“Turning Away from Jesus: Gay Rights and the War for the Episcopal Church” (link currently malfunctioning?) in the June issue of Harper's gave me the chills. It was that good.

The magazine sat on my desk for over a week. I'd look at the cover (a detail from a Prague altarpiece), and put it down, loath to read yet another piece about the Episcopal sex crisis. Thanks in no small part to the mainstream media, homosexuality has been the defining issue for Episcopalians (as well as Methodists and Presbyterians) for the past 20 years. As a result, mainline Protestantism's (potentially) prophetic voice has been drowned out in the debate over who can sleep with whom and still do God's work. Yes, it's a big deal but so is the war in Iraq, public education, the environment, New Orleans, poverty and the imperial presidency. At times, I wonder if it's an easier fight than the ones with less obvious (depending on your side) heroes and villains,

Evidently Garret Keizer agrees: “How does a Christian population implicated in militarism, usury, sweatshop labor, and environmental rape find a way to sleep at night? Apparently, by making a very big deal out of not sleeping with Gene Robinson [the Episcopal Bishop of New Hampshire, a gay man, whose election to the episcopacy is the focal point of current divisions between so-called liberals and conservatives domestically and abroad]. Or on the flip side, by making approval of Gene Robinson the litmus test of progressive integrity, a stance that I have good reason to believe would impress no one so little as Gene Robinson.”

In his quest to understand why homosexuality is dividing the church communion, Keizer speaks with African prelates, Anglican parish priests and American laity. He contextualizes his search by considering history, theology and sociology. Amazingly, and in spite of his own affinities, he is able to discuss all sides with deep sympathy and respect. But he decides that the current crisis is, at best, a sideshow or, at worst, a distraction from vexing problems whose solution would require more than arms' length indignation.  

For that reason, the church's predicament holds a mirror to society's shortcomings: “Yes, the eucharist has meanings peculiar to Christians—but it also can be taken as a universal symbol of how any community shares its wealth, its bread and wine, what the old socialists used to call the roses and the bread. The consecrated wafers placed on the tongue or in the upturned hands of the faithful, one per person and all the same size, have a secular equivalent in the basic allotments of health, education and welfare—of life, liberty and the off chance of happiness—that every citizen at the common table can expect as his or her due. If the obvious implications don't make you squirm, if they fail to explain why I resolutely refuse to apply the word 'left' to the progressive side of 'the gay debate' in my church or to just about any debate going on outside the church, then nothing will.”

What do we owe each other? What constitutes communion and community? Keizer pushes so hard on religious questions that they turn into secular conundrums. His beautiful, provocative piece—I hardly do justice to his eloquence and thoughtfulness—confronts the church's sex crisis by taking that confrontation one step further to demand “Why?” His answer—we're all Episcopalians now—was unexpected, unwelcome but not entirely unjustified.

Admit it: you were surprised by the unanimous Texas court ruling that the state had insufficient warrant to remove children from the Yearning for Zion ranch (A.K.A. polygamous Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints' compound) in Eldorado.

If so, you were hardly alone. For weeks, headlines have trumpeted the under-age sex, teenage pregnancies and forced marriages that appeared to be the sect's stock-in-trade.

The court, however, found little hard evidence that minors were in physical danger or were victims of abuse. The children were members of a group with an unusual belief system. But the Texas court, in line with earlier Supreme Court decisions, ruled that unusual religious beliefs are not cause for state action.

How could this happen? Dahlia Lithwick, in Slate, compared the Texas takedown to goings-on at Guantanamo Bay.

“In both cases, government actors hurled themselves at a problem with the best of intentions. The prospect of averting just one more terror attack, or protecting just one more molested child, has a way of making all those technical details seem trivial. But both cases have been plagued by glaring errors of fact and identification: Names and ages and association were all jumbled up, hearsay and double hearsay piled up in place of real evidence.”

Other commentators agreed. Noted CNN's Jeffrey Toobin: “It was difficult to find out what was going inside that compound, and there was certainly ample grounds for suspicion, But it's a good thing that the courts insist on a very high bar for the decision to remove children from their parents.”  

As expected, comments on the blogosphere runs the gamut – but most support the court's decision. Some because it affirms parental rights; others because it adheres to Constitutional standards. In
Reynolds v. US, the 1878 Supreme Court case that outlawed polygamy, the justices cited Thomas Jefferson's distinction between religious belief and the actions that derived from belief. The former was protected under the First Amendment; the latter were not if they violated the laws of the state. The Texas court upheld the distinction between these two and found Child Protective Services had not proved the FLDS engaged in unlawful actions.

In a rush to judgment—and hastened by the lure of salacious storytelling—many journalism outlets did not uphold a standard of balance much less objectivity. How will they follow up the story? We'll wait and see.

