It's not exactly new news—but the New York Times has an eye-popping update on abusive labor practices at a Postville, Iowa meatpacking plant.

In case you missed it—in May, federal immigration officials raided the nation's largest kosher plant, Agriprocessors, Inc. in Postville, which had employed almost 400 illegal immigrants, almost two dozen of whom were also under-age. The Times' Sunday story offers recently uncovered details about the gruesome working conditions and illegal labor practices inside the plant.

For those of us who remember the initial coverage of the Postville story, it's a far cry from that early narrative of heartwarming pluralism on the prairie. Back then the Orthodox Jews who took over a boarded-up plant in a dying town were initially viewed with suspicion. But the prospect of new jobs and new residents eventually won over many locals.

Turns out the natives were right.

For links to pro and con coverage on the Postville, see Steve Sailer's excellent round-up, written when the raids went down in May.

So, is this a religion story? Since the owners of the plant, the plant itself and the purpose of the plant are all religious – the story begs the question. Moreover, the wrongdoing in this instance seems particularly heinous given the context. On the other hand, reporting on this as a “special case”—religious group goes bad!—would undercut the valid news angles, specifically immigration and labor violations.

One way to get at the contradiction that arises between religious intent (laws of kashrut) and capitalist imperatives would be to examine what happens when religious practices become commodified. I doubt Orthodox Jews would be the only true believers whose practice didn't square with their teachings. Although this kind of analysis would not be appropriate in a news story, it would make for a good blog or think piece. It also squares with the kind of push back we've asked for in political coverage. (If Jesus is your political mentor, how does that square with your policy decisions?)

As it turns out, the Times Monday story got at some of these issues. Clergy and activists marched at the plant to protest working conditions. Among the demonstrators were several rabbis seeking to “revise kosher food certification to include standards of corporate ethics and treatment of workers.” Maybe more follow-up in the Jewish press?

Elsewhere – see Alternet. Two interesting stories: Robert Scheer on the media and his new book about American empire and an inside look at Pastor Hagee's Christians United for Israel conference.

And, in the category of potentially positive, under-reported religion stories, check out this meeting of Christian and Muslims scholars and leaders. The gathering, taking place at Yale Divinity School, is a next step for The Common Word Project.

This initiative, launched last year by Muslim scholars, seeks discussions of shared values between Muslim and Christian leaders. Ultimately, these explorations would trickle down to the masses. Can it work? And, more to the point, is it a story? (Imagine the newsroom pitch: Here's a hot one – religious leaders and theologians jawing about love of God and love of neighbor.) And yet, this is religion at work in the world – slow-moving, oblique and seemingly, frustratingly, out of step, off-tune and irrelevant to contemporary standards of newsworthiness. And yet the potential for a truly big story.

The most interesting finding in a new survey of media coverage of religion in the primary campaign didn't have anything to do with Muslims, Mormons or mainline Protestants.

Rather it was the predominance of “horse-race” coverage. When researchers at the Project for Excellence in Journalism reviewed16 months of primary campaign coverage across media platforms, they discovered few stories on the foreign policy issues (2.6%), fewer on race and gender (2.1%) and fewest on religion (1.9%). The largest chunk of reporting, 81%, was about strategy, handicapping and who did what to whom.

This triumph of style over substance isn't a surprise but it helps explain why the country is in such a mess. Iraq, the current mortgage crisis, violations of human right at Gitmo? All of these can be explained, at least in part, by the public's short attention span. WMDs? Invade Iraq. Ridiculously easy credit? Buy a McMansion. Worried about heavily-bearded men? Do like Jack Bauer.

Our predilection for quick and easy may also explain why the study found that substantive spikes in religion coverage occurred when the press had an obvious story. Note the uptick following Mitt Romney's “Faith in America” speech and the similar rise during the Obama-Wright affair. Since John McCain has been fairly free of religion-related controversy, there's been little about his. (For some reason, the Hagee contretemps was not widely covered.)

Religion has several strikes against it. Besides being complex and complicated, it's liable to offend. Witness this week's brouhaha. At last count there were more than 1400 articles about the New Yorker cover.

