by Courtney Bender

New York Times readers can safely expect to read about witches every October 31. The only suspense is the angle the reporter will take. Last week, Samuel Freedman came through with a front-page story declaring that Wicca and Paganism are now “just another religion.” Like other American religions, Paganism is expressed in private spirituality, organized in churches and represented on the tombstones of American veterans. And like the adherents of other minority religions, Wiccans have successfully organized to gain “recognition” through the courts and other governmental agencies.

Freedman's story is mild as can be. In fact, it can hardly be said to be “news” at all. So what was it doing on the front page? One answer emerges when we view it in light of last week's other big religion story: Pope Benedict's unexpected invitation to conservative Anglicans to join his fold. This actual news elicited immediate critical response from secular and religious pundits, many of whom viewed the Vatican as fulfilling the prophecy of Lenny Bruce's routine, Religions, Inc. Others, including Catholic and conservative religious critics, argued that the press had gone to far in its criticisms.  

Stepping into the fray in an online column titled “Can we talk about religion?” the Times' “ethicist” Randy Cohen took a stand, urging secularists and non-believers to participate in public talk about religion. “Despite the risk of provoking the ire of believers, we should discuss the actions of religious institutions as we would those of all others—courteously and vigorously” he opines. And religious persons, he said, should not be affronted when secularists have something to say about religion. (He adds that “we” should know something about religion—”we” should not be “doofuses.”)  

In case you missed it, Freedman's witches and pagans show readers how to affect this open-minded pose. As an interviewee attests, “Most of my friends know that I'm Pagan and most of them are not, and we can discuss it.” Pagans and non-pagans can talk together, and witches can gain the symbolic rights afforded other incorporated, tax-exempt religious groups. Freedman's representations of these groups as “just another” religion living in the contemporary secular world thus resonate with and magnify Cohen's less well-articulated concern: namely, the problem of religion that doesn't respond to secular politesse by staying in its proper, pluralistic place.  

The simple answer to Cohen's question, “Can we talk about religion?” is: of course we can. We live in worlds saturated with public religious talk. If the dust-up around the Vatican's announcement is any indication, such talk is vigorous, contentious and takes place in multiple public settings and with multiple ends. Its ultimate goals surely lie beyond polite dinner conversation, which points toward the pithiest questions for reporters and for the rest of us who are interested in religion and public life: What are the goals of religious talk these days?  What intentions underlie “agnostic moralizing” in the Times, and how do those intentions reflect or inform how reporters cover religion?

When witches are conjured to serve as the familiars of a resolutely polite, uncomplicated form of religious pluralism, we might very well ask whether “Fair is foul, and foul is fair.”

Context is crucial for controversial stories, but journalists don't always have time for additional reporting. That's a problem when a few facts can change everything.

In the best of all possible worlds, many reporters would be attending the many conferences celebrating the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth. But in the world we live in, where travel budgets have dried up and stories are updated around the clock, few will make it to these mini-seminars on the theory of evolution.

That's why bloggers come in handy. (Rather than digress on journalists v. bloggers, see Doc Searls on post-journalism journalism.)

This past weekend, when scientists and other interested parties gathered for Darwin 2009 at the University of Chicago, PZ Myers, a biologist and associate professor, provided running commentary. A self-described “godless liberal,” Myers is helpfully clear about his predilections.

Myers' short summaries have a lot of good background and information, but I was particularly struck a talk by Ron Numbers. Numbers, a professor in the history of science and medicine, has written extensively on science and religion.  Addressing the history of creationism, he noted that in the 1920s, when the movement began, adherents did not believe that God created the world in a literal week. Rather, many agreed with William Jennings Bryan that a “day” of creation could have lasted thousands of years.

Only Seventh Day Adventists held to a literal 24-hour day, a belief attributed to their founder, Ellen White, and one which other fundamentalists considered bizarre. But conservative Christians successfully mainstreamed the notion in the 1960s and by the 1980s were ready to push their ideas into the public square—or, more accurately, into the public school classroom.

Since then there have been waves of litigation, textbook battles, charges and counter-charges over evolution, creationism and, more recently, intelligent design. Yet in all the pieces I've read, I never understood just how recent the current understandings were, much less the details of their historical provenance.

