Reporters receive all kinds of bizarre things in the mail (analog or digital). Religion-beat reporters have been known to have some really, really bizarre items come out of nowhere.
My all-time “favorite” (I am using that term loosely) was a 35-page, handwritten manifesto detailing why — using lots of biblical references — Barbra Streisand was the Antichrist. I filed that one away. That wasn’t the case, however, with the typed, unsigned note in a plain white envelope that pointed to public documents detailing the arrest of a prominent clergyman for a sex crime committed in a public bathroom.
Journalists offered hot documents have to ask two questions:
(1) Can this information be verified as accurate?
(2) What are the motives of the person sharing the information? That question leads to another: How can those motives be explained to readers without identifying the person who provided the documents?
It goes without saying that documents from an on-the-record source will be trusted — by informed readers and “stockholders” in the story — more than those from a source demanding anonymity. The key is to give as much information as possible about the source of the information as possible, including why anonymity was acceptable in this case.
This leads us to the Nashville Tennessean story that rocked the world of Southern Baptist Convention social media, the one with this headline: “Inside the Southern Baptist Convention's battle over race and what it says about the denomination.”
The entire story pivots on documents linked to a former SBC president, the Rev. James Merritt, and the Rev. J.D. Greear, the convention’s leader at the time of the events described in the story. It also helps to know that Merritt was the chair of the national convention resolutions committee in 2021.
All of this focuses on efforts to pass a 2021 SBC resolution that condemned “critical race theory” outright — by name and with no qualifications, as desired by leaders of the SBC’s most conservative churches. Here is a key passage:
