Back in January, it was hard to imagine a single media event that could rival Barack Obama's inauguration.  But less than six months later, Michael Jackson's passing has come very close. Jackson's death stopped the clock—and the news cycle—overshadowing even the president's trips to Russia and Italy. Everything else was a blur: Auto company bailouts? California budget crisis? Bernie who?

From TMZ to Anderson Cooper, the media dropped everything, flew out to Tinseltown, and camped out on media platforms outside Staples Center. ABC News sent their dream team, which had not been assembled for any event since the inauguration: Charles Gibson, Barbara Walters, Martin Bashir, Cynthia McFadden, and Robin Roberts. They all reminisced about the Thriller days.

But now that cash-strapped L.A.'s clean up crews have restored Staples Center to its usual summer calm, we can recall what was happening before we dusted off the old Jackson LP's. On the religion beat, reporters were writing about surveys that suggested Americans were among the most fickle religious folks in the world.  Data from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life show that more than half of American adults have changed religions at least once.
Jackson was among them. But the coverage about his faith, both before and after his death was anything but conclusive.  Over the years questionable reporting linked him to Islam, Kabbalah, and just about every other faith tradition.  Jackson himself once spoke candidly of growing up as a Jehovah's Witness in a 2000 Beliefnet article. (“After all, even reporters are children of God,” he said.)

At his memorial service Tuesday, a stained glass backdrop hung behind a gospel choir as Jackson's gold casket was carried in.  Other than Rev. Lucius Smith and Rev. Al Sharpton, no other religious officials presided at the service. Their comments shied away from Jackson's faith or religious practice. The Jackson family itself remains divided along religious lines.  His mother Katherine is reportedly still a member of the Jehovah's Witnesses.  Several of her children have fallen away from their childhood faith.  Michael denounced the church shortly after the release of Thriller and his brother Jermaine converted to Islam in 1989.  Like many American families, their family tree is a mosaic of different faiths.

Although religion played a small role in the memorial service, it played an even smaller role in the media coverage.  Even ABC's dream team didn't give much background on Rev. Lucius Smith, calling him a “family friend.” Why did reporters shy away from asking these questions? As burial arrangements are made, there will be opportunities to discover more about Jackson and his faith, if reporters dig deep enough.

Blogger Juan Cole pointed out some of the reasons why Jackson's faith was never fully understood, and how that actually played into his status as a pop idol. “Jackson was a man of multiple identities,” Cole writes. “Toward the end of his life he bridged his family's Jehovah's Witness brand of Christianity with a profound interest in Islam. He was all things to all people in part precisely because of his Peter Pan syndrome. A child can grow up to become anything, after all.”

One religion angle on the story did seem to stick, and that was the devout love of his fans. Get Religion called him St. Michael, the pop angel, and chastised coverage that seemed to worship the man himself. “How do you find substance — journalistic, moral, religious, political — in this kind of show-business event? The family couldn't really decide what faith tradition to emphasize, so the default was a vague, sanitized version of African-American gospel music, crossed with MTV.” The problems that Get Religion pointed out could be addressed with solid reporting into the religious complexity of the family, and why the memorial was structured the way it was.

Scholar Gary Laderman expanded on how Jackson's image has become sanctified since his death. “Like Elvis, or even Oprah, his life story now in death has a moral valence… about being human with weaknesses and vulnerabilities, but also being superhuman and immortal in the eyes of devoted fans who invest body and soul in their idols.” Now that the memorial is over, we can ask these deeper questions about the religious aspects of American pop culture, including mourning a celebrity.

The story of Michael Jackson's death has captivated billions of people from around the world, and from every major faith tradition. It's a fascinating angle on a story about a man who had so many eccentricities.

What if more journalists tried to write like JoAnn Wypijewski, probing rather than excoriating; thinking rather than reacting? I'd thought I'd seen everything I needed to know and then some on the Mark Sanford front when I came across Wypijewski's jewel-like meditation on love, marriage, religion, politics and journalism.

It would have been enough if Wypijewski had simply set the record straight. Despite most media reports and innuendos, Sanford is neither a benighted Southern conservative nor a backwoods Bible-thumper. “He recently irritated those who are [very religious] by not signing a bill that would have welded I Believe to the state license plate” writes Wypijewski, adding “he wasn't elected in 2002 pushing family values; he ran as a vague libertarian and was elected because a lot of Democrats, blacks especially, abandoned the odious incumbent.”

