by Rhonda Roumani

Amid the ongoing drama around Park51 and Glenn Beck's stagey MLK moment at the Lincoln Memorial, you may have missed New Gingrich's recent address at the American Enterprise Institute. The former Speaker of the House subtly played on the Tea Party emotionalism of the events in Washington, DC and lower Manhattan to set the scene for a new menace to America. In a talk ostensibly about national security, he warned of the dangers of sharia—the complex and widely varying body of social custom based on the Quran and Islamic tradition which governs national life in some Muslim societies and that often shapes community life in places where Islam is a minority religion.

“The fight against sharia and the maddrassas and mosques which teach hatred and fanaticism is the heart of the enemy movement from which the terrorists spring forth,” Gingrich said. “And it's time we had a national debate on this. One of the things I am going to suggest today is a federal law which says no court anywhere in the United States under any circumstance is allowed to consider sharia as a replacement for American law.”

Warning against the presence of Islamic law in its “stealth form,” Gingrich, who has been mentioned as a possible candidate for president in 2012, skillfully set up what he called “creeping sharia” as America's next bogeyman and positioned himself and his party up as the force best equipped to defeat it. This is a tactic that politicians have used for decades—create your own imaginary threat in order to become the hero who will vanquish an enemy spun from shadows and fog. And Gingrich's choice is shrewd: in the United States these days, the lack of clear-eyed information about Islam is matched with a widespread and easily manipulated fear of anything Islamic.

Our mistake as journalists is to allow ourselves to become the unwitting mouthpieces for politicians who want to play on this combination of ignorance and fear. Rather than simply reporting on assertions like the ones in Gingrich's speech, journalists need to provide their audiences with accurate information about sharia and the likelihood (or patent absurdity) of claims that Islamic law could be imposed in the U.S. Specifically, the fact that sharia is subject to a wide range of interpretations–including the non-legalistic idea that it is simply a path for living a life more in keeping with God's will–is important to highlight.

But rather than tracking down sources and presenting objective information, journalists are mainly sitting on their hands, even as protesters at the proposed site of Park51 loft placards with the word “sharia” drawn in script meant to resemble dripping blood.

The last good reportage on sharia appeared in an article by Noah Feldman in the New York Times Magazine in 2008. Simply titled, “Why Sharia?” Feldman's piece described the origins of sharia, how it has changed in modern times and how it often means something completely different in Muslim societies than it does in our own. It has been inexplicably difficult to find a comparable attempt to explain sharia since the latest wave of anti-Muslim sentiment began to crest a few weeks ago.

So, fellow journalists, what is sharia? Who if anyone is proposing that it should govern life in the U.S.? Is it reasonable to say that shadowy factions are seeking to impose it here? Or is it more likely that politicians who are promoting this view are seeking their own gain (and the demise of their political opponents)? There was a time when these would have been obvious questions. They are obvious questions. Ask them; otherwise, we risk becoming little more than propagandists for Gingrich and others who would use our timidity to their advantage.

by Dalia Hashad

While the news media have been covering (and often stoking) the drama around Park51, the proposed Islamic cultural center in lower Manhattan, a peculiar revisionist narrative keeps popping up: George W. Bush as a defender of Muslims.

There had been hints of it here and there, but what really knocked me out of my seat was  Maureen Dowd's New York Times column praising Bush's supposedly sagacious distinction between terrorists and the majority of Muslims:

The war against the terrorists is not a war against Islam. In fact, you can't have an effective war against the terrorists if it is a war on Islam. George W. Bush understood this… It's time for W. to weigh in. This…was one of his points of light. As the man who twice went to war in the Muslim world, he has something of an obligation to add his anti-Islamophobia to this mosque madness. W. needs to get his bullhorn back out.

True, Bush talked a blue streak about how his “war on terror” was not a war against Islam. The former president famously visited the Islamic Center of Washington, DC within a week of the 9/11 attacks to broadcast his message: “The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That's not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace.”

Dowd is not the only prominent journalist waxing nostalgic for Bush's rhetoric about Islam and Muslims. In fact, many well-meaning commentators are taking this bizarrely wistful–and forgetful–trip down memory lane.  