It's a little like reporting on the Taliban and forgetting to mention that we helped to organize and arm them. (This is not a direct parallel; rather it's an insightful example.)

There will be lots more insightful examples at Trans/Missions because this week we are starting something new. We've asked ten religion and media mavens to take turns writing with me. Updating The Scoop on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, we'll have more content, more variety and lots more incisive commentary.

Diane Winston

Near the end of American Beauty, an abandoned plastic bag languidly drifts and falls on a bare city street. Its graceful dance convinces one of the film's characters that “there was this entire life behind things, and this incredibly benevolent force that wanted me to know that there was no reason to be afraid ever.”

Alan Ball, the terrifically talented writer who penned those words, went on to create Six Feet Under  and now True Blood. He's still developing characters who see beauty in the mundane, realities beyond our own and (mostly) benevolent forces in the universe—but now they're bar maids, grill cooks and shape-shifters.

Ball's appreciation of truth, beauty and “soul communion” begins in the immediacy of experience. It's akin to “the Buddhist notion of the miraculous within the mundane,” as he once told an interviewer. Insights like that pulled me down to the Paley Center for a panel discussion with Ball and True Blood's writing team. I wanted to hear insiders talk about the season's savviest political satire, plotted thick with subversive religious subtexts. And, yes, the Halloween spirit moved me too. If there's going to be holiday-themed vampire stories, I want something meatier and juicier than “Gee whiz, vamps are hot these days.“

Dear Reader, I could not have imagined what happened next. (For a transcript, see Futon Critic.)

The evening's Q&A began with the trivial—i.e., “Would you cast Snoop Dog as a vampire?” (probably not)—and ended with the tangential (we learned that Godric's death scene was filmed in just two takes, but there was no mention of the decision to turn author Charlaine Harris' pedophiliac serial killer into a Christ-figure). Call me a geek but I wanted to hear something more than Ball's oft-repeated assertion that the vamps-as-gay proxy was “just some fun window dressing.”

When asked why vamps were so popular, Ball duly noted they were “powerful symbols” and segued into the evening's one zinger: “We had a vamp in the White House for eight years who sucked us dry, and now the media and popular culture is just beginning to tell the story.” But otherwise, it was fanzine 911: Next season Eric gets naked! Bill and Sookie stay connected! Evan Rachel Wood returns as the Queen of Louisiana! The story arc centers on identity—”Who am I, what am I, what do I want to be?”—or, as the writers put it: “helmets, racism and self-respecting hotties.”

In other interviews Ball has talked about the need to face death—at 13, he was with his sister when she was killed in a car accident—in “a culture that goes out of its way to deny mortality.” True Blood's opening credits eloquently visualize those fears as well as the antidotes (or distractions) offered through religion and sex. The show's second season offers plenty of both, with plotlines about Maryann, Godric and the Fellowship of the Sun as well as those steamy scenes of Eric naked.

Now here's that holiday story: Regina Marchi, author of Day of the Dead in the USA on food customs  that commemorate the really dead. (Sorry vamps.)

Diane Winston

Sergey Brin's $1 million gift to HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, is a reminder that the relationship between religion and immigration is long, deep and rarely covered.

HIAS, whose initial commitment to rescuing and resettling Jews worldwide now extends to other refugees and immigrants, has helped 4.5 million people since 1881.

When Brin's family left the Soviet Union 30 years ago, HIAS provided them with tickets, living expenses and visas that made possible their resettlement in Maryland. This weekend, accepting the gift from Google's co-founder, HIAS's director noted that Brin's story reminds Americans of the valuable contributions made by immigrants and refugees. And, one might add, the religious groups that serve them.

Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo makes that point in God's Heart Has No Borders: How Religious Activists are Working for Immigrant Rights.  Her study shows religious workers in human rights struggles that cross-cut religious, ethnic and racial ties. Peggy Levitt makes a different point in God Needs No Passport. Examining how immigrants use new media technologies to maintain strong ties to religious communities in their homelands, Levitt describes the impact of these new global allegiances on American notions of diversity. Looking at religion more up close and personal, Jacqueline Maria Hagan explores its role in the journeys of undocumented migrants. Her Migration Miracle: Faith, Hope and Meaning on the Undocumented Journey illustrates how religion is a key resource during life-threatening odysseys.

