All the Religion News That’s Fit to Print: The Impact of Media and IT on Religion Today
Cousins Foundation
Atlanta
In God We Trust
November 12-14, 2014
John Buchanan
It is a great privilege to be here among such distinguished company, and it is good to see old friends. I am grateful to the Cousins Foundation for making this important conference possible, to Tom Cousins and Ann Cousins for their wise leadership and concern for our topic and to Lillian Giornelli, President of the Cousins Foundation.
My assignment, conveyed to me by my very good friend and colleague George Wirth, was braod enough to allow me considerable leeway. George asked me to address – and to be mindful of the time -
- The overall state of religious media in our country: magazines, paper, t.v., internet communication
- How people of faith are getting their message out: especially regarding controversial issues. I will add – how people of faith are getting their news about religion.
- The history and national and international impact of The Christian Century.
- What the theme “In God We Trust” means to me, and to other media members.
1. The Overall State of Religious Media
One of the great benefits of working at the Christian Century is the opportunity it affords of being in the occasional presence of Martin Marty. Marty is a phenomenon. The Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago, Marty has written so many books that even he, I believe, has lost count. The story, perhaps apocryphal, is told about one of Marty’s countless friends – maybe Bill Moyers or Norman Lear, called and Marty’s secretary said: “I’m very sorry but Dr. Marty can’t come to the phone. He’s working on his next book.” To which the caller responded:” That’s alright. I’ll hold ‘til he’s done.”
Marty and Harriet live on the 83rd story of the Hancock Building, directly across the street from Fourth Presbyterian Church, where I worked before retirement. They were regular visitors in worship: Marty, being Marty, calculated that it was precisely 270 steps from the front door of his condo down two banks of elevators, across the street and into his pew at Fourth Presbyterian.
We have been friends for a long time; I, along with several hundred thousand others. So when George Wirth invited me to make this presentation I called Marty and told him about my assignment and said, “Why don’t you make this speech?” He declined but did agree to have a conversation, which we did. In preparation, Marty had dug out of his file a rather hefty stack of materials, among them a paper entitled simply “Mainline Media.”
In the paper, Marty observes that historically the mainline churches have openly embraced modernity in American culture. There even was a time that we were called “modernists.” So, you would have thought that mainlines churches would have been pioneers and leaders in the use of mass media – radio, television, the internet.
It didn’t happen. What did happen is that we were totally outpaced, outclassed by evangelical conservatives. Ironically, we used to accuse our evangelical brothers and sisters of being “other-worldly,” while we had our feet planted firmly in this world God so passionately loves. The truth is, they became “this worldly” and we did not. Conservative evangelicals, Marty observed, “became technologically sophisticated and programmatically adept at holding audience, while we looked the other way.”
There are many reasons, not all of them bad reasons. Not at all. Marty’s analysis was interesting. He thinks it’s because the heritage of church establishment is still in our DNA – Episcopalian in England, Congregationalist in New England, Presbyterian in Scotland, Reformed in Central Europe, Lutheran in Scandinavia. “Establishments do not have to – where they are established – enter the market place and compete.” In a historical analogy that only Marty can do, he says it is similar to what happened when Roman culture overwhelmed Greek culture. The Greeks had all the philosophy, true art, great history, fine literature, noble temples. Power shifted. The Greeks looked down their noses at the bombastic, unsophisticated, militaristic Romans. The rest is history.
Sadly, Marty declined to write a conclusion and tell us what to do.
I do know that when we try to compete we don’t do very well. I’m not even sure we should try – at least by current standards and practices of winning media strategy. We cannot go one on one with Joel Osteen, and shouldn’t even try. There are wonderful exceptions, of course. When I’m home on Sunday morning with nowhere to go I tune in to the telecast from Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago – whose pastor we will hear later. They know how to do it. Otis Moss knows how.