Daily Beast senior political writer Peter Beinert confessed, “Words I never thought I'd write: I pine for George W. Bush. Whatever his flaws, the man respected religion, all religion.” CNN anchor John Roberts added his voice to the chorus: “[T]he Bush administration…said again and again and again, this is not a war against Islam; it's a war against terrorists.” And in an online chat, Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson yearned for a Bush intervention, saying that he “would love to hear from former president Bush on this issue. He held Ramadan iftar dinners in the White House as part of a much broader effort to show that our fight against the al-Qaeda murderers who attacked us on 9/11 was not a crusade against Islam.”

Yes, the Bush White House hosted Ramadan dinners. But getting the full story entails looking beyond our previous president's words to his actions. This supposed paragon of tolerance also had innocent Muslims around the globe kidnapped and sent to secret CIA prisons where they were tortured. Why are so many savvy journalists willingly blurring the distinction between PR and actual policy?

Let's get this straight: Bush wasn't a great protector of everyday Muslims. Quite the opposite was the case. His administration presided over what was, undoubtedly, the most aggressively hostile period of political repression for Muslims in American history. While he was in front of the cameras singing Kumbaya at the mosque, his administration was rounding up thousands of innocent Muslims not just abroad but right here in America (see the story in Dave Egger's Zeitoun, for example) and throwing them into detention and subjecting them to interrogation without any evidence of criminal wrongdoing.

Far from being the halcyon days of many journalists' faulty imagining, the Bush years were nightmarish for many Muslims in the U.S. The lawful, peaceful practice of their religion could and did result in government monitoring, harassment, detention, deportation and even torture. In short, the friendly facade of the Bush administration masked an ugly collection of behaviors and attitudes that amounted to the de facto criminalization of the Muslim faith.

Bush's hypocritical insistence that he made a distinction between terrorists and peaceful adherents to Islam set the stage for the current atmosphere of rampant Islamaphobia. Specifically, people came to expect that those ensnared in the Bush administration's national security practices were not innocent Muslims, but people who posed a real threat to the nation. A decade of not-so-secret domestic surveillance and harassment in the name of “the war on terror” has thus accomplished what Bush professed to abhor: a blurring of the distinction between average Muslims and terrorists bent on doing violence to Americans.  

Now, with politicians emboldened to express their distrust of Muslims freely, even the shallow niceties of Bush's rhetoric have been pretty much abandoned by the Republican party. This discarding of the temporary facade of even-handed tolerance isn't so much a change in political philosophy as it is the natural evolution of the previous administration's Islamaphobia. The broad acceptance of the false narrative that Bush was a champion of Muslim Americans overlooks the critical truth that he shares the blame for creating the current atmosphere in which it is acceptable to hate Muslims openly. What journalists are missing, and what is so important to remember, is that the Bush administration led us to this unhappy, dangerous place.

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.

by J. Terry Todd

New York City's Fringe International Festival is a two-week extravaganza of experimental theater held annually during the last two weeks of August. Now in its 14th year, the Festival serves up everything from drag performance to quirky re-stagings of Shakespeare. At the Fringe, nothing is off limits. In the shadow of continuing national debates about Park51 / Cordoba House near Ground Zero in New York, a number of works at the Festival explore Muslim subjects in ways that disrupt our all-too-predictable “national conversations” about religion, ethnicity, race, immigration, terrorism and violence.

Take, for example, “For Kingdom and Fatherland,” Shabana Rehman's one-woman show that debuted at this year's Fringe. Rehman, a Pakistani-Norwegian stand-up comic who counts Margaret Cho and Sarah Silverman among her influences, invites us along on her search for home. The performance ranges from Karachi, where she was born, to Oslo, where she immigrated with her family, then on to New York, where she moved after someone pumped 18 bullets through the windows of her family's restaurant in Oslo, apparently in retaliation for Rehman's comic skewering of aspects of Muslim life in Europe. 

There's also the “mullah-lifting” incident, as Rehman calls it. Back in 2004, when one of the leaders of Iraq's Ansar al-Islam visited Norway to promote his new book, Rehman challenged the cleric to a “fundamentalist test,” surprising and infuriating the mullah by clutching his waist and lifting him off the floor. (She later told the New York Times, ''If a small woman like me can lift him up, he can't be dangerous.”) 

That stunt made Rehman a target of criticism from many European Muslim leaders and also from some liberal academics, who claimed she reinforced stereotypes of Muslims just to get a laugh.  In “For Kingdom and Fatherland,” as Rehman stands on stage amid piles of stacked baggage, we get to hear her own very compelling story, the story of a Muslim woman determined to find  humor in the dislocations and contradictions of this absurd and disturbing time and place. It's one woman's life as a challenge to all varieties of fundamentalism.