I mention these books since each comes at the religion and immigration story from a different angle that could be mined for shorter articles. Likewise, American journalists could take a look at how religion and immigration plays out in Europe for ideas about what's happening, or not, here. Denmark's Muslims hope to build their first mosque, France is considering a ban on burkas and Germany will soon be home to a sharia bank. Have religious immigrants brought similar architectural, cultural and social changes to the U.S.? These stories are evergreen, evolving and always waiting to be told.

Diane Winston

by Don Lattin

News of Elizabeth Clare Prophet's death sent me tripping back two decades, to the summer of 1989, when the news media descended on Paradise Valley, Montana, to wait out the biggest religion non-story of all time–the end of the world.

Let us pause for a moment of silence–to remember one prophet and prepare for 2012 and the next outbreak of doomsday fever.  

Prophet, the charismatic leader of the Church Universal and Triumphant, died October 15 in Bozeman, Montana. In the late 1980s, her volatile mix of divine prophecy, New Age mysticism and right-wing political fervor–combined with wars and rumors of war–inspired hundreds of her followers to head for the hills near Yellowstone National Park, where they stockpiled weapons, constructed huge underground bomb shelters and inspired Time magazine, tabloid TV and the rest of us to come see the show.  

Her church, founded in 1958 by her late husband, Mark Prophet, borrowed heavily from the century-old ideas of Theosophy and the 50-year-old “Mighty I Am” movement of Guy and Edna Ballard. Mark and Elizabeth also saw themselves as the mysterious “two witnesses” mentioned the apocalyptic pages of the Book of Revelation. Following Mark's death, Elizabeth became, in her humble opinion, the only living messenger of the “ascended masters.”

Prophet prophesied that Oct. 2, 1989 would mark the beginning of an eleven-year period of turmoil– but those who survived would see the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.

Nothing particularly interesting happened on that day. The reporters left, followed several years later by many of her followers. Just before the turn of the millennium, Prophet announced that she was suffering from Alzheimer's disease, and she quickly disappeared from public view.  

But wait! Maybe she was onto something. I just had a revelation that 1989+11+11+ 1= 2012. Anyone with their ear to the ground and their eye on the Mesoamerican Long Court calendar knows that Planet Earth and its human inhabitants will embark on a new era of cosmic harmony beginning Dec. 21, 2012. It's a date has been kicking around the since the Harmonic Convergence non-event back in 1987, so we better pay attention this time around.

There will, of course, be some darkness before the dawn, but any New Age worth its salt needs a little tribulation to get things rolling.   

Fortunately, we won't have to wait two years to see these prophesied disasters.  Next month, Sony Pictures will release the movie 2012, with the tag line “We were warned.” The studio has gone out of its way to blur the line between fact and fantasy, news and entertainment, by setting up a fake think-tank and news service to promote the movie.

So what's the lesson in all this? Don't let doomsday sensationalism completely dominate the story, including the mundane-but-always-important question of historical and theological context. That may not be easy to do when a church is collecting guns and building bomb shelters, but we can't understand the Church Universal and Triumphant without addressing its roots in the Theosophy movement and pointing out that there is nothing new about the New Age. Readers also need to put this Prophet in the context of countless other prophets who've opened the Book of Revelation and found themselves in its pages. That way, we leave the reader both less frightened and more informed.

Don Lattin is a veteran religion reporter. He is the author of Jesus Freaks: A True Story of Murder and Madness on the Evangelical Edge and the forthcoming book, The Harvard Pschedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age in America. He can be reached through his web site.

Journalism used to be a zero sum game: Either I made the front page or you did—and even then there wasn't enough space. Mostly editors didn't “get” our stories; sometimes they completely overlooked our beats. When we knew what they wanted, we tried to give it to them. In a scarcity model, you scramble for crumbs.

Some of my students are still hunting for crumbs. They want certainty, security, status and health insurance. Others are playing a whole new game. But they're out on a limb without a safety net, and it's my job as a mentor and professor to help create it.

(A new report, commissioned by Columbia's J-school, calls on foundations, philanthropists, the government and universities to help with the safety net.)