In the world of secular media things are very different for us than they were just a few years ago and had been for more than a century. A century ago reporters attended and reported on sermons from prominent pulpits, and newspapers printed extensive sermon excerpts. Today, most metropolitan newspapers have drastically reduced their coverage of religion: there are almost no “religion pages.” The Dallas Morning News used to have a splendid entire section devoted to religious news and features and it was quite good. It’s gone too. Michael Paulson, who still covers religion for the St. Louis Globe reports on the 60th Annual Convention of the Religions Newswriters Association referring to “the dwindling band” of religion reporters and concludes that it is “a beat that is suffering a serious reversal of fortune.” The Los Angeles Times used to have a four-person team of religion reporters. No more. The Chicago Tribune, my hometown paper, had a very respectable full religion page in every Friday edition. It’s gone too. The reasons are complex — Debra Mason, Executive Director of the Religious Newswriters Association suggests that the main reason for the decline is not that religion is targeted. All “specialty” beats are down – environment, health, education. And, newspapers themselves are in a struggle for survival.
And yet religion does make news when there is scandal. Sexual abuse in the Catholic Church still gets front-page attention and lots of it despite howls of protest from the local diocese office. The recent Synod of Bishops in Rome was on the front page for several days.
My problem with religion in the news is that reporters often get it wrong pretty consistently. A recent local ABC report on the evening news about a statement Pope Francis made indicating that the Big Bang Theory and evolution are not incompatible with Christian faith and do not contradict scripture – concluded with the dramatic announcement that the pope had just contradicted Christian teaching on those subjects – showing total ignorance of the thinking of mainline Protestants and Catholics – millions and millions of us who are not literalists and fundamentalists.
In the midst of the President Clinton/Monica Lewinsky mess, I decided to preach a sermon about it and referred to the David/Bathsheba affair and what it said about accountability to God and also God’s gracious forgiveness and continued reliance on David. The sermon caused a little stir and sure enough I got a phone call from a newspaper reporter. “I heard you preached about Clinton and Monica,” he said. “Tell me, who was that David guy you mentioned?”
Newspaper reporters don’t always get it right, not to mention the experience of living in a “Catholic” city, i.e. a city where the Roman Catholic church has been strong and influential for decades. The Tribune, for instance, insists on referring to Palm Sunday and Easter as Catholic celebrations.
The reality is that absent thoughtful religion reporters – and there are some – the religion that makes it into the newspapers is not ours – or else it is entirely focused on some public scandal. Everyone knows that a church can feed and clothe thousands and never be regarded as newsworthy. But when the pastor lifts money from the plate it’s front-page news.
Two anecdotes before we move on. I was in a group meeting with William Sloane Coffin once where some were lamenting that their congregation and denomination were never in the newspaper. “Well,” Coffin said, “when was the last time you did or said anything newsworthy?”
One time I talked to the Tribune religion editor – back in the day – and I said, “I’m not anti-Catholic, but there are more of us than there are of them and we’re never in the paper and they are all the time.” “When was the last time you reached out to us with news?” he asked. The Diocese has a PR office and we receive a press release, telling us something about what Catholics are doing, almost every day.”
Robert Putnam and Charles Campbell, in American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, have a striking analysis of how the media have played a role in the decline of interest in religion by young adults. The placid, quiet fifties evolved into the cultural revolution of the sixties, which Putnam and Campbell call an “earthquake and a perfect storm.” Everything shook and came apart: sex, drugs, war protest, draft card burning, hostility towards all forms of authority, mistrust of all institutions. And then, the authors said came a counter-movement, a strong reaction in the form of the newly energized conservative evangelicals who espoused traditional family values: led by popular televangelists – Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. The movement was so large it attracted the attention of political operatives and produced the Moral Majority. It was news. Falwell and Robertson could be counted on to say something outrageous, and eminently quotable. Remember Falwell saying that God allowed 9/11 to happen because of feminism, abortion, and homosexuality? Somewhere along the line the movement became fixated on sex and turned downright mean – which stimulated a huge aftershock. Putnam and Campbell concluded that young adults not only left the churches in droves because they were turned off by what they heard and read about Christianity on television and in the newspaper, but also simply lost interest in institutional religion of any form. It wasn’t the media’s fault – but media did play a major role in the entire phenomenon.
