Host Bill Baker sits with RNS Editor-in-Chief Bob Smietana for a conversation regarding the history and future of religion reporting in America and why religion journalism matters now.

Transcript

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

How did you get started in this religion journalism world?

There are two answers to that. One is: I was a religion major in college. I was going to be a pre-med major… I went to my first religion class at eight o’clock on a Monday morning, the first quarter of school, and I was so intrigued, that I became a religion major. Much, probably to the chagrin of my father who wondered what I would do with that, I wrote for our college newspaper, and then I did nonprofit work for a long time. Then in my thirties I went back to school and wanted write about religion, and so I went back and did some freelancing, got a Master’s in writing, and landed a job at a little tiny magazine but also did a lot of freelancing for wire services and sort of built from there.

It’s something I always wanted to do, and then there’s a little serendipity that I finished my master’s degree right when this magazine had an opening for an associate editor. I landed and took off from there.

Are there many people doing religion writing anymore? It seems like there used to be a lot… And now I wonder how many there are really left.

Well, there are there are more than you might think. There are fewer newspapers: especially regional and local newspapers. For example, I’m a member of the Religion News Association which is a journalism association for reporters. We used to have categories for very small newspapers, kind of local… My hometown newspaper The Sun Chronicle of Admiral Massachusetts which is a town with 3,400 people. They had a religion writer and that’s not the case anymore. That category has been melded with other worlds.

We have a lot of young religion reporters right now. There are a lot of 20 to 30-year-olds writing at places like the Post, or The Times, or for Sojourners, or for new web sites that we have never heard of before. So, we’ve had this kind of explosion of digital journalism and a lot of young reporters wanting to get into religion writing.

How has religion writing changed over the years in America?

Oh, it’s changed a ton! There are press associations for religious press who used to be quite big. The Associated Church Press is one of them, also the Evangelical Press. So, I think President Truman [was] one of the early presidents met with the editors of The Associated Church Press back in the day. So, that is a major thing. So, the religious journals have sort of dropped and now some of the resistance have become a little more promotional. But it has ebbed and flowed. I was reading some history of our association the other day for a project and in the ‘70s there were about 70 members.

And people wondered if there was going to survive and then it blew up to several hundred members and we’ve got… 700 members of our association now. So, it’s ebbed and flowed.

What is Religion News Service? What do you do exactly?

So, we are a non-sectarian religion journalism site that was started in the thirties. It was started in the ‘30s because at the time the most the religion reporting wasn’t great. In fact, it was very anti-Semitic. So, there wasn’t good religion reporting, [no] good unbiased religion reporting. And when they were reporting on religion, they did these spectacular things, or they did sort of puff pieces. There weren’t people doing good, solid reporting. That made important topics interesting. Or, they either didn’t cover important topics, or they covered it poorly.

But we are a non-sectarian religion journalism site. We try to talk about matters of faith, belief, and we’re a little bit like the Associated Press for religion – [that] is what we’ve been called in the past. A lot of people pick up our coverage. But we are a great religion site that has great religion reporting and treats everyone the same.

Religion is a complex subject. How does one cover it? There’s theology, there’s the politics of religion, there are many hundreds of faiths… Where do you start? Do you go really deep or do you bounce along the surface?

We try to go deep at RNS. What has really been our calling card is going deep in understanding. The great part about religion reporting all those things that you just talked about. There is. It really runs from birth to death. And actually before you’re born, religion is concerned about, and after you die. And every part of life: from what you eat, and what you wear, to how you bury your dead, too what kind of public policy, to who you can marry. All these things… how we should treat our neighbors, to what our public policy on immigration should be, that’s all part of the mix.

I mean obviously, we look at places where religion impacts kind of day to day life; to see if it’s the daily life of people, the day to day life of the nation. You’re always looking for interesting and in different kinds of things and trying to get as many different kinds of religious voices.

You know we’ve got to cover the major religious groups in America. We have to cover Catholics well, we have Protestants well, Jews and Muslims well, both [groups]. We have to cover non-believers as well these days, but then every one of those groups has subcategories.

One of the things about religion is that, and you talked really about those serious parts of religion, but religion goes from many respects the silly to the very serious. And you know how on that continuum where do you try to fit in, or do not hesitate to cover some of the crazy aspects of the world of religious life in America.