Another one-woman show at the Fringe is “Driving the Saudis,” Jayne Amelie Larson's very smart and very funny multimedia production exploring the connections between power, privilege, women's experience and religious practice, staged first in LA and then in Memphis before arriving at the Fringe Festival last week. 

A number of years ago, Larson landed a gig as a chauffeur for a Saudi princess and her retinue during the royal's seven-week stay in a Beverly Hills hotel. Larson has fashioned the stories she collected into riveting theater, with sharp insights into the emotional wounds of women seemingly unable to escape their fate, either as wealthy royals or as their servants. The extravagant shopping excursions down Rodeo Drive, the trips to plastic surgeons for Botox and buttock implants as well as various other absurdist situations are contrasted with the experiences of the chambermaids and nannies who work for the princess and her family.

Larson connects the dots between our own appetite for oil–which fuels this orgy of getting and spending–and thus turns the mirror as much on us as on the Saudi women. And she shows how religious faith–in this case, Islam–offers both shackles and liberation for women.

I have no expectation that the fiercely witty and sometimes caustic artistic interventions of Rehman's “For Kingdom and Fatherland” and Larsen's “Driving the Saudis” will somehow jump from the marginal stages (or from reviews on the back pages of the arts section) and into greater public consciousness. That would provide just the jolt we need to shift our stale religio-political debates from the frightening fantasy realm favored by right-wingers into the living, breathing reality that most of us–that, in truth, all of us–actually inhabit.

But it's probably not going to happen. For one thing, I'm aware of the danger, for the literal-minded, that these productions (and others like them) can reinforce the very claims about Islam that ricochet through the legacy- and new-media echo chambers in this anxious moment in time. Still, for ambitious journalists who continue to nurture a sense of public service in their work, there's a lot to be gained from taking a look at how artists–the tricksters and wise fools of every era–are interpreting the most contentious issues of our moment in history. The upside to risking the ire of a reactionary audience is the prospect that, for perhaps the first time, a few more people may see Muslims (or gays or African-Americans or whomever) not as a scary, threatening mass but as a group of individuals not so very different from themselves.

* * * * * *

J. Terry Todd is Associate Professor of American Religious Studies at Drew University and director of Drew's Center on Religion, Culture & Conflict. The author of many articles on religion in 20th-century America, Terry is especially interested in religious conflicts over family life and sexuality, and how Christian ideas and practices shape U.S. politics and mass media.
 

William Dalyrmple's opinion piece on the Islamic cultural center slated to be built near the site of the Twin Towers should put journalists and fellow travelers (that is, all of us) to shame.

“Many of us are perfectly capable of making distinctions within the Christian world,” Dalrymple writes. “The fact that someone is a Boston Roman Catholic doesn't mean he is in league with Irish Republican Army bomb-makers, just as not all Orthodox Christians have ties to Serbian war criminals or Southern Baptists to the murder or abortion doctors. Yet many of our leaders have a tendency to see the Islamic world as a single terrifying monolith.”

All good here–except I would add pundits and reporters to the “terrifying monolith” roster along with leaders. This past weekend, CNN anchor Don Lemon displayed just such tendencies in an interview with Eboo Patel, the executive director of the Interfaith Youth Corps.

Americans' seeming inability or unwillingness to comprehend ethnic, sectarian and regional differences within Islam—as well as its followers' widely varied perspectives on jurisprudence (or the path to a faithful life)—makes life somewhat easier for us or, at least, less complicated. Yet that tidy, incurious worldview becomes a problem when changes occur on the ground and news consumers aren't equipped to gauge their significance. The campaign to build the cultural center in lower Manhattan represents one such change; according to Dalyrmple, Feisal Abdul Rauf, the center's Sufi organizer, preaches love and reconciliation. His worst offense may be sounding “slightly New Age-y.”

Just as Rauf's vision of an intercultural center places Islam in the heart of Manhattan as both a witness and a response to the 9/11 tragedy, Muslims elsewhere are experimenting with ways to engage religion with everyday life. In Malaysia, the summer breakout TV hit was Imam Muda. A religious cousin to “American Idol,” the show featured ten contestants seeking to win a talent search for the best religious leader. The men took written tests and performed pastoral duties, including marriage counseling, preparing a corpse for burial and reaching out to young people. According to the show's producers, Muslims are looking for imams “who can be one of us, an imam who can play football, can talk about the World Cup, can talk about the environment and UFOs.”