2. How Do We Get Our Message Out? (and – how are we/can we get up to date, accurate religious news?)
We could all do a much better job of simply understanding, (and then programming based on our understanding) how media works. What we do best – worship, serve, teach and learn is, quite simply – not mass media-friendly. I’m not advocating at all, but as Bill Coffin advised – “If you want to get in the newspaper or on television – do something newsworthy.” We could at least learn from our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters with their regular press releases. But that requires staff, budget and intentionality – and I don’t see much of that.
We do have a problem when it comes to controversial issues. My denomination’s General Assembly decided, after literally years of discussion, to divest itself from three corporations whose business in Israel was deemed harmful to the Palestinian people and the peace process. At the same time, the church was careful to say that it intended no attack on the state of Israel’s economy or vitality. If the intent was to convey that nuance to the world by way of the media, we might as well have saved our time. I am not advocating: not saying the decision should not have been made simply because it would make people angry – its own members and pretty much the entire Jewish community – only that most mass media isn’t good at nuance. The second part of the action – the disclaimer part – was simply overwhelmed by the first part, the newsworthy part.
We simply must understand that. And if we mean what we say – i.e. that we mean nothing beyond the initial divestment decision we must do a much better job of interpreting and education.
The other side of this issue is huge – how people get news, religious and secular. Every print publication in the world is facing an uncertain future, including denominational magazines. It seems that every week or so a niche journal somewhere goes under. Even major print publications are struggling. Newsweek is gone. Time is shaky. The venerable Ladies Home Journal ended its entire subscription process, laid off the entire staff and now publishes a much smaller magazine for newsstand distribution only.
Print publishing finds itself in a perfect storm. Young people don’t much subscribe to anything, nor read much on paper. I’ve got five pretty smart adult children, who know what’s going on in the nation and world, who care deeply about big issues – and I don’t think any of them subscribe to anything. The only paper print they read is the Christian Century and that’s because I send them complimentary subscriptions. They get up in the morning and instead of the time-honored ritual of retrieving the morning newspaper and then sitting down with a cup of coffee and reading it, page after page, they turn on the computer and look at three, four, five online newspapers. I love my old ritual, so deeply ingrained that I’ll probably continue doing it even if there is no content in the paper that arrives at my door. It is futile to lament, even more futile to fight, like those wonderful souls who kept their horse and buggy, waiting for the Model T craze to end.
Digital publishing is the future: everyone knows – there will, I believe, always be a need for sustained print: thoughtful essays, articles – books you can hold and place on a shelf and admire. But digital communication is simply too good, too fast, and every publication that is still alive and kicking is investing time and resources in it, including the Christian Century. The problem is that no one has figured out how to make enough money at it to pay the costs of producing it and make a profit. That will happen. Advertisers are simply beginning to see the marketing potential of online advertising and will, in time, bring their advertising dollars to the medium that reaches most of the people.
It is truly a new world and the challenges ahead for print media are to invest as much energy, creativity, staff time and resources as possible in figuring out how to be online and pay the bills, and still retain the faithful print subscribers who keep the enterprise afloat.
In terms of how we get religious news in a time of the radical reduction in secular media commitment and column space – there are the denominational magazines, of course, and the Christian Century has responded by significantly expanding our news sections – more pages, more reports and profiles. We’re not quite up to speed with Time, but we do now have a “People” page. And happily, for the digitally adept – which means everybody under the age of 60 – there are online services for religious news that are quite good. We’re proud of our website. Here are a few other options.
On Faith, Sally Quinn’s Washington Post site
Huffington Post religion section
Religious News Service
Catholic News Service
Sightings, Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago
Krista Tippett’s On Being
The Morning Buzz from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI)
3. The History and Impact of the Christian Century
The Christian Century began, as our name intimates, at the beginning of the 20th century. What a time that was.