Good stories can always be recycled, and David Brooks' recent column, “The Neural Buddhists,”  is a case in point. According to Brooks, neuroscience demonstrates that “transcendent experiences can actually be identified and measured in the brain.” Notwithstanding religious differences, research shows that “people around the world have common moral intuitions” and “are equipped to experience the sacred.”  

Bottom line: Brooks predicts a rise in “new movements that emphasize self-transcendence but put little stock in divine law or revelation.” For some, that's heresy; for others—the growing ranks of religious “nones,” it's descriptive.

The column struck a nerve; when I checked Google blogs, there were 273 listings mentioning it. Some hated it; others loved it; still others wanted more discussion. (This week's “Does Science Make God Obsolete“—Templeton's two page New York Times' spread—sounded a similar theme. Would that there were a few less white men opining.)

Where can you go with the Brooks column? Depending on time, space and resources, a reporter could check out scientific journals, interviews researchers, find clergy who also are scientists, and scientists who are theologians. Perhaps it's a person-in-the-pew piece or a trend story on the growing interest in meditation or a look at a clinic where the research is ongoing.

Opening up in a different, more challenging direction is the Times' Week in Review columns on Israel and the Palestinians. Three pieces approach the topic from very different angles, but they share a key word “catastrophe.” Jeffrey Goldberg's take, “Israel's American Problem,”  sees a catastrophe looming if American leaders don't help facilitate a two-state solution. In “The Birth of a Nation,”  Ruth Gruber recalls a potential catastrophe when the US State Department sought to scuttle President Truman's recognition of Israeli sovereignty. Elias Khoury describes the situation of Palestinian refugees as an ongoing catastrophe. None of these writers question Israel's existence, but each raises the question: “What next?”  

The question stymies most of us, journalists included. The situation is so fraught that an ill-chosen word or poorly vetted quote can cause irreparable harm (not just to the situation but also to one's career). Yet, here, too there are alternate ways of looking at stories with an eye to enlarging their scope and public understanding. What's up with J Street, a new alternative to AIPAC? Have any of the Americans who had settled in Gaza and were forcibly removed from the Gaza Strip three years returned to the US? What does the new generation of American Muslim activists propose for the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate? (I focus on domestic angles assuming many reporters cannot go to the Middle East.)

Lots of interesting stories also appear outside the New York Times; last week one of my favorites was on NPR. Julie McCarthy gave listeners seven minutes in heaven – a fascinating look at Bolivian missions that have revived their Baroque music heritage. McCarthy revealed how 18th century Spanish Jesuit missionaries left behind music that the indigenous people made their own—and how—with the help of a Polish musicologist and priest. Bolivians have restored old manuscripts, rebuilt old instruments and revitalized an astonishing example of musical hybridity. Recycling possibilities? Next year's festival in Bolivia.

Two new books on American evangelicalism wield a one-two punch to news coverage as usual. In The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, Christine Wicker argues that a solid bloc of “values voters” is as real as the Easter bunny—not only are evangelicals a diverse lot but their numbers are much lower than their leaders claim. In his forthcoming The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power,  Jeff Sharlet demonstrates there's more to faith-based politics than compassionate conservatism or Mike Huckabee.

(Disclosure: Sharlet is a colleague and friend whose work on The Revealer I have long supported and who also has supported mine.)

Sharlet and Wicker remind us that good journalists take nothing for granted. Numbers lie, statistics conceal and sources tell us what they think we want to hear (or what they want us to know). Most answers need follow up questions and many stories require context for full understanding.

Sharlet goes deep into context for his thoroughly researched and engaging book about “fundamentalism's avant garde.” The Family is a loose network of politicians, businessmen and military leaders worldwide who share a commitment to Jesus, power and biblical capitalism. Sharlet tracks the development of their affective, individualistic faith from Jonathan Edwards and Charles Finney to The Family's current leader Doug Coe. Likewise, he reveals their handiwork in far-flung political machinations—including regime change in Uganda, civil war in the Philippines and dictatorships in Latin America.  Here at home, the group is best known for its sponsorship of the National Prayer Breakfast, but their web of relationships facilitates influence from the Oval Office to inner-city streets.
 
Sharlet's book may be both too subtle and too scary to have the impact it should. He is, in effect, offering an alternative American narrative—one that places radical religion at the center of our national story. That religion, a 'gentle and militant, conservative and revolutionary” elite American fundamentalism, “responds in this world with a politics of noblesse oblige, the missionary impulse married to military and economic power.” It's a powerful theory that, if Sharlet is correct, has enabled an ideological coup d'état that is hidden, he notes, in plain sight.