My net is held in place by the conviction that religion undergirds and enriches just about any story a good reporter might want to tell. It's a way to understand why individuals and societies make basic choices—justifying means to ends, judging right from wrong, joining hopeless causes and noble crusades. It's a key motivational factor that's often overlooked in our zeal to see the world in materialist terms.

I teach students to treat religion as a social dynamic, pairing it with politics, race, culture or economics. But once they master the analytic categories and the storytelling skills, they've got to get their work to the public. There are many places to post, but few pay (or pay much) for content. It's paradise for readers but an impossible model for a professional career.

The solution has to be top-down as well as bottom-up. We need to incentivize journalists to write creatively and analytically about important social dynamics, including religion. Anyone, but especially foundations and philanthropists aware of the need for reliable information to safeguard democratic society, should see the urgency of religion in the mix.

The object is not just to keep the spotlight on pedophile priests or church/state dilemmas. It's also to support and mainstream the kind of incisive and investigative work that Kathryn Joyce has done on religion and families, Bethany Moreton on religion and business and Dagmar Herzog on sex and the religious right. Whether packaged as travel stipends, reporting fellowships or living support, incentives ensure that in-depth reporting is sustained and expanded in the new media environment.

Reporters, too, need to accept a whole new level of responsibility. There's no time for griping at editors when you work online. Rather, you bend to the media's logic, re-branding, re-packaging and re-envisioning your work and yourself in ways that might seem antithetical to an older generation of journalists. We still teach the fundamentals of reporting and writing, but students can't, or shouldn't, graduate from j-school without taking a course (or at least learning some lessons) in entrepreneurship.

In the old media model, religion was typically overlooked, occasionally sensationalized and reliably turned over to the political reporters when something important occurred. In the new media model, religion should be just another one of those indispensable bits of data—like “why” and “so what”—that needs to be factored into every story.

We have the time, we have the space, now we need to create and cajole the resources to re-imagine journalism from the inside out.

Diane Winston

Sex, scandal, God and mammon—it's been headline bait since the earliest newspapers. If you know the story of the Prophet Matthias (an 1830s “cult” leader whose religious career ended with a murder trial), you know there's nothing new under the sun or, for that matter, a newspaper masthead.

Now New York Times reporter Laurie Goodstein has a riveting piece about “a mother, a sick son and his father, the priest.” Happily, Goodstein has the space to explain the five-year affair and, more important, the 22-year old financial struggle among Pat Bond, the Rev. Henry Willenborg and the Order of Friars Minor, the Franciscan community to which Willenborg belongs.

Read the piece for details, but the gist is that Bond, a single mother of three, and Willenborg, a priest who initially offered her marital counseling, conceived a child born in 1987. According to Goodstein's lede, Bond met Willenborg when he was the spiritual director for a women's retreat she attended. (Note to Franciscans: loving animals is one thing, placing a fox in the hen house is another.)

Soon after his son's birth, Willenborg pulled away. Bond turned to his order for financial support, provided only after she signed a confidentiality agreement (violated now because her circumstances are dire). Bond's predicament is not uncommon, but as Goodstein writes, “Ms. Bond's case offers a rare look at how the church goes to great lengths to silence these women, to avoid large settlements and to keep the priests in active ministry.”

The Franciscans' meager and grudging support is stunning. Even when Willenborg's son is diagnosed with cancer and his medical bills mount, they give as little help as possible. Almost as shocking, though less surprising, is their treatment of Willenborg, who seems to receive barely a wrist slap. Most significant is that Bond's experience may be shared by thousands. Deep in the article (I wish it had been higher), Goodstein notes that as many as 20 percent of Catholic priests may be “involved in continuing sexual relationships with women,” many of whom are silenced by confidentiality agreements.

What next? The country's Roman Catholic bishops are preparing a pastoral letter warning that “cohabitation, divorce, contraception and same sex unions are undermining the traditional meaning and purposes of marriage,” according to the Religion News Service. Goodstein reports that during the relationship, Bond had an earlier pregnancy that ended in a miscarriage. But not before Willenborg informed his superiors and suggested Bond have an abortion.  