Two anecdotes:
The Second International Congress of Mathematicians convened in Paris in 1900, as the 19th century gave way to the 20th. German mathematician David Hilbert cheerfully and confidently announced to the delegates that there were just twenty-three remaining problems in the Newtonian system, and once these twenty-three remaining puzzles were solved, we would know everything there is to know about the universe. Hilbert went on to announce that scientific progress would bring about permanent peace and prosperity.
[see Karen Armstrong, The Case For God, p. 262]
In that milieu of high-minded confidence and optimism a World Mission Conference convened in Edinburgh in 1910 to talk about interchurch collaboration in the global missionary enterprise. Twelve hundred delegates from around the world expressed that same cheerful buoyancy about the religious prospect. It was a distinguished gathering: John R. Matt, Lord Balfour, the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Jennings Bryan, Robert E. Speer, Tasuku Harada, president of Doshisha University in Japan. Taking it all in was a 36-year-old clergy delegate from the Christian Church, Disciples of Christ, Charles Clayton Morrison. Two years earlier he had purchased, for $1,500, a floundering journal that had been a publication of the Disciples, The Christian Oracle. He “re-founded” – is the way Morrison put it, and renamed it The Christian Century. He wired reports and editorials back to Chicago.
The conference indentified sectarian division among Christians as the most formidable obstacle to the global advancement of Christianity. Hope and optimism ran high. Morrison wrote: “Everyone feels the presence of a power, not ourselves, which is making for a triumphant advance of Christianity abroad.” [The Christian Century, July 7, 1910; reprinted July 4-11, 1984]
It is perhaps not possible for us to recapture the optimism and hope of the first decades of the 20th century. Because of spectacular advances in science, human life was about to become much better, healthier, more peaceful. Thoughtful Christians believed that with all of that going on combined with mass media and mass transport, the Kingdom of God on Earth was in sight. Newly ecumenical and hopeful Christians believed that the new century would produce “The World For Christ, in our time” It would be, truly, the Christian Century.
The magazine became an eloquent voice for the Social Gospel.
I rather like the way Wikipedia describes us as the “flagship magazine of U.S.” Mainline Protestants…
“For decades the Christian Century has informed and shaped Mainline Christianity. Committed to ‘thinking critically and living faithfully,’ the magazine explains through argument and reflection what it means to believe and live out the Christian faith in our time. As a voice of ‘generous orthodoxy, the Century is both loyal to the church and open to the world.’”
An indication of the influence of the Christian Century is that two other journals were founded to argue with us: Christianity and Crisis, and Christianity Today. We have never been large: the highest circulation was around 45,000. Mostly it has been in the mid-30,000s, but we, as is the case with everyone in the industry, took a major hit during the 2008 financial crisis. We discovered, along with everyone else, that when the economy falters and indicators turn down the one thing everyone does is stop subscribing and renewing subscriptions to print media. Particularly journals. We lost between 15 and 20% of our readership – just at the time the digital revolution was picking up speed. We survived. Many journals did not. We are paying our bills, the subscriber slide has leveled off and stopped, just under 30,000. We are stable financially, and engaging in an effort, the Martin E. Marty Legacy Circle, to build financial security for whatever emerges in our business…the future.
We have been, and are read by academics and pastors, evangelicals who don’t like our consistent progressivism – but can’t stop reading us (a little like continuing to watch the Chicago Bears), and liberals who wish we were more liberal. Among our readers are, or have been, Bill Moyers, Jimmy Carter, former Tarheels basketball coach Dean Smith, and every executive for every national Jewish organization in light of the Israel/Palestine Boycott, Divestment, Sanction issue. Contributors to our pages over the years included Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, Nelson Rockefeller, Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert Kennedy – and of all people, Spiro Agnew. We continue to attract writers of influence in Theological Education and the church.