What's interesting (and thanks to colleague Peter Mancall for pointing this out) is that an earlier cover, showing Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in bed together, both reaching for the red phone, did not generate much conflict. Heaven knows we've imagined our public leaders in compromising positions, and we've seen enough images of interracial couples that the shock value has worn off. But we haven't seen many images, much less satirical ones, of Muslims so the new cover packs a punch. Religion is the new sex — the taboo topic that we don't know how to discuss in public.

All this to say: I'm betting that religion will play an increasingly larger role in campaign coverage. The current issue of Newsweek does an excellent job of fleshing out Obama's spiritual odyssey in ways that take him and his faith seriously. (One can only hope that the 12 percent of the public that believes he is a Muslim will read it.) The New Yorker story about Obama's political rise in Chicago is a good companion piece. The man may be a seeker but he is first and foremost a political animal.

The fiction of values voters dies hard. How else to explain so many stories seeking to handicap the evangelical and Catholic vote?

Will they, won't they, do they, don't they—it's hard to parse how, which and when “religious” factors motivate voters now that the universe of religious issues has grown from abortion and family values to encompass the environment, the economy, the war in Iraq and AIDS policy. But this begs the question: were there ever any values voters swayed solely by concern for a greater good?

Over on the Immanent Frame, John Schmalzbauer offers a nuanced view of the many mansions within the evangelical house: “the Obama/Dobson debate gets at the same issue [evangelical diversity] by exposing the myth of the evangelical vote. The deep divisions in the evangelical house can be seen in the contrasting reactions to the controversy, suggesting that it may be more accurate to speak of multiple evangelicalisms rather than a monolithic movement.”

Schmalzbauer offers some fascinating statistics to make his point: “the percentage of younger evangelicals identifying as Republican fell from 55 percent to 40 percent in 2007. Likewise the circulation of Focus on the Family's newsletter dropped from 2.4 million copies in 2004 to 1.1 million today. Compare this with the 600,000 people on the subscription list for Sojourners and the prospects for a progressive evangelicalism begin to look a little brighter.”

Jeff Sharlet, whose book The Family is now #31 on the New York Times bestseller list, would argue that differentiating progressive from conservative evangelicals is a sideshow; the real story is about a secretive fundamentalist elite who have stealthily moved the US rightward for more than six decades. Sharlet uses the term fundamentalist not to conjure a caricature of Bob Jones or Jerry Falwell, but to capture the vision of the movement's “desire for a story that never changes, a story to redeem all that seems random, a rock upon which history can rise.” Yes, all that and “an expansionist ideology of control better suited to empire than democracy,” too.

I've already recommended The Family but as a steady stream of articles still asks whither the religious vote, I once again wonder if news outlets are missing the point. If Sharlet is even half right, the religious vote doesn't really matter, they've already won.

On a less serious note, my favorite religion story this week is on St. Paul's Cathedral. The angle is the intersection of science, art and religion. Oh, yes, and jello. Take a look at what could be the best religion story of the year.

Not long ago, David Crumm, a former colleague on the religion beat, began Read the Spirit, an online hub for developing “spiritual connections between people of faith.”

Now he's added an especially timely feature to his eclectic mix of reflections, reviews and resources. Our Values is the brainchild of Wayne Baker, a sociology professor at the University of Michigan. Baker developed the site in collaboration with Crumm as a way to explore civic values. Every day, Baker introduces a hot-button topic and asks visitors to comment. (Monday's topic is Christian license plates; last week's included polygamy, marriage and Hillary Clinton.) The responses will be used in the design of a major survey on Americans' Evolving Values.

“Not only will it help to define the content of the coming survey,” Baker said in a press release, “It represents a new, 'open source' approach to research that is based on the 'wisdom of the crowds' rather than only the insights of a small group of academics.”

This experiment bears watching as yet another example of how crowd sourcing can change what we know and how we know it. In the next few days we'll have a direct link to Our Values in the GET section so you can visit the site and let us know what you think as as journalist and/or citizen.

Geneive Abdo's article in the new issue of Foreign Policy is likely to make a lot of people mad. “False Prophets” is only available to subscribers, but you can read a Q&A that outlines many of her ideas.