But Wypijewski pushes further, analyzing the last 40 years of changing sexual mores and politics to examine how we've mangled expectations of love in the name of personal fulfillment. In the process she takes the media to task for condemning Sanford for the sins they love to hate—and live to expose.

Of course it's understandable why journalists seize on stories of celebrity adultery. They, too, follow the path of least resistance, seizing tropes that make good copy. Hypocrisy sells and religious hypocrisy sells even better. But it's also true that they miss (or misunderstand) believers' lack of outrage when preachers and politicians stumble. We are them, they are us: we all sin and need forgiveness—from our readers if not our gods.

In a similar vein, Farai Chideya exhorts reporters to be more self-aware when writing about race. She calls out Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz who, complaining that black female reporters are too soft on Michelle Obama, sounds snarky and sexist.

The bigger but less obvious problem is Kurtz's lack of self-awareness. He seems to forget that white people, as members of a race, are subject to as well as objects of bias. As Chideya notes: “This presumption of transparency when it comes to whiteness is particularly dangerous in the newsroom. At the same time, for example, my now-cancelled show “News and Notes” was scrutinized for any bias toward then-Senator Obama, one of the people constantly reminding us not to be biased would use the phrase 'my friend Karl Rove' without the slightest sense of irony.”
 
Journalists, like the rest of us, have blind spots, and religion and race tend to be big ones. We become so used to assuming our perspective is normative that we come to believe it. But sometimes there's a gap between belief and reality; Wypijewski and Chideya offer challenges, and insights, on how to scale it.

Diane Winston
 

by Jennifer Hahn

The decline of America's mainline churches is an old story. But here's a new angle that few journalists have covered: “The Churches Strike Back.”

Americans are leaving religious institutions in droves. In fact, the fastest growing religious group in the U.S. is the unaffiliated, according to the Pew Forum for Religion & Public Life. The American religious landscape has always operated as a competitive marketplace, where religious groups compete, sometimes fiercely, for adherents. But as a steady stream of Americans opt out of religious institutions, the struggle to get them back to church has grown even more spirited.

In recent years, Roman Catholics as well as several Protestant denominations have launched multi-media campaigns to entice people back into their pews. The most recent, and high profile, is the United Methodist Church's $20 million “Rethink Church” campaign, launched in May. With slick ads on national television, radio, and in popular magazines, the campaign sports the tagline “What if church was a verb?” The focus is primarily on works (as in “faith without works is dead”) and showcases the church as actively involved in making a better world. One of the print ads running in the left-wing magazine Good pictures two hands cupping dirt and asks, “What if church considered ecology part of theology?” A television spot focused on global health asks “What if church wasn't just a building, but thousands of doors each of them opening up to a journey that could actually change the world?” accompanied by shots of the church's missionary work fighting HIV, AIDS, and malaria in distant parts of the world. This week, the campaign even made its way onto the most prominent advertising spot in the country – on a mega-screen in New York's Times Square.

The Methodists' “Rethink Church”  campaign is heir to a similar effort the United Church of Christ started a few years ago called “God is Still Speaking” and an ongoing effort by the group Catholics Come Home to “help fill empty churches across the globe.” Jewish groups are also making an attempt to attract young Jews, who still strongly identify as Jewish but do their own thing religiously, back to their institutions. The Progressive Jewish Alliance, for instance, seeks to bring Jews back to communal life through social justice campaigns.

So even though recent statistics make it hard not to write that decline-of-religious-institutions story once again, there's another, far more interesting, story waiting to be told. Religious groups seem to be realizing that in this media-saturated culture, everything – even the way we choose to worship God – needs a brand identity. It's not over until the fat institutions sing. And singing they are.

Why should Jay Rosen have all the fun? If you follow him on twitter (worthwhile for all journalistas), you're already familiar with his current bugaboo, the Church of the Savvy.  

The Church of the Savvy, unlike the churches usually covered here, is made up of journalism's Grand Poobahs, the Washington, D.C. mainstream media elite. It's these folks, says Rosen, who make and shape the news—in implicit collusion (or misguided over-identification) with their sources. (For a historical perspective of the phenomenon, Rosen suggests Sally Quinn's 1998 piece on why the DC establishment turned on Bill Clinton.)