Another attempt to put Islam in tune with everyday life is 4Shbab, Egypt's answer to MTV. A recent New York Times piece describes the show as “MTV without the gratuitous gyrations and skin, and with videos about family, public service, Palestine and, above all, salvation.” Reporter Negar Azimi explains that the show is part of a trend to span the gap between decadent Americans and Puritanical mullahs by using Islamic restaurants, water parks and entertainment centers to make religion relevant to youth.

Will 4Shbab's competition—”Who Wants to be An Islamic Popstar?”—ultimately change hearts and minds? Can an Islamic cultural center near Ground Zero offer alternatives to the conflict narrative that sets the news agenda and increasingly shapes Americans' view of the world? Hard to know. But unless these initiatives are reported fairly and thoroughly, there's little chance that Americans will understand that Islam isn't the enemy

Diane Winston

by Andrea Tabor

Women's longboard champion Joy Monahan isn't endorsing swimwear or board wax. In her latest promotional spot, she's selling Mormonism.

Last week, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints launched a commercial campaign with one simple mission: to show non-Mormon America that Mormons are “normal.” In contrast to Big Love's high-collared sister-wife Nicki Grant, Monahan is sporty, hip and Hawaiian. Almost as an afterthought, she mentions, “I'm a Mormon.”

The ad campaign has really confused the pundits, both on the right and left. Reaching nine mid-sized American cities, several of which are in potential swing states, the spot had Salon.com and Fox News smelling Mitt Romney in the mix. But the scent of presidential politics could be throwing journalists off the trail of a much more interesting story.

Monahan's commercial, and the others like it, are running in conjunction with a redesigned missionary website, Mormon.org. Unlike a typical PR site, which would feature ample opportunities for visitors to “sign up for more information,” Mormon.org is a social network. Church brass are encouraging rank-and-file Mormons (along with higher profile believers like Monahan, they hope) to create Mormon.org profiles and volunteer to be contacted by non-Mormons who want to learn about their faith.

For faith outsiders, the site doesn't require registration. Users can search for Mormons based on gender, age, ethnicity, location and previous religion. (Some search parameters, like “African-American male in his 50s,” yield few—if any—results.) They can then connect with Mormons via Facebook, read their blogs or follow them on Twitter. In other words, the real social interaction takes place elsewhere on the Web, with Mormon.org as the starting point.

According to church officials, the profiles of individual Mormons aren't edited by site moderators. Members respond to questions about their personal faith experience, including touchy doctrinal questions like, “Why did your church previously practice plural marriage (polygamy)?” and “Do Mormons worship Joseph Smith?” and “Why do some people call the Mormon church a cult?”

For a religious institution often described as secretive and closed-off, Mormon.org is a huge step. Another tradition battling those labels is Scientology, which is also mounting a huge TV ad campaign. But while Scientologists were banned from updating their Wikipedia page due to abuse and have tried to silence negative tweets about the movement, Mormons in leadership positions appear to be embracing social media, even if it means giving up a measure of control over their message.

The potential PR and missionary liabilities that come with trusting average members to respond to sensitive doctrinal questions are already apparent. For example, one profile reads, “The reason why plural marriage was practice [sic] among the early saints of the church was because God instructed us to. One can look back and say this and that about how plural marriage benefited those people, but regardless how unpopular a commandment may seem we must follow it to receive the blessings He has for us.” A young woman writes, “Mormon women are very traditional in the sense that they believe that their primary role is found in the home.”

Those might not be the messages that LDS leaders want potential Mormons to hear.

Although Mormon officials are hoping that millions of member-profiles will be added to Mormon.org, the true impact of the campaign remains to be seen. After all, the average Web 2.0-savvy Twitter user probably isn't interested in a visit from a Mormon missionary. And once the site does fill up with profiles, the church's diversity problems could become a lot more apparent.

What does all of this mean for reporters? Just a little digging through the profiles on Mormon.org offers an amazing opportunity to get to a fresh perspective on this difficult-to-cover religion—and to go beyond the pre-packaged statements of church leaders or the sterile numbers yielded by surveys. And the site itself is a developing story well worth watching.

Andrea Tabor earned a Master's degree in journalism from USC Annenberg in 2008. She currently works in social media and web content development in Los Angeles.

by Richard Flory & Brie Loskota

The sky is falling and apparently it's taking organized religion with it.