Abdo argues that efforts to build cultural bridges between Americans and Muslims are misguided. Rather, she wanted to engage the Islamicist critique of the West since these ideas, propelling groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood, are likely to influence the Middle East's future leaders. But that's not what happens, as Abdo writes:

“Almost as soon as the project began, though, a fear of political backlash proved to outweigh any potential for mutual understanding. At a meeting in Qatar with a 20-member committee composed of former ministers, diplomats and scholars, the question of whether the views of Islamicists would be part of the alliance's work was raised in public discussions. One of [former Secretary-General Kofi] Annan's special advisors decided that meetings with Islamicists would amount to scandal for the United Nations. For me, the reversal was one of a few defining moments in my understanding of the risks the institution was willing to take.

“More profoundly it exposed the philosophical divide within the alliance: Was the best way to deal with extremism through a head-on political approach or an indirect cultural one? Is it better to engage directly with Islamicists and learn firsthand their grievances and convictions, or to create Hollywood films for the Muslim masses in the hopes of changing perceptions of the West and vice versa?”

The latter approach won out, and a great many institutions and organizations, large and small, have jumped on the cultural diplomacy bandwagon. But very few of these efforts, according to Abdo, are involved in the hard work of understanding a truly other point of view.

Abdo's argument flies in the face of what most Americans believe: Don't negotiate with your enemy. (Barack Obama's taken a lot of flack for saying he would meet with leaders of states such as Iran and Cuba.) However, it's instructive to recall what one American president said at the height of the Cold War.

“Some say it is useless to speak of peace or world disarmament, and that it will be useless until the leaders of the Soviet Union adopt a more enlightened attitude. I hope they do. I believe we can help them do it. But I also believe that we must re-examine our own attitudes, as individuals and as a Nation, for our attitude is as essential as theirs….

“First examine our attitude toward peace itself. Too many of us think it is impossible. Too many of us think it is unreal. But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war in inevitable, that mankind is doomed, that we are gripped by forces that we cannot control. We need not accept that view. Our problems are made manmade; therefore, they can be solved by man.”

Those words are from a June 1963 commencement speech at American University delivered by President John F. Kennedy.  His charge, that we face down our own doubts and find new solutions within ourselves, sounds jarring at a historical moment when our leaders claim the high road and trust God to make things turn out right.

Just a generation ago, Americans were up against an unwinnable war, an unpopular president, and a faltering economy. Prices were up, wages were down and a shortage of oil—due as much to the manipulations of domestic producers as an Arab oil embargo—created a crisis of confidence. Neither Gerry Ford, an amiable Republican, nor Jimmy Carter, a managerial Democrat, could provide a national vision that healed and inspired.

Ronald Reagan, campaigning against Carter in 1980, asked Americans a simple question: “Are you better off now then you were four years ago?” He appeared to offer an answer—less government, more military strength and a return to traditional values. (As he famously told an evangelical gathering in 1980, “You can't endorse me, but I endorse you.”)

Reagan's actual successes can be debated, but the perception of his presidency, at least among a majority of Americans, is that he restored the United States to its former glory. When he introduced his 1984 campaign tagline, “It's morning again in America,” voters agreed, re-electing in a lop-sided 49-state sweep.

There are many parallels between the mid-1970s and today. It's more than the war, the economy and the out-of-touch leaders. Americans took stock of their world and felt helpless: the environment was degraded, women's roles were in flux, and traditional values seemed in decline. Perhaps as a result, religion appeared on an upswing. Gurus' followers grew, evangelicals enlarged their flocks, and mainline denominations, criticized for being more socially-oriented than spiritually-minded, saw their numbers dive.

Reagan was able to capitalize on a cultural moment of change and uncertainty by providing a vision of continuity, a message of hope, and an assurance that the best was yet to come. If you study Reagan's record, you'll see he got some things right, but many others wrong (remember Grenada, Iran-Contra and Reaganomics). But he led Americans forward after almost a decade of feeling stuck, rearranging the political landscape, for better or worse, with a dream of a middle America—white, middle-class, God-fearing and hard-working—at its center.