Crazy is the interesting word. So, every religious group, to its participants and its practitioners, looks normal to outsiders and looks crazy. If I say to you that we follow a man who walked on water and rose from the dead you might be a little suspicious. If I say someone was under a tree and became enlightened, you might be suspicious. If I say someone got talked to by an angel in a cave, and I’m basing my life on that revelation, you might look in other circumstances look suspiciously. For people in that tradition, it is perfectly normal.

I’ll tell you about best story I’ve ever covered. One thing about extreme religious groups or unusual groups is they reveal a lot of things.

So, I did a couple stories I’ll tell you about very briefly; one of which had the greatest title ever: Apocalypse Meow. This was about a group of Pentecostals who had become convinced that their pastor was the new messiah and their pastor had started mixing religion with Egyptian beliefs and began worshipping their cats, because their cats really saved them at the end of the apocalypse. And they were in a cat rescue here in town. And I believe the pastor had become fairly abusive to her folks. It started out as a normal like cat rescue place. But what was interesting about that is you could look at one unusual belief, what does it mean, and two, how do people end up believing things that seem unusual.

A new group doesn’t say you should worship me as your Messiah. They start they have relationships with people, and they have friendships with people. And then the person asks for a little bit more and bit more and then by the time you are far enough down the road you’re too far into let go, right?

And then I’ve also covered Pentecostal snake handlers, which are really interesting, but that is like really raw religion it’s based on…There’s a passage in the Book of Mark about picking up serpents and drinking poison, and they believe those were the evidence. But they push the question of religious liberty should you be able to handle serpents? Because in the state of Tennessee you can’t own a rattlesnake.

But they need a rattlesnake for their worship service, so, is that allowed? And what are the rules for that? And what are the boundaries of acceptable religion versus not accepted religion?

But we do silly stories that make you smile. Is a story which is actually a very serious story, but very kind off the beaten trail…There’s a guy, a Russian Pentecostal man who kept getting 666 everywhere. On his badge, on his paycheck. He quit his job over this because he thought it was a sign of the devil.

Now, there’s a little there’s a little bit of humor in that. There’s a little bit of kind of weird factor in that, but there was someone took this piece so seriously that they quit their job. So, you can get both of those things. I mean, religion is funny sometimes and it’s sad and it’s very uplifting and it makes you angry. It does all those things and that’s what’s great about it.

Religion these days has had a lot of questions around it because there have been issues of abuse – of all faiths. Catholic, many of the religions in America, and some bad behavior of individuals who are leaders of religious groups. How do you handle those difficult subjects? Where do you find the truth?

A couple of angles to that. First, you do a lot of reporting. Because you know you’re talking about very serious topics you want to make sure you get right. You’re talking about people have a lot of influence. You want to make sure you get it right. A friend of mine once described to me this way when you’re writing about religion… You’re writing about somebody’s kids, or their family. It’s very sensitive. You have to be careful, and these often are powerful religious figures. You have to hold them to account as well.

Religion goes very deep. Faith and beliefs go very deep. People don’t like it when you start trampling around and looking under the rug in their category. How do you protect yourself from that, but yet still get the true story when people are trying to protect themselves.

Yes. In a lot of journalism, if I want to know what the federal government is spending on something I just file a Freedom of Information Act, and get a lot of material. This stuff is mostly the Freedom of Information Act or FOIA, they call it. You can’t FOIA a church, so you have their voluntary stuff. I think you just keep reporting on it. You talk to people who say, here are the facts that we know. But what you don’t do is mock people. You don’t say: oh, look at this dumb thing that they believe.

You say this is what they say believe you use their own words.

You have them talk about it and what it means. For example, God told me to do that… Well, how do you know is God talking? How do you know God, and not yourself? Because that’s what, for example, a minister – that his or her job is to interpret God’s will for their congregation. Well that’s a big task, right? How do they know what is their will, how do they know what is God’s will? I know these schools have formulas and teaching to kind of keep people within boundaries.

And so, you talk to them. When they use religious language say, “God told me…” Well, okay. How did you know that was God talking to you? How do you know that this is the right thing to do, and you treat people seriously. And that means writing about the good things they do, and the bad things they do.

Bob, tell us about the changes now in religious reporting and what in 2018, and 2019, and 2020 are going to be the big subjects that you have to cover, as well as the panoply of religious territory changes.

So, a few things are obviously we’re going to cover religion in the election. We’re going to cover where the Catholic Church is heading and the current scandal. But we’re also looking at the bigger picture. So, America is changing it’s becoming more demographically diverse. The economy is changing, our views on social issues are changing, our political views are changing, our technology is changing. And that’s affecting us. It’s like the whole country has been thrown into a blender and we’re going to see what’s going to come out! Right? We don’t know and we’re going to do the same things.