Rosen's use of the term “church” is chockablock with nasty nuances, since many of the so-called savvy would hate being linked to something as oblique, opaque, and old-fashioned as religion. But Rosen's made the connection before. Back in 2004, he wrote that journalism is itself a religion—with creeds, theological schools, high priests and orthodoxies. He also made a prediction:

“We're headed, I think, for schism, tumult and divide as the religion of the American press meets the upheavals in global politics and public media that are well underway. (Not to mention the roaring force of the market.) Changing around us are the terms on which authority can be established by journalists. . . The Net is opening things up, shifting the power around. Consumers are being producers and readers can be writers. Consensus is breaking apart on the definitions of the The Good in journalism. And that may be a healthy turn for citizens and for our future experiments with a free press.”

So true and now, five years later, Rosen and his twitterbuds are documenting the tumult and schism, playing up the Church's coziness with the political establishment. But their metaphor also illumines the mainstream media's treatment of religion and politics.

The Church of the Savvy views religion instrumentally: how will a religious bloc vote; which religious leaders have juice; and what religion stories bring eyeballs. Coverage falls into familiar set pieces: He said/she said (did evolution occur?); horse races (how will Catholics vote) and conflict (the debate of gay marriage or Shi'a vs. Sunni or Jew vs. Muslim). The problem is that these narratives only go so far: they do little to explain issues, ideas or even the complex human calculus that goes into accepting the demands of a life of faith.

Fortunately consumers are becoming producers and readers are turning into writers. Some of their efforts are fairly well-known—Pastor Dan, Jewschool and Altmuslim for starters. But we're always looking for more. Know anyone storming the Church of the Savvy? We'll post blogs and websites that are overturning the tables.

Diane Winston

Where's Popeye when you need him? Remember how he always beat Bluto? He had a secret weapon. When Popeye ate that slimy green stuff your mom said was good for you, it made him super-strong. So when Popeye said “eat yer spinach,” it seemed like a great idea.

Where's Popeye now? And what does he have to do with covering religion?

At the center of any religious vision are two questions that demand emotional discipline: What's meaningful and what am I going to do about it? Journalism addresses these questions by providing difficult, unpleasant and sometimes tedious information about our world. It's mental spinach.

But these days there's less and less spinach and more and more junk food. How many stories, blogs and twitters have you seen about South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford's adultery? How many Michael Jackson obituaries, testimonials, and profiles do you plan on reading? What about clips of the Farrah flick? And all that speculation about 10 (count 'em) Oscar nominees for best picture.

Then again, anything can be spun so I am sure that some folks are thinking deep thoughts about death and infidelity (or maybe that screenplay gathering dust in the closet). And others are too busy lamenting journalism's demise to see their role in the corruption of content. (So many Iran tweets slid easily into speculation about Jackson.)

So here's today's veggie plate: a white paper on the Bush Faith-Based Initiative. Released earlier this month, I found just one news story about it. The report, issued by the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government at the State University of New York in Albany, is a comprehensive evaluation of the elements and the effectiveness of Pres. George W. Bush's faith-based and community initiative. (Disclosure: As a program officer at the Pew Charitable Trusts in 2000, I participated in initial conversations about the grant that funded the Institute to conduct research and analysis on the initiative.)
 
The report has much to chew on. There's a summary of the hiring issue—should federally-funded, faith-based organizations (FBOs) be allowed to make employment decisions on religious grounds—that became a bitter point of contention. But there's also mention of the small numbers of FBOS that actually applied for federal money because of red tape and potential governmental oversight; Bush's move to decentralize the program by creating complementary initiatives in 11 governmental agencies, and the successful creation of a “level-playing field” for FBOs to compete for federal dollars. We learn why the Bush initiative was politicized, how Obama is trying to re-cast it, and that we still lack definitive research on the efficacy of faith-based programs and whether or not they work better than secular ones.

Anyone who remembers the press posturing that accompanied the roll-out of the Faith-Based and Community Initiative–theocracy seemed imminent–will likely pass the plate this time around. But that would be a mistake. At a time of economic stress, the role of religious groups in providing social services is relevant. Moreover, the debate about how religion should enter social service provision is significant. But most important, this is a discussion about values, responsibility and social change. It's a micro-religion story with a macro-religion message. It's not sexy, seamy or smarmy but it will be good for you.