That's the take-away message in a recent Los Angeles Times opinion piece by William Lobdell. Starting with novelist Anne Rice's defection from the Catholic Church (or more accurately, her most recent defection) and then citing evidence from recent Pew Forum surveys charting the uptick in the number of religiously unaffiliated, Lobdell proclaims that not only is Christianity in America “not well” but that “its condition is more critical than most realize—or at least want to admit.”

Lobdell—a former LA Times religion reporter and himself a convert to, and from, a number Christian denominations—concludes that “many people who call themselves Christian don't really believe, deep down, in the tenets of their faith. In other words, their actions reveal their true beliefs.”

These bold assertions about the dominant religion in the U.S. give us an opportunity to explore how journalists use surveys to bolster the stories they tell. “If it bleeds it leads,” as the old saying goes, but these days we might well add, “It only matters if you can measure it,” or maybe, “If you can't quantify, you must modify.”

Numbers and statistics can seem undeniably authoritative, but journalists—who are supposed to question everything—have to look not only at the agenda of the purveyors of the statistics they report but also at the trends hiding behind the headlines in the press releases. Case in point: a recently published book titled Sex, Drugs, and Body Counts: The Politics of Numbers in Global Crime and Conflict (reviewed here) presents several cautionary tales for journalists, as well as media consumers, about what to trust—or not—in the facts and figures that shape the news.
 
How does this healthy skepticism apply to Lobdell and Rice? Both decry what they see as the hypocrisy of religious leaders as one of the reasons that Christianity in peril. Lobdell writes that Rice is leaving the Catholic fold “in the name of Christ” for a spiritual path of her own because she is “unable to reconcile the Gospel message with religious institutions covered with man's dirty fingerprints.”

A 2009 Pew survey of religious conversion and affiliation does note that those who leave religious traditions are often disaffected, in part, by what they call religious hypocrisy. Still, it's hardly news that many believers consider their faith a private matter and keep institutional authority at arm's length. And if you probe a little deeper, you can find data in the Pew survey that undermines the hypocrisy thesis. For example, only 2 percent of former Catholics cited  the most egregious acts of institutional betrayal—sexual abuse by clergy and other authority figures—as the main reason for their becoming unaffiliated.

What's missing from much of the reporting based on surveys from Pew and other organizations is a sense of historical perspective. The stories told by Rice and Lobdell in many ways mirror the broad arc of American Christianity, which can be characterized as an ongoing process of affiliation, un-affiliation and re-affiliation, whether from Catholicism to Protestantism or between different Protestant denominations or to completely novel religious movements.

Ironically, the 2009 Pew study reveals that people raised as “religious nones” have the highest re-affiliation rate of any major religious group; most eventually join an established religious tradition. The study goes on to show that “among both those who were raised Catholic and Protestant who are now unaffiliated, for example, roughly one-in-three say they just have not found the right religion yet.”

This suggests that the real story may not be about the decline of Christianity (or other traditions) but, rather, that the real American religion—Radical Individualism—continues to thrive in the current spiritual landscape. As journalists work to make sense of emerging religious trends at home and around the world, they should remember that statistics are at best a snapshot; they rarely capture the whole scene or tell the whole tale.

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).

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 Nick Street

The conflict narrative that often shapes reporting on religion and public life is readily apparent in current coverage of a pair of live-wire stories: the recent ruling against the constitutionality of California's Proposition 8 and the announcement that lawyers from Pat Robertson's American Center for Law and Justice have sued to prevent the construction of a mosque near Ground Zero in lower Manhattan.

While the he-said-she-said template serves as a handy receptacle for sharp sound-bites, it also tends to obscure complexity and favor the perspective of sources who are most eager to polarize the story. Sexuality, Islam and the perennial tensions between religion and science arguably generate as much heat as they do not because these topics are inherently controversial but because it serves the political interests of Christian conservatives to stoke controversy around them.

For journalists, the temptation to forgo nuance and analysis also seems especially powerful at a time when most media consumers are acquiring their news of the world through online outlets that tend to tighten rather than loosen the knots of prejudice and ignorance.

What's a conscientious reporter to do?

Chris Mooney—a young science journalist who blogs for Discover and whose writing for Seed, Mother Jones, The Nation and The American Prospect has earned him wide acclaim—is in some respects an unlikely exemplar of new-media nonpartisanship.  His first book, The Republican War on Science, took aim at the second Bush administration's skepticism and outright hostility toward the scientific establishment on issues ranging from climate change and space exploration to stem cell research and education policy.

