Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
One of the threads I rarely see covered in our larger American media outlets is what I’d call a “meta-theme” — the way that religion and politics, an oft-incendiary combo, are twinned in our national history. My colleague Mollie is much more of an expert in this arena than I am, but as a historian’s daughter, I am steeped in the tension between American sacred and secular voices, one that goes back to the Puritans and the Quakers.
As you would expect, your GetReligionistas have received quite a few breathless emails asking us why this site has had nothing to say about President Barack Hussein Obama’s plans to address the nation’s public-school students about the importance of discipline and education in their lives. Haven’t we noticed all of the protests by parents from sea to shining sea?
The arrest of Phillip Garrido last month left a lot of questions unanswered. How had he kept the 11-year-old girl he kidnapped captive for 18 years? How had he fathered two daughters with her and why had his wife agreed to keep the three in a backyard shed? And what was the role of religion in all of this?
There are two kinds of people in this world who cannot avoid wrestling with the term “theodicy” — clergy (especially hospital chaplains) and reporters who are committed to covering religion news.
I’ve been pondering why it’s important, as we GetReligionistas do from time to time, to venture beyond our shores to either see how American media cover stories in foreign countries, or the diffferent ways in which foreign journalists cover religion through the lens of their own cultures. We love to make merry with the British press and their sometimes outrageous tendency to make a lot out of a very little and for sometimes dancing on the cliff of truth — but do we understand why? It’s not only that the British market is competitive — the way the Brits cover religion says something about English culture.
I opened up my Washington Post this morning and immediately thought about a forum that took place in my own Orthodox parish last night.
So the Republican candidate for governor of Virginia wrote a master’s thesis about family-friendly government policies. Make that traditional family-friendly policies. Written in the 1980s, it suggested that the government should craft policies that encourage traditional families (as opposed to “cohabitors, homosexuals or fornicators”). The Washington Post‘s coverage of Bob McDonnell thesis is at DEFCON 1 — just a couple days into it we’re now up to two-front page stories, three inside stories, two columns, one house editorial and one cartoon (as of yesterday, that is).
When elected officials promote BS about politics or world affairs or the state of the economy, it’s a reporters responsibility to let readers know. (Not saying it happens often enough, but that is the expectation.) But what about when a pol says something religious that doesn’t pass the smell rest?
