick Street

Nearly half a century ago—on September 11, 1963—the New York Times published a piece by David Halberstam that would, together with the rest of Halberstam's reportage from Southeast Asia, earn him the Pulitzer Prize a year later.

“The Buddhist Crisis in Vietnam: A Collision of Religion, World Politics and Pride” examines the conflict between the U.S.-backed government of South Vietnam, which was dominated by the country's Catholic aristocracy, and an increasingly militant and politicized movement of Buddhists, whose cause grabbed international attention when a respected senior monk set himself on fire at a busy Saigon intersection three months before Halberstam filed his story.

What makes Halberstam's article worth revisiting is not only his thorough sourcing within both the government of Ngo Dinh Diem and the Buddhist movement but also his clear-eyed analysis of the forces at play in the unfolding drama.

“What caused the Buddhist crisis?” Halberstam wonders, along with his reader. “How political was it? What were the issues? What went wrong? First, the Buddhist protest, observers say, could not have taken place unless the climate for some sort of dissent had been ripe, unless there had been deep and latent dissatisfaction in many areas of the country. Second, the lasting impact of the crisis will not stem from who was right and who was wrong…but from how the Government handled events.”

We learn that the country's minority Catholic government, bolstered and emboldened by the American aid it was receiving to support its war against communist insurgents from North Vietnam, had become increasingly unresponsive to the desires of the Buddhist majority.  In March 1963, the government denied a request to fly the Buddhist flag in Hue, the seat of Vietnamese Buddhism, on the Buddha's birthday. Subsequent protests in that city drew thousands to the streets, and the government broke up the demonstration by firing into the crowd, killing nine.

Over the next few months, the U.S. attempted to broker a settlement, which ultimately satisfied no one, and the Ngo government's increasingly brutal acts of suppression transformed the younger Buddhist clergy into an organized resistance movement.

“[The protest] was a complicated force,” Halberstam concludes. “It was in small part Buddhist against Catholic; it was in much larger part the protest of a large segment of the people who happened to be Buddhist against an authoritarian Government that happened to be Catholic-dominated. It was also, in small part, have-nots protesting against haves; it was in much larger part 20th-century Asians protesting against older Asians molded from a mandarin past.”

What lessons does Halberstam's reporting on the nexus of religion, politics and hubris in Southeast Asia offer those of us who are attempting to make sense of an increasingly politicized, conservative Protestant-dominated movement against Islam, both here in the U.S. and abroad? Again, the first strength of “The Buddhist Crisis in Vietnam” is its humanizing of both the Ngo government and the opposition by thorough sourcing. A number of recent articles have offered a counterweight to abstractions about Muslims and Islam by illuminating the efforts of American Muslims to be seen as they really are. Several exemplary pieces look at an impromptu PR campaign at the Minnesota State Fair; a video project depicting Muslims in everyday life; an Islamic charity drive in Detroit; and the lost Muslim culture of the Twin Towers.

More difficult to find are pieces on our current moment that match Halberstam's careful delineation of the forces, interests and policies—both Vietnamese and American—that hardened the Ngo government and radicalized the country's Buddhist clergy. Jane Mayer's New Yorker profile of the Koch brothers and their connections to the Tea Party movement points the way, but it remains to be seen whether her example will be followed by others in the mainstream media.

We should hope so. Understanding who profits from stoking the animus some Americans feel toward Muslims and Islam will only become more important should conservatives, as expected, gain control of one or both houses of Congress in November. To paraphrase Halberstam's conclusion, the lasting impact of our supposed Muslim crisis will have less to do with who's right or wrong than with how our government handles events from here on out.

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.

by Judith Weisenfeld

One of the summer's big political stories involved conservative activist Andrew Brietbart's selective editing of a video of USDA employee Shirley Sherrod speaking before an NAACP meeting. Sherrod recounted how, in the course of her work with struggling farmers, she was awakened to the need to move beyond an often violent history of race relations and recognize other forms of solidarity across racial lines.

In Brietbart's hands, a speech about a profound moral transformation became a racist screed against whites. And, broadcast repeatedly on conservative media outlets, the edited version of Sherrod's words acquired the power of truth.