Gotcha, yes–more grist for rants against ecclesiastical hypocrisy and calls to rethink clergy celibacy. But Goodstein's article also shows that there's plenty of room for stories about sexual politics in organized religion: who wins, who loses and why it continues to fester. Also needed, as Goodstein ably demonstrates, is more investigative reporting. Enough with stories about religious holidays and “weird” practices (Hindus throw milk on statues! Sikhs wear scary daggers!). Many of us would prefer to follow the money and get the bad guys.

Diane Winston

New names are in—first we did it, and now my bosses did too. The USC Annenberg School for Communication has added “& Journalism” to its moniker. In both our cases, what does it signify? Two words: entrepreneurship and incentives.

And no more anonymity for the ink-stained scribes in our proto-modern building.  But more important, we're taking on the “future of global journalism.” Welcome words here at Trans/missions. Religion needs to be in that mix, and so far it's been MIA.

Look/see for yourself. Journalism is awash with new experiments, but few actively engage institutional religion or its role in politics and culture. Even fewer examine ethical issues or the questions of meaning and ultimacy that are commonly referred to as spirituality. Whether it's non-profit news, micro-news, news for hire, citizen journalism, collaborative journalism, student news, specialized news or amalgams, there's little attention to the impact of religion on institutions and individuals. (And if there is, it's implicit. Case in point: Facebook's happiness index has the potential to be news, create news and subvert news. I don't find that particularly happy-making, but I do consider it a pseudo-religious social experiment.)

With newspapers cutting religion beats along with other specialty reporting, there's a lot less time and money spent on investigative, in-depth and complex stories. That's why we need to promote entrepreneurial journalism as well as to incentivize those working on related topics. Some of this is already being done at sites like ProPublica or the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Journalism.  But I don't see investigations into the financial trails of religious NGOs or the religious aspect of global resistance movements or even a look at the sexual politics of the American Congress. A cursory examination of the Pulitzer site might lead to the conclusion that religion plays almost no role in worldwide crises. Really? Even Daniel Brooks' fascinating story on Mohammed Atta, “The Architect of 9/11,” marginalized the role of religion even as it wrote around it.

What to do? One of the web's great gifts is its capaciousness: Let's use it to expand and enhance coverage. Straightforward narratives can be pushed out with video, audio and slide shows. Duke Helfand's Los Angeles Times story on Southern California mega-churches benefitted from photographs, but it would have been even better with video that captured the congregations' vitality and the passion of their members. The same strategy can work for alternative news sites if reporters and editors understand that religion is more than a Saturday or Sunday thing. It reminds me of the Zen tale about the little fish that swims up to the Fish Queen and asks, “What's this great ocean I keep hearing about?” Religion is like that.
 
There's talk of creating specialty sites that focus on religion in the same way the Pulitzer goes after crisis reporting or that KHN, the new Kaiser Health News, bores down on health-related issues. Those may be needed, but I'm more for mainstreaming. We can accomplish that by educating reporters about the importance of religion, teaching them to integrate it into their entreprenuerial repertoire and finding ways to incentivize our vision of good reporting.

Religion is central to news and should not be in a ghetto. Here at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, where we can almost see the ocean, it won't be.

Diane Winston
 

by Andrea Tabor

I first heard about the Telegraph's “Ahmadinejad is Jewish” exposé on Facebook. The comments came flooding onto my coworker's wall. Among my favorites: “hahahhahahaha oh mannnnnnnnn this is so funny right now to the point where i cant even say the wordsssss.”

That's certainly how a lot of bloggers felt about it. In fact, Telegraph blogger Damian Thompson used “Hahahahaha” as his nut graf.

The Telegraph claimed that an identification document Ahmadinejad held up in one of his election photographs showed his birth name listed as Sabourjian, a common Iranian Jewish name. Since the original story was published, the Guardian interviewed several Ahmadinejad biographers and Iranian scholars who claimed that Sabourjian wasn't necessarily a Jewish name and, furthermore, that the Iranian leader's mother was actually a direct descendant of Mohammed.

The bickering between the two papers hasn't been as vigorous as I'd expect from the British press. The Telegraph has yet to issue a response to the Guardian's piece (published Monday). That may be because the Telegraph relied heavily on a single photograph to support much of the story, and only offered two related articles in the following days: a short piece that said there were 25,000 Jews living in Iran, and another article on celebrities with Jewish ancestry, including Elvis and the Queen. Not exactly the in-depth background articles I would have expected.