Diane Winston
 

Jennifer Maytorena Taylor has made one of the most lyrical, complex and contemporary investigations of religion in America by focusing her documentarian's eye on a Muslim-American, Puerto-Rican, former drug dealer turned family man and community advocate. Oh, and he's a hip-hop artist, too.

“New Muslim Cool,” which airs Tuesday, June 23 as part of PBS' “POV” series, follows several years in the life of Hamza (né Jason) Perez.  Through her filmmaker's magic, Taylor turns the grit of Perez's Pittsburgh neighborhood and the grind of daily prejudice into visual poetry that flips from sensuous to searing in a heartbeat.

[Disclosure, as an advisor, I offered encouragement and screened cuts in progress. Yet nothing prepared me for the impact of the film, which kept me glued to the computer screen.]

Taylor takes us deep inside Perez's world, revealing a raw place of hope, fear, dreams, and disappointments. We follow the swaying, capped and covered head-bopping believers who groove to his music. We watch curiosity and concern light the faces of his tight-knit Puerto-Rican family when they greet his hijab-wearing African American bride. We see him struggle between anger and acceptance when the FBI inexplicably raids his community's masjid. And we understand that when he uses the term “jihad” to describe his inner spiritual struggle, we are looking at a man bend his entire being to sanctify every minute of every day of his life.  

Ever since September 11, journalists, essayists, memoirists, novelists, filmmakers, and playwrights have tried to depict what it means to be Muslim in America. Taylor, through Perez, gives us a portrait unlike anything I have read or seen or heard before. Maybe it's the fact of his otherness; perhaps it's the intimate look at his multiracial community, could be the aesthetics embodied in his persona—prophetic rapper/proud dad/perspicacious do-gooder. But maybe it's the force of Perez's religious commitment: hostility, prejudice and ignorance are small obstacles to be overcome. When Perez tells us that God answers his prayers and has blessed him time and again, we see what faith is made from.

Diane Winston

I love this story. The “so what” graf says it all: “In an era in which food politics are increasingly part of the national conversation and organic chefs are lauded in glossy magazines, [chef Tim] Hammack and a growing number of his talented colleagues are applying their creativity and commitment to serving the lost and needy.”

Patricia Leigh Brown does a great job reporting and writing, but the piece itself has all my faves: food, religion and a local hero. Hammack, a trailer park kid from Northern California, ascends to foodie heaven as a chef at Thomas Keller's Bouchon then chucks it all to cook at a rescue mission.

Hammack is a great subject. From his grandma's Dust Bowl recipes (just how do you make po' boy pudding?) to the daily decisions about what to make for dinner, the 30-year old cook comes across as an ordinary guy who turned an extraordinary career into an exemplary vocation. Brown notes that his faith played a part, [“A dedicated churchgoer, Mr. Hammack realized after two years [at Bouchon] that an entire career spent cooking for the affluent would not fulfill him”] but she allows his actions to tell the story of his commitment.

It's the perfect religion story, which is to say it's not a religion story at all.

Also in the love column: I am eagerly following the unfolding impact of new media on old faiths. Last month, we had the Vatican app and this month an Orthodox Jewish inventor has come up with Koogle, a “kosher” search engine. Let me know if you've seen others.

And lest I sound too lovey-dovey, my hackles were raised by Monday's New York Times story on the state of Joan Kroc's bequest to the Salvation Army. Kroc, the widow of McDonald's founder Ray Kroc, left $1.8 billion to the Army with the proviso it be spent on building well-equipped community centers. The model for the centers, based on the one Kroc's funded in her hometown, has three swimming pools, an indoor ice skating rink and a 600-seat theater. The paper reports that now, five years after Kroc's death, “her plan is sputtering.” Is the Army dragging its heels because the centers seem too cushy for a modest evangelical mission or has the economic downturn made additional fundraising difficult? (Army leaders are asking local communities to kick in some funds.)

Reporter Stephanie Strom has unnamed sources imply the former, but her reporting supports the latter. Yet nowhere in the story does she explain the Army's mission, why it runs centers or how the church actually feels about this particular gift and its utility.

As one who has written about the Army, I have more than a passing interest in the topic. Moreover, I am aware that the press tends to give short shrift to the Army's religious commitments and identity. I would like to know more about the Kroc bequest and what the Army thinks about its strategic merits, but it looks like I'll need to wait for the next go-round to hear that story.

Diane Winston