The Christian Century reported on, analyzed and advocated for issues that have characterized the age and challenged the conscience of churches.
On the topic of war, Charles Clayton Morrison was prominent in the anti-war and peace movement, called himself a “pragmatic non-interventionist” and editorialized, issue after issue, against war preparation. It was this issue that precipitated strong objections from Reinhold Niebuhr, a Contributing Editor, who eventually removed his name from the masthead and started a new journal to reflect his “political realism,” Christianity and Crisis. Morrison never budged until Pearl Harbor and even then called World War II an “unnecessary necessity.” Niebuhr eventually came around and resumed writing for the Century. He also disagreed with Morrison enthusiastically on Prohibition.
The magazine took up the cause of organized labor, child labor, universal suffrage, and Native American rights and launched a crusade against the wartime internment of Japanese Americans. After the war, with Kyle Haseldon as editor, the Christian Century focused on Civil Rights. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Contributing Editor and submitted articles. When he wrote “A Letter From Birmingham Jail” he sent it to the Christian Century, which was the first to publish it. In fact, King’s letter was first edited by Dean Peerman, and one of our treasures is the original copy.
On occasion the Christian Century has ventured into the arena of national politics. The resurgence of political conservatism in the Republican Party inspired pointed editorials by Editor Kyle Haseldon. We published a particularly pointed one entitled “Goldwater No.” A few months later the magazine followed up with an editorial entitled “Johnson Yes.” That prompted complaints to the IRS and for several years the magazine had to operate without its not-for-profit tax-exempt status – with serious financial consequences.
The Century has been consistently ecumenical, supporting and applauding the new National Council of Churches in 1950, and World Council in 1948. We are in a very different place today. Among other dramatic changes the mainline denominations are in decline, and have less money to invest in ecumenism. In response the Century decided with my appointment to invest more attention in and to congregations where Christian faith is taught and nurtured. My hope and aspiration has been for us to be an indispensable resource for congregations struggling to be faithful, sometimes against very long odds, and pastors who lead and must stand up in their congregations, week after week, and say something faithful and useful – to do it without losing the prophetic edginess and thoughtful cultural and political critique that we continue to believe is a unique and maybe life-saving role to play.
About our name – we are much less sanguine about calling any century Christian. The 20th, that began with such cheerful optimism and brought unimagined progress in technology, healthcare, travel – turned out to be one of the most violently tragic in human history. After the Holocaust and Hiroshima no one with their senses about them was calling it the Christian Century. We talked seriously about a name change at the millennium – tried lots of alternatives and were guided, finally, by Marty’s wisdom: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” More importantly, we continue to profess and trust the radical, unconditional love of an incarnate God, still active and working in human history, even our own, and our confidence that the Kingdom of God may not come as Morrison and others confidently believed in 1910, but still comes, now and then, here and there, as Jesus said it would, in the lives of his people. And that makes every century a Christian Century enough that we remain comfortable with our name.
4. In God We Trust: What it means to me and other people in the media
In times of crisis – nations turn to religion, God, the Almighty for affirmation and security.
It was during the Civil War that Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase, after receiving many appeals to put something about god on our coins decided to do it – and ordered that “In God We Trust” be put on some U.S. coins.
Congress approved on April 22, 1864. On May 18, 1908 – Congress mandated that “In God We Trust” be on all coins as alternate to “E Pluribus Unum.” In 1950, Congress adopted as the official national motto – “In God We Trust.” In 1957, “In God We Trust” was put on all U.S. currency.
So – what exactly is it, and what does it mean?
Culture and religion have always lived side by side, more often intertwined. Ancient and modern Empire all have a religio/cultural base that forms values, provides blessing/justification for the empire and whatever it is doing. Sometimes the intertwining is so tight that the political structure itself assumes divinity – Roman Emperors called themselves Divine.
Dictators have always understood the potency of religion – ancient and modern.