Mooney, who's also the host of “Point of Inquiry“—a podcast in which secular-humanist thinkers and writers air their opinions on religion, ethics and challenges to Western empiricism—recently filed his third and final Discover blog-post chronicling his experience as a Templeton-Cambridge Fellow in Science and Religion. A dozen fellows are selected for each summer's gathering at Cambridge University, where they attend seminars and public lectures by an impressive array of scholars and public intellectuals.  The program is one of several similar ventures, including the lucrative Templeton Prize and the recently launched website Big Questions Online, funded by the deep pockets of the Templeton Foundation.

Did Mooney uncover the theological agenda and heavy-handed proselytizing that other secular-humanists claim to see in Templeton's spreading of largesse? “Critics depict the fellowship as a kind of Kumbaya love-fest in which journalists are taught that science and religion have always been and always will be best friends,” Mooney writes. “However, I've grown increasingly convinced that this critique really isn't aimed at the target.”

Specifically, Mooney observes that “the details of various theologies are hardly the dominant aspect of what we're hearing about. And even when it comes to theology, I still see great value in the clarification of religious concepts, and in learning what the most thoughtful believers actually think and argue, and why.”

Echoing fellow journalist Nathan Schneider, who examined the organization's influence in a recent article for The Nation, Mooney concludes, “[T]o claim this fellowship is some kind of religious Trojan horse strikes me as pretty untenable.”

What lessons does Mooney's experience offer other journalists? First, the proliferation of unapologetically opinionated bloggers as authorities on the news doesn't mean that careful analysis of the facts is going the way of the dinosaurs. Just as the journalistic conventions that anchored the profession a decade ago have had to shift (or crumble) to accommodate new-media realities, the freewheeling culture of the blogosphere will have to adapt (or die) when the next really big crisis—environmental, economic or political—persuades enough consumers that they need a relatively objective source of information on the events of the day.

Second, and more pointedly, Mooney's probing of his fellow humanists' assumptions about Templeton commends a practice that many journalists in the mainstream media seem to have forgotten when it comes to reporting on stories related to religious belief: push your sources to explain or justify the positions they take. The ruling against Prop 8 and Christian conservatives' move to block the construction of a mosque near Ground Zero both beg for just this kind of aggressive storytelling.

If Mooney is willing to have his biases tweaked, surely the opponents of Islam and same-sex marriage can survive a similar experience.   

Nick Street is a freelance writer living in Los Angeles.

As if we really needed a reminder, a recent Pew study confirms that over the past decade the surge in new media has caused the old economic foundations of journalism to crumble, even as the call for consumable content has grown more urgent. We know the impact that's had on what we report and how we write, but we've been slower to comprehend how these reverberations influence newsmakers. The 24/7 news cycle—as well as the explosion of news and gossip sites—gives a whole new meaning to public life. Whether they're politicians or pundits, authors or actors, prominent cultural personalities are changing what they share and how they share it. When the topic's religion, that may either mean tightly controlling information about one's most cherished beliefs or simply letting it rip.

Mitt Romney and fellow Mormon politician Jon Huntsman have chosen the former path, according to an article in the Deseret News (the hometown newspaper of the LDS church, which also owns the paper in a for-profit business holding company). Since a new poll showed the former Massachusetts governor as the strongest GOP presidential contender, church members—as Deseret readers tend to be—are interested in how he will deal with the religion question. Recall that evangelical opposition doomed Romney's 2008 campaign. Back then, Romney addressed the faith issue head-on and tried making nice with conservative Christians. But he was unable to win their trust. If he runs again, he won't even try. “There are just some people for whom it won't be settled,” Romney recently told the Boston Globe. “That's just the nature of who we are as a people.”  

The Deseret story quotes a Mormon political science professor who says Mormonism is a “big handicap” for politicians. That may explain why Huntsman, a former Utah governor and another 2008 Republican hopeful, is taking a more aggressive tack. Although his father is an active LDS church member, Huntsman has let it be known that his children attend Catholic school and his adopted daughters come from Buddhist and Hindu cultures. “I can't say I'm overly religious,” Huntsman told CNNMoney.com. That strategy might make sense in a general election, but Huntsman may be cutting off his nose to spite his face with the Republican base. Yet even as Romney and Huntsman try to distance themselves from the political liability of their Mormon faith, their success in doing so is tempered by the hundreds of articles and blogs reporting and analyzing the news, speculating on its meaning and waiting for the next gotcha moment.