Yael Hersonski takes up similar questions about images and the fragility of authenticity in her work A Film Unfinished, which premiered recently in New York City. Hersonski examines film footage made by the Nazis in Warsaw in 1942, partially edited into a 62-minute documentary and then deposited in a vault to remain forgotten for over a decade. Once rediscovered, the wrenching scenes of Jewish suffering helped the unfinished film quickly achieve the status of an authoritative representation of life in the Warsaw Ghetto. Portions of the Nazi footage were incorporated into post-war documentaries about the atrocities of the Holocaust.

In 1998, however, the discovery of two additional reels from the same film project called into question the documentary nature of the Nazis' intentions. The newly discovered material revealed that the filmmakers had staged their “documentary,” shot multiple takes and compelled starving Ghetto internees to appear before the camera. While the exact purpose and intended audience for the Nazi film remain unknown, the filmmakers' placement of some internees in scenes of luxury was undoubtedly aimed at arguing that wealthy Jews were indifferent to the suffering of their fellow Jews.

Hersonski thus dismantles the apparatus of authenticity that has long surrounded the Nazi film, raising questions about whether footage of suffering taken by perpetrators can credibly represent victims' experiences and exploring how media constructions of the past shape contemporary spectatorship.

A Film Unfinished also challenges those interested in media to consider the functions of images of religion in documentaries. In this case, the Nazi filmmakers staged a number of religious rituals, including a funeral not in keeping with Jewish practice, the circumcision of a starving infant and men and women immersing themselves in a ritual bath. In a review in Heeb magazine, “Jewdar” wonders whether the goal of including these scenes “ultimately wasn't propaganda but anthropology–the Nazis making a video record of the quaint customs and rituals of what were supposed to be Europe's last Jews in their natural habitat.”

The victims themselves thought otherwise. One observer of the making of the project noted in a diary that, once the ghetto residents were ordered to participate in these staged rituals, he knew definitively that no good could come of the film. In staging the religious scenes and filming them through an exoticizing lens, the Nazis positioned their filmic construction of Judaism as a component of their argument for Jewish depravity.

A Film Unfinished reminds us not only of the often fraught nature of documentary truth, but also of the particular power of representations of religious life. In a piece on Hersonski's film in Senses of Cinema, Bérénice Reynaud leaves us with the hopeful interpretation that the unwilling participants' failure to “correct” the Nazi stagings of Jewish ritual was a message to the future, that “the inhabitants of the Warsaw ghetto made it possible for us, now, to know with certainty that this scene was nothing but an instance of Nazi propaganda.”

This underscores our responsibility to be attentive to such messages in other “documentary” productions, particularly given the current media context. The intense repetition of crafted stories, as in the case of the edited version of Shirley Sherrod's speech, makes it difficult but all the more vital to challenge their distortion of the truth.

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).

Is our president a Muslim? Of course not. But rather than state the obvious, news outlets spent the summer ballyhooing polls, surveys and interviews that reveal 25 percent of Americans may be, at best, benighted, and, at worst, bespelled by malevolent pundits, politicos and talk-show hosts. Journalists reported this story as if it were legitimate news. Instead they could do their real job—informing the public in service of the democratic process by tracking down the roots of this canard and explaining whose interests are served by its circulation. Ann Rodgers of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette gives some helpful context.

How big will Republicans win in November? According to the news media, the midterm election is the hottest race since Secretariat won the Triple Crown. But casting the upcoming vote as win or lose referendum on the president, the Democrats or even the Tea Party misses the forest for the trees. What are Americans most worried about? Why do so many seem more concerned about local mosques than shuttered factories, home foreclosures and failing public schools? Instead of sniggering coverage of the Democrats' imminent demise, journalists could deliver some on-the-ground reporting on what's at stake for voters. The Washington Post has some places to start.  

How soon will the Mideast talks fail? Ever since Mahmoud Abbas and Benjamin Netanyahu shook hands at the White House, the press corps has been handicapping the collapse of the peace process. In a clarifying interview, JJ Goldberg, a senior columnist for The Forward (full disclosure: also a friend) suggested that instead of treating this latest meet-up as the same-old, same-old, reporters would do well to look at the context for current talks and the changes made by both sides over the past 30-plus years.

These cases all reek of the misguided assumptions and outmoded protocols of a flailing industry. It's easy to forget that a good story well told is drama enough. Reporters don't set out to tell misleading stories or to sensationalize the news, but the industry's current logic of hits, clicks and eyeballs can bend coverage. Similarly, newsrooms' valorization of an antiquated and questionable notion objectivity—source A cries foul, source B says fair, file your copy and move on—produces seemingly even-handed coverage that tends to favor the party with the biggest megaphone and/or the deepest pockets.

