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As the early coverage of the Mitt Romney address continues, I would like to ask a basic question: Are most mainstream reporters assuming that the Christians — Catholic, Orthodox, evangelical and mainline — who do not consider Mormonism “to be Christian” are those who know little or nothing about the details of Mormon doctrine or those who actually know quite a bit and disagree with it?
In a cover story for the Dec. 3 Time, Jeffrey Kluger quickly jumps into a collective voice, oddly crediting humanity as a whole for the most noble behavior while also blaming it for the worst horrors. As early as the second paragraph, he’s revealing a tone of scientism that weaves throughout the piece:
Five years ago, political scientists Louis Bolce and Gerald De Maio wrote a fascinating story about the media’s failure to cover the rise to power of “secularists” in the Democratic Party. Bolce and De Maio studied The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times between 1990 and 2000. While the papers ran 682 stories about the GOP and evangelical or fundamentalist Christians between 1990 and 2000, they ran only 43 stories identifying secularists with the Democratic Party.
Under normal conditions, we do not go out of our way to feature the work of outside writers. But in this case, there is this interesting commentary piece by an outside writer who used to be an inside writer.
I’m not sure if it’s GetReligion policy or anything, but we try our best to avoid giving hatemongering Westboro Baptist Church any more publicity than that which its members so desperately crave and receive. But this month’s $10.9 million judgment against the group makes it a bit hard to ignore. The Baltimore Sun‘s Matthew Dolan went to Topeka, Kan., to see how Westboro has affected its hometown:
If there is one edition of The Economist you should pick up off the newsstand, it is this week’s because of its special report on the state of religion in the world.
I was too slow to express my interest in posting about David Kirkpatrick’s epic New York Times Magazine essay, so Terry beat me to it, and with greater thoroughness. Still, Terry graciously invited me to write an additional post if I had a different perspective on Kirkpatrick’s reporting.