Of course, religion and politics make a combustible mix, but who knew religion, politics and literature could be equally volatile? Last week, author Anne Rice, whose renewed commitment to Catholicism was ballyhooed just a few years back, wrote on her Facebook page that that she was quitting Christianity. Rice isn't quitting Christ; she just wanted to disassociate herself from his homophobic, anti-intellectual and right-wing adherents.

Rice's online rant generated 350-plus articles and as many blogs. Evangelical Brian McLaren supports her (with some caveats); crunchy con Rod Dreher disparages her and Andrew Sullivan, the contrarian pundit who quit the conservative movement for reasons similar to Rice's concerns about organized religion, appreciates Dreher's critique but understands Rice's frustration.

What's the impact of playing out religious convictions in the media, especially at the scale, level and intensity now possible? Insofar as it makes news consumers savvier about religion's role in our collective lives, smarter about religious creeds and concepts and less likely to be manipulated by frauds, demagogues and scoundrels—it's all to the good. But being the focus of media attention usually entails playing by the media's rules. That tends to mean dumbing down complexity and playing up sex, conflict and sensationalism. That works well for some, but I'm not sure it served the best interests of the political process that Romney wants to change or the religious landscape that Rice would re-envision.

Diane Winston

By J. Terry Todd

Religion isn't the first subject that springs to mind when you think about the San Diego Comic-Con International, the globe's largest annual pop culture klatsch that just wrapped up its 40th season. What started in 1970 as a modest confab for self-described “nerds,” mostly sci-fi and comix fans, has evolved into a sprawling convention covering every aspect of mass media and every genre from anime to 'zines.

Over 150,000 people flooded San Diego's Convention Center for seminars, shopping, and parties, sharing their mutual devotions, dressing up like their heroes and alt personas – vampires, werewolves, zombies, and even old school characters like Yoda and Wonder Woman.   And they came to hang out with the stars.  This year's celebrity roster included, among many others, Will Farrell, Jeff Bridges, Tina Fay, and Angelina Jolie, there to promote her new movie Salt on the flick's opening weekend. 

Where was religion in this mix?  Cast members at the Glee panel dropped teasers for the new season, including word of an episode where Mercedes will take Kurt to church, and someone (Kurt? Mercedes? A duo?) will sing REM's “Losing My Religion.” The most visible Comic-Con religion story was the showdown between fans and a traveling troupe of apocalyptic protesters from Westboro Baptist Church, the congregation best known for its “God Hates Fags” motto and for picketing the funerals of fallen soldiers and people who've died of HIV/AIDS. Although it's not clear why the WBC folks, all four of them, turned up at Comic-Con, other than to warn of impending judgment, they were met by a raucous carnival of counter-protesters, including a robot sporting a “Kill All Humans!” sign. A jolly Jesus was also on hand, in the form of a real-life incarnation of Kevin Smith's Buddy Christ from the 1999 flick Dogma.
 
True, there's nothing particularly newsworthy about the WBC pickets other than the cleverness of the counter-protesters, but there is something notable about Comic-Con itself.   Leave it to the grand old dame of evangelical publications, Christianity Today, to recognize it. As far as I know, CT was the only media outlet to find a religion angle at Comic-Con, referring to it, in a notable turn of phrase, as a “giant pop culture hajj.” On its website it ran a feature about the Rev. Tony Kim, the minister of Newsong, an Irvine California church, whose blog babbleon5 carried the pastor's daily dispatches from Comic-Con. 

What I found fascinating about the CT feature is that Kim (and the CT editors?) seem to have intuitively grasped the similarities between fandom and religion, between “fandom and the kingdom,” according to the article's tag line. “What I think really draws people to Comic-Con,” Pastor Kim said, “are those core ideas and philosophies of a savior, of redemption, of people who are dying for something that's greater than their own cause.”   True, as well, of the corporate sponsors of the event, I wonder, including Disney, Warner Brothers, Universal Pictures, and Showtime? 

Still, Pastor Kim is onto something.  Of course he wants to witness to – and covert – the Comic-Con crowd.  He sees himself as a traveler in a strange land, but a sympathetic visitor who just might make the bridge between his world and theirs, deploying a different variety of superman language he senses Comic-Con fans might just understand.