This book deserves to be read by every and any journalist. It's a primer for what reporting can and should be. Sharlet weaves first hand reportage with historical research and archival work. He connects dots, sees the big picture, and finds the telling detail. He is neither balanced nor objective, but a mainstream media whose guiding principle is not to offend can overrate those qualities. Hewing to an older journalistic tradition of speaking truth to power, Sharlet is not afraid to be offensive. His compelling story seeks to upset and unsettle in the best tradition of muckraking reporters.
 

The Pew Forum's recent study, “Religion in China on the Eve of the 2008 Beijing Olympics” begins with a reminder that religion remains a factor even in one of the world's most secular nations.

“On Aug. 8, 2008—the right day of the eight month of the year '08—at exactly 08:08:08 p.m. the summer Olympics are scheduled to begin in Beijing. The day and hour for the start of the Olympics was chosen for its good fortune—a widely held belief in Confucianism and Chinese folk religions.”

By American standards (which are unusually high among developed nations), religion is not a significant factor among the Chinese: only 31% deem it very or somewhat important in their lives. However, given six decades of a repressive policy, those numbers are, according to Pew, surprisingly high. Moreover, they represent a large number of people, “nearly equal the estimated number of religiously affiliated adults in the U.S.”

Accordingly, the 1-plus % of the Chinese population that identifies itself as Muslim equals some 20.3 million people—a population almost as large as Saudi Arabia's. (More to the point, as one of China's ethnic minorities, Muslims are not bound to the one-child per family policy.)

Notwithstanding the fervid prayers of some Olympic contestants, religion probably won't be a major story during the summer games. But the Pew Forum's findings are worth remembering: A growing number of urban, educated, 20-something Chinese men and women are increasingly interested in the topic.

More on religion: a story last week from the Columbus Dispatch reported that United Methodist   congregations “could share pastors and combine churches with a Lutheran denomination under a partnership approved by the denomination last week.” (The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America  will need to okay the agreement at its 2009 conference.)

The reasons for the partnership, assisting small and struggling congregations, is obvious. But Methodists and Lutherans, despite their shared Protestant identification, hold very different notions of authority, polity, ecclesiology and theology.  More than 20 years ago, sociologist Robert Wuthnow's  classic The Restructuring of American Religion posited that education, mobility, and socioeconomic factors were trumping theological differences among American Protestant denominations. Some took Wuthnow's argument as proof text for the culture war, but it also explains the softening of theological boundaries among the mainline and the triumph of pragmatics (shrinking budgets) over dogmatics.

Brooke Adams, the polygamy correspondent for the Salt Lake Tribune, was on On the Media this past week to discuss coverage of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Noting that some media outlets give less than a full picture of the controversial sect, she said some members of the group attend college, use the Internet and empower women.

 “The problem is that we hear so little from this community over the years and we hear mostly their characterizations put out by critics or people who've left the community,” she told interviewer Bob Garfield. “And what you can see when you're there at the ranch is that these women were pretty outspoken about their making a choice to live this way.”

Adams is right: people should be able to speak for themselves and there are usually more than two sides to every story. She is correct to remind us that we rarely hear the perspectives of women from the group. That said, any social arrangement that permits adults to have sexual relations with children is wrong, and I wish Bob Garfield had asked her what community members said about that.

Remember that scene in the “Wizard of Oz” when Dorothy pulls back the curtain and finds that the great and terrible Oz is really a small, balding man? Veteran journalist Christine Wicker makes a similar discovery in her new book, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation.

A Southern Baptist by birth, and still a self-described evangelical, Wicker decided to investigate conventional wisdom about the numerical strength of America's moral majority. What she found should embarrass the secular media almost as much as it should evangelical leaders. The National Association of Evangelical's claim to represent 30 million souls? Wicker says the actual number is closer to 4.5 million. The Southern Baptist's Convention's estimate of 16 million members? Try a quarter of that number.

In her own words: “The idea that evangelicals are taking over America is one of the greatest publicity scams in history, a perfect coup accomplished by savvy politicos and religious leaders, who understand media weaknesses and exploit them brilliantly,”

Reviewing the book in Mother Jones, Debra Dickerson notes how those savvy politicos and religious leaders exploited a gullible (and religiously naive) press corps, “Having been handed a ready made story line by the thou-shalt-not brigades, the media became transfixed by a phenomenon they couldn't fully fathom but felt bound to report on.” That's not to say that the Religious Right did not exert influence, rather that its success had more to do with creative spin than Christian soldiers.

Wicker's book is a quick read that hits a happy medium between anecdotal reporting and statistical analysis. She also explains her personal interest in the story and current ambivalence about her cradle faith community. (Disclosure: Wicker is a friend and I blurbed the book.)