All this seems pertinent when I read media accounts about Barack Obama and the hope he engenders across racial, religious and regional lines. Andrew Sullivan eloquently described Obama's appeal in his December 2007 piece, “Goodbye to All That: Why Obama Matters.”  It's not that Obama has an answer to every woe, but he holds the promise of a new morning.

Ronald Reagan's success is a reminder of the power of symbols His accomplishments, most significantly helping to bring an end to the Cold War, must include his re-visioning of the American dream. Re-visioning our collective identity requires a new synthesis of national pride, economic promise, and religious purpose, and we seem past due. The question is: whose vision will inspire us, what will it look like and can the media “see” it as it happens?

The just-released Pew Forum survey on American religious life provides the raw materials for understanding where the nation is headed. How reporters use the data to probe the emerging religious and political landscape, and our emergent national dream, will be fascinating to see.
 

Just because it's a quiet week on the campaign trail (no religious faux pas or embarrassing endorsements), lacking, too, in clergy scandals and faith-based conflagrations, don't assume God's on summer break. There's still a lot for enterprising journalists to cover.

The Happening, M. Night Shyamalan's much-maligned new movie, sounds much more interesting now that I know it's about religion.  Thanks to the blogosphere – no MSM review I saw had this angle – the film can be read as an extended argument for religious faith in general and intelligent design specifically.

“Night was inspired by reading Albert Einstein's biography and discovering Einstein had rejected religion at first until he saw 'the hand of God' in the gaps between scientific explanations. In The Happening, Shyamalan tries to recreate this surrender to faith by saying sometime you just can't explain it when shit happens.”

When asked about the religious faith that inspired him, Shyamalan was “vague.” But Annalee Newitz, writing at io9 was not. Her review argues that the movie supports not only intelligent design but also male headship in a traditional Christian family.

Lest you think io9—a sci-fi site—goes off the deep end, look at the interview with Shyamalan in “Scientific American.” Here the director sounds less a candidate for the Promise Keepers than for a drum circle:

“There is something that binds everything. To keep looking for that, that drive is almost the holy grail. I can totally relate to that on an intuitive level. That's somehow tied to some mystical thing—I don't know if mystical is the correct word. It's beyond logic; it's the evidence that all things come from one simple thing.”

I still don't plan on seeing the movie, so you'll have to tell me whether or not The Happening is one simple thing, but I might just delve into the theological side of The Boss. The Gospel according to Bruce Springsteen, from Asbury Park to Magic”  is a book I wish I had written (albeit with a different title). Author Jeffrey B. Symynkywicz is a Unitarian-Universalist minister who (if the press release is to be believed) engages Springsteen's religious and political themes in an intelligent and accessible manner. Reading excerpts on Amazon, I did find the style accessible (easy rehashing of Bruce's bio with musing on his music) and the content reminiscent of a semi-hip Sunday sermon:

“The song 'Backstreets' also reminds us that we are born as children of the holy fire, children of the Spirit. But the ways of the world often separate us from our blazing birthright. To find enlightenment and passion again, we must escape the word and head for the desert. For the outskirts, for that place away—in this song, 'an old abandoned beach house.”

Of course, Bruce isn't the only musician with Big Things in mind:  Miley Cyrus' godmother also sings about sin and salvation. Backwoods  Barbie, Dolly Parton's new album, is a familiar mix of noble women, cheatin' men, and a forgiving God. Says reviewer Susan Wunderlink, “Her songs put forward Christian spiritual elements like faith and prayer, but Parton has never been one to get specific about theology.” (Hmm—might there be a piece on the Bible, the Boss and the Backwoods Barbie—sin and salvation from Nashville to New Jersey?)

The folks behind Church Basement Roadshow do get specific about theology, and since they were good enough to show up at my synagogue Saturday morning (noshing not davening), I wanted to end this update on religion and culture with a mention of their project.

Tony Jones, Doug Pagitt and Mark Scandrette are three leaders of the emergent church movement. (For those unfamiliar with this theological/social perspective—which began among evangelicals but has found resonance among Jews and Catholics, I recommend Eddie Gibbs and Ryan Bolger's Emerging Churches: Creating Christian Community in Postmodern Culture. Gibbs and Bolger provide an academic overview, but Jones, Pagitt, Sandrette and host of others have their own books, too.)