Old institutions are dying off. New ones are being born. New leaders are coming up; much more diverse. Folks who never got a chance to speak, are having a chance to speak. And sometimes they’re talking about old grievances, so the whole religious landscape is being rewritten before our eyes. And so, we’re going to try and cover that religious change.

We’re trying to cover Hispanic religion. It’s a topic that’s almost completely not covered. We don’t know what Hispanic Catholics are doing. We don’t know what Hispanic Pentecostals are doing, [or what] Hispanic Protestants or Hispanic nonbelievers [are doing].

We don’t often cover the black church. We don’t cover Pentecostals in general. We don’t cover Asian-American religion. We don’t cover Muslims as much. So, when we’re covering Islam is also often so much about politics. We don’t just cover the day to day life of American Muslims or American Jews. So, we’re covering this kind of transformed religious landscape.

What is it going to look like in the future and how are religious institutions and religious congregations and religious individuals going to handle this transformation in society? Will it change what they believe? Will they cling to what they believe? Where the conflicts and how are they going to work through these generational changes?

Is religion becoming even more important as a subject to cover? It seems like in a society as politically stressed and as polarized as the American society is today that religion may actually have a bigger role – it has a significant role – but may have even a bigger role in the future.

I think so. I think religion is the most important beat in the news business. The most interesting beat, the most influential beat. And religion in American culture had a pretty good relationship.

You know there are tax benefits for religious groups. There are religious charities that do a lot of work. The biggest part of the philanthropic world is religious giving. There are religious hospitals. When religion had a more prominent place, there was deference given to religion. Now we have to share.

So, it’s a bigger story because religious groups are having to redefine their role in the culture. And when that’s redefined, people are going to fight harder for what they think is right. So, we’re having discussions we never had before. You know, we’ve had these discussions about what are the relationships between religious groups and people who are LGBT. We’ve had these big lawsuits over contraception… We’re going to have lawsuits over same-sex marriage. We’re going to have lawsuits over the role of religious teaching in medical situations and Catholic hospitals are growing part of the landscape.

So, I’ll give a personal example. When my daughter was born, our midwife moved from a women’s hospital in Evanston, Illinois, where we lived that time, to a Catholic hospital in Evanston. And then we wanted to get her tubes tied, and she couldn’t get that at the Catholic hospital. She could have at the other hospital. So, we just thought: Okay, well it’s inconvenient, but it’s a Catholic hospital. Well, I think now people would say, why do I have to make that choice?

Why is the Catholic Hospital’s teaching influencing my health care? That’s a question we weren’t asking. 15 to 20 years ago. But we’re going to be asking now. Those kinds of questions [are] going to be important because everything is changing and so our whole relationship is being rethought. And so it becomes a source of more conflict and we don’t know the answers to some of these questions.

You’ve talked about some of the big issues and obviously, Religion News Service does a lot with those, tied to our whole country, and our society, and culture. But there are of course little unusual issues as you drill down into the myriad of religions in this country. Do you have the ability to cover all of this stuff, or how do you make those choices editorially?

That’s a great question. We try, and we’re trying to do both. Trying to cover the big picture and the small picture at the same time, as much as we can. So, we are lucky that we have a lot of freelance reporters who want to write for us; a lot of religion reporters. So, we can with our staff, we focus on the big picture, and with our freelancers we can focus on the little picture.

But a little story can be important – you just got to find the right thing. And everything can be important! I’ll give you an example:

So, one of the biggest stories I’ve ever covered was a zoning story over the construction of a new mosque here in Tennessee, in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. [It] got national coverage. We had people in the streets. It’s a zoning story, right? And Muslims are still a small part of American culture – in terms of population – but it was a huge story. Because folks didn’t want this mosque being built, and it’s a part of big cultural change. So, you can often use the situation to tell the universal and then you use the universal to see how it affects the particular.

So, we’re trying to do both. But editorially there are more religious stories than we could ever publish. Pretty much every week there are as many… So, we are trying to find – or make sure we’re keeping an eye on – the big picture and then not missing small stories.

Well Bob, over the months and years ahead, we’re going to be counting on your steady editorial hand to guide us through this complex maze of faith, and faith decisions, and theological decisions that we will all be facing in our society and be facing.

Thank you. You’re welcome. It was great. Thank you for having me.