Finally, news, by definition, is what's new this minute. But the present is shaped by the past—a fact trumped by shrinking news holes and short attention spans. As an alternative to ignoring the impact of what's gone before, JJ Goldberg suggested that news outlets reporting on the current Mideast peace talks use graphics and time-lines to illuminate the conflict's history and illustrate how the two sides' positions have changed over time.

In a recent interview, Jay Rosen, NYU journalism professor and press critic, summed up the news industry's biggest problem: “Change is too expensive; the status quo is unsustainable.” Maybe so, but sweeping pronouncements don't allow for the possibilities of small interventions. Graphics, interpretative journalism and shoe leather won't solve all the industry's problems, but they can help journalists find a way forward.

Diane Winston

by John Adams

In just a couple of years, a significant portion of the American public has moved from questioning the patriotism of Barack Obama's pastor (and, by implication, the patriotism of candidate Obama) to wondering whether President Obama is, to turn a phrase, really a Muslim in Christian clothing. In fact, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life recently published the results of a recent survey showing that one-in-five Americans believes the president is Muslim–which dovetails with another poll indicating that only 30 percent of Americans have a favorable opinion of Islam.

These findings are hardly shocking if you watch any amount of news programming or the occasional reality TV show. People have an enormous capacity for delusional thinking and the media are more than willing to give them a platform “to shine.” But do the media, specifically the sports media, move beyond providing a platform for shallow opinions to perpetuating the ideas of a narrow segment of the American public?

Enter Tim Tebow. Tebow, an outspoken Christian athlete, became a media darling while in college and used his stardom to promote his Christian values and message; the sports media were more than willing to oblige. Tebow's glare-guard, which displayed a different Bible verse each week, was the often the focus of the camera's gaze during games, and his anti-abortion commercial during the Superbowl was the most talked-about spot of the night. 

ESPN's “Tebow Watch” showcases his every move during preseason, and his jersey is the #1 seller in NFL, though he's only a third-string quarterback for the Denver Broncos. Why does any of this matter?  Because it makes me wonder whether this “over-coverage” would be given to Tebow if he were a Muslim athlete.
 
Consider the type of coverage dedicated to religious topics in sports. The three biggest religious stories in the sporting world are: Ben Roethlisberger finding Jesus, Glen Coffee turning his back on big money to serve God and Amare Stoudemire finding his Jewish roots. All these stories shine a positive light on the widely accepted Jewish and Christian traditions.

Roethlisberger was cleared of all charges stemming from a night during which he bought drinks for an underage girl and had sex with her in the bathroom of the bar where they were drinking. He was subsequently accused of sexual assault. How does one recover from a PR disaster like this?  See: “Roethlisberger Turns To God.“

2010 was supposed to be the breakout year for the 49ers Glen Coffee. He went into training camp in great shape and ready for big things. But he took an early exit from the league after just two seasons because, as he said, “God Told Me To Follow Him.” Most journalists conveniently overlooked the fact that Coffee and Coach Mike Singletary were consistently at odds.

Amare Stoudemire discovered that his mother had Jewish roots and so, in an effort to understand Judaism, he took off on a trek to Israel. Stories popped up all over the sporting world, but SportsIllustrated.com's piece on “Prominent Jewish Athletes” was the most interesting. I don't have a problem with SI's photo-gallery story, but when you search for the “Prominent Muslim Athletes,” you find nothing that remotely compares to the sympathetic and even laudatory coverage afforded to Tebow, Coffee and Stoudemire.

The typical stories of Muslim athletes are about the things that amplify the otherness of Islam: the problem of fasting during Ramadan (which will become an issue when the 2012 Olympic Games roll into London); young athletes' refusal to compete against Israel; and cheerleaders' having to dress modestly. All of these stories are written in an argumentative, negative tone.

This sampling of stories suggests that sports media cast “acceptable” religious beliefs in a positive light and readily allow the shadow of controversy to fall on Muslim athletes and their faith. Regardless of whether we're covering politics, the arts, economics or sports, journalists need to be aware of the biases that can creep into our stories. We can easily remedy the negative feedback loop between public opinion and careless media coverage by telling the whole story with depth and clarity.

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.