The roadshow purports to be a 1908 revival (with a 2008 message) that reminds audiences of the power and glory that led Spirit-filled revivalists to hit the sawdust trail. I missed the roadshow when it played in Los Angeles, but the music, costumes and old-timey shtick appeal to the historian in me. The journalist who also abides would have liked to know who's in the audience (is it reaching beyond the emergent community), how the “boys” negotiate between kitsch and commitment, and whether the 1908 message works today or succumbs to nostalgia. Rather than another story on “oh those strange emergents” who (a) live communally; (b) behave counter-culturally; or (c) are insufficiently Christian—I'd like to see coverage of this creative bid to recapture history in service of the present moment.

Since creating a course on American religion and foreign policy, I've been scouting out resources, several of which are worth sharing. The Council on Foreign Relations has a (fairly) new religion initiative that provides updates, resources and conference calls. Last month, its backgrounder on religion in China was a helpful snapshot, especially if you lacked the time for the meatier package prepared by Pew.

Another source, especially for reporters seeking stories, is the list of grants made by the Luce Foundation as part of its Religion and International Affairs initiative. (Disclosure: USC received one of these grants for its Religion, Identity and Global Governance project, which funded my course.) Support for research and materials on the International Religious Freedom Act; the role of African-American religious groups in foreign policy; religion as a tool for reducing international conflict (I look forward to that one), and women, religion and globalization will provide much-needed resources and background.

Santa Clara University also is supporting a new web site that was created by political science professor Eric. O. Hanson. Hanson's aim is to provide an introduction to global religion, ethics and politics for students, diplomats and researchers. His site looks at the interplay between religion and politics as well as its specific manifestations in different countries and regions. There's also helpful background on many world religions. Hanson does not mention journalists as part of his clientele, but the site's straightforward navigation and accessible descriptions make it an excellent resource for those last minute questions about religious groups in Malaysia or the politics of Daoism.

Of course, religion and international relations is not the same as
religion and American foreign policy (see Foreign Affairs and Carnegie Endowment) But both have been under-studied, under-researched and under-appreciated areas. Current trends in domestic and global politics indicate that reporters—as much as diplomats, politicians and academics—will need to be conversant in each.

If you have any suggestions for resources, please send them.

I was going to start off with a ringing endorsement of Lawrence Wright's piece “The Rebellion Within: An Al Qaeda mentor rethinks terrorism” in last week's New Yorker. But that was before I found Tom Heneghan's Faithworld post on the French “virginity lie” case.

If, like me, you have been unaware of this oh-so intriguing story, here's the recap: A French Muslim couple sought a civil annulment when the husband discovered his wife was not a virgin. His legal grounds were that she lied about an “essential quality” (i.e. virginity) necessary for marriage. French law permits annulment if one partner hides an “essential quality,” but, in the past, these have been more akin to a criminal record or a past marriage.

When news of this case and the “essential quality” cited to dissolve the marriage made headlines, many French citizens were outraged. Says Heneghan, “Politicians, feminists and human rights activists immediately demanded the ruling be overturned.” That's because it sets back women's rights in several ways :

• “It violates a woman's privacy by making virginity a possible criterion for marriage.
• “It violates sexual equality because no proof is asked of the groom's virginity.
• “It introduces a religious concept of the virgin bride into the secular marriage contract.
• “It treats the bride like merchandise in commercial transaction.”

But the couple doesn't want an appeal, which would force them to resume a failed marriage. And French leaders aren't sure whether this is an issue for the courts or the legislature to decide. Moreover, who should, or could, decide whether virginity is an “essential quality”?

I love this story because it has so much resonance for Americans interested in chastity and abstinence. The story probably couldn't happen here (we don't have anything quite like the “essential quality” loophole in our annulment laws), but the narrative of gendered expectations probably occurs more often than many of us expect.