More to the point, though, is what fandom more generally can tell us about religion.  Is it possible that fandom is a kind of religion?  Or that religion is a kind of fandom? It's not easy to follow this logic, if we think we already know what religion is and where to look for it.  But as Gary Laderman argues in his 2009 book Sacred Matters, there's a superabundance of cultural experience that flies beneath the radar unrecognized under the category “religion,” and if we care to look, we'll find these sacred grooves etched into everything from sports to movies to celebrity culture. Laderman claims – and I think he's right –that looking through a more expansive lens would help us better see the contours of religious life, both in the U.S. and elsewhere as well. 

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J. Terry Todd is Associate Professor of American Religious Studies at Drew University and director of Drew's Center on Religion, Culture & Conflict. The author of many articles on religion in 20th-century America, Terry is especially interested in religious conflicts over family life and sexuality, and how Christian ideas and practices shape U.S. politics and mass media.

Earlier this month, CNN fired Octavia Nasr, its senior editor on Middle Eastern affairs, for tweeting about the death of Lebanese cleric Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, Nasr's tweet said she was “sad” to hear of the cleric's passing and that he was “one of Hezbollah's giants I respect a lot..”

According to an internal memo, Nasr's “credibility” had been “compromised.”

Fadlallah was a complex and controversial figure, who gained notoriety in the U.S. in 1980s because of his alleged ties to the then -nascent militant group Hezbollah. As a Grand Ayatollah, he was Lebanon's highest ranking Shiite cleric, on par with Iran's Grand Ayatollah Ali Khameini. Yet, he's considered more progressive, especially on issues regarding women's rights.

To the US, he was a militant firebrand, a terrorist who condones suicide attacks against Israeli military and someone who supported the 1983 bombings of the US marine barracks in Lebanon. He was, however, also one of the Muslim world's first religious clerics to speak out against the attacks of September 11.

How is it that Nasr, a Christian Arab-American “enlightened” journalist could respect an extremist Shiite cleric? And should that respect be cause for her dismissal?

In other words, is there more to Fadlallah than what more American news consumers are led to believe, and are journalists reporting the whole story on the Middle East's most controversial figures?

Pulitzer prize winner and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman is one of the few high-profiled journalists to defend Nasr. He called Nasr's dismissal “problematic” because of the expertise she brought to her job.

“We also gain a great deal by having an Arabic-speaking, Lebanese-Christian female journalist covering the Middle East for CNN, and if her only sin in 20 years is a 140-character message about a complex figure like Fadlallah, she deserved some slack,” Friedman writes.

Over the years, American journalists have shied away from covering controversial figures in the stories about religion and politics in the Middle East. News organizations are reluctant to stray too far from American foreign policy.  They're equally wary of offending religious groups that support Israel.  As a result, there's a dearth of complex or nuanced coverage of figures like Fadlallah and of the conflict itself. Instead,  most articles written about Fadlallah describe him as “the spiritual leader of Hezbollah” – a title that's misleading if not downright wrong. And, soon enough, that is all we come to know about him. The description catches on and journalists stop asking questions and start repeating the phrases they are hearing around them.

There is a reason why the Arab world has a completely different narrative than the one that we hear here at home. How can a figure like Fadlallah be considered one of the most progressive and respected Shiite clerics in the Arab world and be considered a mere terrorist in the US? There's a disconnect between the two stories and we need to understand the shades in between.

Fadlallah's passing will create a void amongst Lebanon's Shiite community—especially amongst its youth—and may cause a new wave of young people to turn to even more conservative and anti-western figures like Iran's Grand Ayatollah Ali Khameini. And anyone who watches CNN won't know that. In fact, if Lebanon's youth do turn to more conservative or militant leaders in the next ten years, Americans may not know why (we'll think they've always been like that) because the person who might have been able to tell that story no longer works there–busted by tweeting.

Rhonda Roumani is a freelance journalist who has covered Islam and Muslim-related issues both in the U.S. and abroad. She has worked as a correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor and her articles appeared in a number of other publications, including the Washington Post, USA Today, the Washington Times, the Chicago Tribune, Newsday, the Boston Globe, Columbia Journalism Review, the Daily Star, Bitterlemons.org and Beliefnet.com. She has also appeared on radio and television shows such as CNN International, NPR's “All Things Considered” and the Washington Post Radio. Before turning to freelancing, Roumani worked as a reporter for the Beirut-based Daily Star, where she covered Syria and other regional issues.