The Third Reich overtly took on the trappings of religion — Nordic mythology, symbols, liturgies, celebrations. The Nuremberg Rallies, many have observed, were quasi-religious events.
Marxism did away with churches and replaced them with an ideology with its own scripture, festivals, liturgies and saints. Remember those military displays in Red Square, and if you visit today and are willing to stand in a long line you can respect, venerate the saints whose bodies are interred in the wall and actually see a famous relic – old Lenin on display, dry as a prune.
The late James Nichols liked to talk about how the French Revolutionaries, who overthrew both the monarchy and all ecclesiastical authority upon which the monarch was dependent – turned violently anti-clerical, but credit to our new civil religion, “La Patri.”
The Christian Church lived for 1700 years in tension with the various civil religious – sometimes entirely co-opted, sometimes resisting, sometimes critiquing.
Thomas Jefferson came up with a new, radical paradigm – a constitutional separation of church and state – to make certain each stayed out of the other’s business.
Jefferson understood, perhaps a few others, then or now, the ill effects – on both, when they become too cozy.
No one thought it would work. It is still not universally understood or approved of. An astonishing percentage still think the USA is a Christian nation.
It is still potent medicine politically. But what Thomas Jefferson’s experiment did, in fact, was create space – some might say the necessity – for the emergence of a Civil Religion.
In our time, Robert Bellah thought most creatively and helpfully about it. Bellah, who became a believer – an Episcopalian – was clear that civil religion and revealed religion are distinct phenomenona. And the separation and freedom for revealed religion, not only to practice but critique the state and its civil religion, is absolutely imperative.
So Yes – In God We Trust indicates the existence of Civil Religion, with its sacred documents: The Declaration of Independence, Bill of Rights, Constitution, and Gettysburg Address;
- sacred spaces: Bunker Hill, Yorkstown, Antietam, Gettysburg, Iwo Jima
- sacred times and holidays; July 4, Memorial Day, Veterans Day, complete with public liturgies.
And the nation does turn to its civil religion for comfort and security at times of threat and fear (as it always has).
After 9/11 – we started singing “God Bless America” at baseball games (not Wrigley Field – where “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” just may be the hymn of another civil religion – The Church of Baseball, as Susan Sarandon put it in Bull Durham).
Bellah was helpful in pointing out the positive functions of our Civil Religion. Civil Religion functions as “social glue,” Bellah said. He argued that there is a religious covenant and a good and noble one in our founding documents – The Declaration of Independence, The Bill of Rights, The Constitution, the Civil Rights Acts, and Voting Rights Bill. It is based, not on our superiority as a people and destiny to rule – but on principles of equality, justice, liberty, and the common good.
To be sure – we have never lived up to those principles. We have broken the covenant, the title of his fine book, The Broken Covenant, which has stood the test of time.
I took it off the shelf and was glad I did. He wrote on p. 141:
“The recognition of a broken covenant does not mean to me the rejection of the American past. We are not innocent, we are not the savior of humankind, and it is well for us to grow up enough to know that. But there have been Americans at every point of our history who have tried to pick up the broken pieces, tried to start again, tried once again to build an ethical society in the light of a transcendent ethical vision. That too is part of our tradition, and if we can find no sustenance there, our prospect is even darker than it now seems.”
That phrase – about Americans trying “to build an ethical society in the light of a transcendent ethical vision” — struck me.
Of course the God on our quarters and dollar bills is not Yahweh, Elohim, not the God we Christians believe loves all of creation with such a love as to become incarnate in it, live in it, and die in it. It is our task to be clear about that. Sometimes our belief in the God of Abraham and Jesus calls us to challenge and hold to account the nation and its civil religion.
But there is something about that “transcendent ethical vision” – it is still there in the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, the 14th Amendment, the Civil Rights Act – even though never fully implemented, that is well worth celebrating. And insofar as “In God We Trust” means that – our transcendent ethical vision, it’s fine with me, and if we ever start singing “God Bless America” at Wrigley Field, I’ll definitely sing along.