Then, what to do with the scorned bride who instead of championing her sexuality said, “I don't know who decided that they would think for me. I haven't asked for anything. I feel like I'm hallucinating.”  I wonder, too, how this would play out in our press. For sure we would have heard whether or not the bride wore a scary veil or, worse yet, a black (as in a very dark, concealing, sinister black) burqa. (See Elaine Sciolino's recent piece on a female Al Qaeda propagandist if you want an example of how clothes can become symbols and women's bodies serve as battlefields.)
 
Heneghan doesn't write the piece (which is technically a blog or column) as if it were a “Muslim story” and there are no subtle tags (references to veils etc.) to influence a reader. Rather, the story points out fundamental questions that religious orthodoxy poses to the secular state: What to do when God's law contradicts man's law? Who wins, but maybe more important, who gets to decide? 

Reporters today have it so good! (Ha! Just wanted to see if you were paying attention,)

But seriously, the Internet has revolutionized the practice of journalism in ways besides the debate about whether bloggers can be “real” reporters. More significant, and definitely a more useful focus, is the availability of resources—ideas, issues, insights that there was no easy way to access as recently as a dozen years ago.

This means, as many have noted, one person can have a major impact on the news cycle. On Religion Dispatches, Bruce Wilson explains how he did just that by posting a video of Pastor John Hagee on YouTube.  Wilson notes that the story had “languished” on his own website, Talk To Action, until Huffington Post ran with it.  You know what happened next.

Now check out Wilson on “Manga Messiah”  a comic, he calls, “a training manual” for the next pogrom against the Jews. The comic was published by Tyndale House—also responsible for the block-buster Left Behind series— which probably believed it was producing a culturally relevant rendering of the Synoptic Gospels I leave it up to intrepid reporters to suss out who's right.

But Biblical controversy is nothing new—as the Chronicle of Higher Education demonstrates in an elegant “he said, she said” update on the Gospel of Judas. Reporter Thomas Bartlett looks back at that bombshell 2006 story that had New Testament scholars declaring Judas a hero rather than a villainous betrayer. Bartlett goes over the back-story of how the Gospel of Judas was lost, found, and commodified by National Geographic and a hand-picked scholarly “dream team” that released a documentary and several books that mainstreamed this revisionist perspective.

“But almost immediately, other scholars began to take issue with the interpretation…. They didn't see a good Judas at all. In fact, this Judas seemed more evil than ever. Those early voices of dissent have since grown into a chorus, some of whom argue that National Geographic's handling of the project amounts to scholarly malpractice. It's the perfect example, critics argue, of what can happen when commercial considerations are allowed to ride roughshod over careful research.”
 
Riding roughshod puts it mildly. According to April D. DeConick, the “dream team” mangled a key translation whose correct meaning undermines their entire premise.

“It had to do with the word 'daimon,' which Jesus uses to address Judas. The National Geographic team translates this as 'spirit,' an unusual choice and inconsistent with translations of other early Christian texts, where it is usually rendered as 'demon.' In this passage, however, Jesus' calling Judas a demon would completely alter the meaning.”

News outlets who rushed to cover the initial story haven't done as much follow-up. Thanks to Bartlett for the update.

Also thanks to Lauri Lebo for her new book, The Devil in Dover: An Insider's Story of Dogma v. Darwin in Small-town America. Lebo covered the “Dover Trial,” (Tammy Kitzmiller et al vs. Dover Area School District et al) that challenged a public school district's requirement to teach “intelligent design” (ID) theory alongside evolution. The parents, arguing ID was religious perspective and that teaching it violated the First Amendment's “no establishment” of religion clause, won. Lebo covered the trial for the York Daily Record, and Religion Dispatches asked her about the book's “most important take-home message.”

“These First Amendment cases aren't just the subject of dispassionate courtroom debate. They are intensely personal. We are a nation founded on democratic principles. So, I think, we have this innate sense that teaching children both sides of a debate is a quite reasonable compromise. “

Most reporters would agree – unfortunately, there are usually more than two sides to every debate and some of the sides can be off point, irrelevant or misinformed. How do we, as teachers and reporters—decide what's what? Lebo doesn't say, but—as all these stories suggest—reporters (and news consumers) have a hard time getting beyond binaries.