As a news consumer with zero expertise on the origin of Iranian surnames, I tend to trust the multi-sourced reporting in the Guardian's piece, but I'd like to hear what the Telegraph can come up with to support its claims. Wall Street Journal blogger James Taranto agreed, writing, “We must confess we are a bit skeptical. Sabourjian sounds like an Armenian name to us.”

As I note above, as soon as the story was published, it began to make the rounds on Facebook and Twitter. Five days later, chatter around the story is quickly fading. Whether it's true or not, the story has impacted Ahmadinejad's reputation in the region and around the world. The Telegraph's Damian Thompson remarked, “I mean, think about it: this venomous anti-Semite and Holocaust denier will never be able to play the anti-Israel card again without members of his audience sniggering. 'How can you attack your own cousins?' they'll ask.”

Even if Ahmadinejad wasn't born to Jewish parents, there was still a reaction story waiting to be written. How did Iranian Jews take the news? In a post titled “He Does Sorta Look It,“ Time magazine's Joe Klein writes, “One of the more popular rumors in Iran when I visited last June was that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is Jewish.”

If he is, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz wrote one of the most interesting ledes: “Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's scathing attacks against Israel and his repeated denials of the Holocaust could be motivated by a desire to conceal his own Jewish roots, an Iran expert told the Daily Telegraph on Saturday.”

This self-hating Jew angle swept through the blogosphere this week, but with so little follow-up reporting on the Ahmadinejad case, it didn't factor heavily into the subsequent coverage.

Unless a resourceful reporter can get a DNA sample from Ahmadinejad and send it to the Genographic Project, we'll probably never know his true ancestry. But that doesn't mean we should stop asking questions. Did the Telegraph story lead or follow the “self-hating Jew” thread weaving through the blogosphere? And what about the silence of the Muslim press? Is Al Jazeera above reporting on a thinly sourced story that has traction mainly among new media “journalists” who are willing to let “Hahahahaha” pass for a nut-graf? Or is their keeping mum akin to the taciturn reporting in the Christian press around the outing of right-wing homophobes like Ted Haggard and Larry Craig?

Stay tuned…and keep digging.

Today may be the first day of the rest of your life, but it's also the first day to savor our new logo. The USC Knight Chair in Media and Religion, a stopgap name, didn't really describe what we do. “Trans/Missions” expresses our intent to explore the interactions between media and religion that enrich, bedevil and complexify culture and society.

Trans/missions will continue to feature ideas, issues and trends that are worth reporting, along with multi-media storytelling aids and best practices. We'll also explore how the arts address religion and spirituality; the possibilities for citizen journalism; the need for alternative narratives; and the changing news landscape.

In other words, we'll keep asking the “so what” questions:

•    What are the best stories that show how religion intersects with politics, science, education, entertainment, sports, medicine and international relations (for starters)?
•    When does a spiritual “Aha!” moment turn into a trend?
•    How can multi-media platforms enhance storytelling on complicated ethical issues?
•    Why do the entertainment media keep religion hidden in plain sight?
•    Which print and online re/sources can fill in the gaps in our knowledge about spirituality, ethics and religion?
•    Who are America's real “heroes”?

Here's the bottom line: Religion is national and international news. Viewed institutionally (is the Vatican still a geopolitical player?); individually (are Americans becoming more religiously tolerant?); politically (what's the on-the-ground impact of the Taliban, Hamas or the Religious Right?) or culturally (why is the headscarf accepted in the U.S. but not in France?)—people's beliefs and corresponding behaviors affect everything from war and peace to weddings and funerals.

In the months ahead, Trans/Missions will continue to provide smart and engaging commentary on what's covered, what's not and how to read religion between the lines. Case in point: this weekend  washingtonpost.com ran my story  on religion, medicine and feisty journalism. Check out readers' comments on faith and medicine for insights into the controversies about the H1N1 vaccine that is being disseminated nationally this week. NPR's story touched on some of the fears surrounding the new vaccine, but there's more history—and religion—to the story than Morning Edition reported.

Diane Winston