If you want to read more about the press' capitulation to the Religious Right's narrative, you can look online for “Back to the Future: Religion, Politics and the Media,” an essay I wrote for the September 2007 issue of America Quarterly. (The journal requires a subscription, but if you can get it online or in your library, this special issue “Religion and Politics in the Contemporary United States” has many excellent articles.)

In “Young Gay Rites,” a New York Times Sunday magazine story, Benoit Denizet-Lewis artfully renders the attractions of marriage for young gay men. Profiling several Boston-based couples, Denizet-Lewis suggests that the under-30 crowd is creating a new norm that (hopefully) blends the best of gay and straight relationships. Ready to commit and to publicly affirm their devotion, most of the pairs plan a ceremony for friends and family. We learn what they wear and whom they invite, but we never hear about the role of religion in their lives. The absence is noteworthy since homosexuality has been both a contested arena for many religious traditions and yet many members of the LGBT community have strong ties to their faith. Given the political and religious right's appropriation of heterosexual marriage as basic to society's well-being, the decision of gays to embrace seems more than a simple lifestyle choice. Perhaps, as the religious right contends, Boston is a secular humanist haven, but I'd still like to know if religious rites/rights factor into the young gay unions that the Times described.

Elsewhere in New England, Aliza Shvarts, a Yale senior, probed the intersection of religion, politics and free speech with an art project that purportedly included blood from an either a self- induced miscarriage or menstruation. Writing in the Yale Daily News, she explained, “For me, the most poignant aspect of this representation . . . is the impossibility of accurately identifying the resulting blood.” Yale administrators did not find the piece poignant; they forbade its exhibition unless Shvarts confessed it was a put-on—something she refused to do. The controversy generated a fair amount of buzz as Shvarts managed to offend proponents on both sides of the abortion debate as well as religious folk, feminists, fellow students and bloggers. But it also roused First Amendment advocates who weathered previous wars over objets d'art including “Piss Christ” (a photograph of crucifix in a glass of urine) and “The Holy Virgin Mary” (a collage splattered with elephant dung). 

What's interesting to consider is why works of art loom as threats to religion. As a counter-cultural force, religion is offensive: the prophet Hosea wed a prostitute, Jesus attacked the moneylenders and Siddhartha Gautama (who became the Buddha) abandoned his wife and child. Outrage is often the first step to justice, compassion and enlightenment, but apparently not in New Haven.

Might some evangelicals feel outrage on visiting Daniel Radosh's website? As online testimony for his new book Rapture Ready! the site is a miracle of kitsch, commercialism and great links. We learn that the book, a self-proclaimed “perfect blend of amusement and respect” for the “often hidden world of Christian pop culture” reveals the artists, artifacts and experiences that propel the $7 billion faith-based industry. Be sure to check out the candy, comedians and  holographic eye witness glasses (as well as a wonderful clip of Victoria Williams on Jay Leno).

Reading about Radosh and Shvarts raises a critical question: Where's the line between amusing and offensive? Radosh will sell a lot of books while Shvarts becomes a pariah. One pokes fun and the other draws blood. My sense is that in reporting on the two, the mainstream media defines religion as commodifiable (which is socially acceptable: those 3-D glasses are cute) or confrontational (urine, feces and blood are unacceptable). But urine, feces and blood are part of the body, which in many religious traditions is part of God's creation. Perhaps witness wear is too, but the case is shakier.

Faith, art and commerce collide but instead of understanding why—and how the news mediates our perspectives—I'm left with the feeling that, as in Denizet-Lewis' article, something's missing.

Haven't heard much about culture war lately, but that's likely to change when both the presidential candidates are in place. Obama vs. Clinton is a sideshow; in the coming slugfest, it will be blue state vs. red state—with cringe-inducing sound bites that make all Americans seem silly.

John Marks and Craig Detweiler are ready. Marks' and Detweiler's new film Purple State of Mind, seeks to bridge the color gap by modeling intelligent conversation between friends. Detweiler, a filmmaker and author who co-directs the Reel Spirituality Institute at Fuller Theological Seminary is an evangelical. Marks, a novelist, journalist and former 60 Minutes producer is a non-believer. When the two men were college roommates in the 1980s, both were Christians. But they parted ways and, over the past 20 years, headed in very different directions.

Purple State of Mind begins where most friendships end – with the recognition of real differences. Marks and Detweiler filmed four conversations over the course of a year that reveal deep disagreements. The two persevere, affirming their mutual respect as well as desire to find a way through the cultural chasm that divides many Americans.

The filmmakers hope their documentary will spark additional conversations. On Monday April 28, we'll screen it at USC Annenberg and hear from Marks and Detweiler about lessons learned regarding themselves, each other, and our nation's true colors.