And now, two personal notes from tmatt

"On Religion" heads into year 36 and an appeal for help with Rational Sheep

It’s time for that cliche: “And now, a word from our sponsor.”

In other words, I’d like to make a personal comment or two. One is about my past, and present, and the other is about the present and, I hope, the future.

Let’s start with the future. This Rational Sheep project is (slowly) growing and I know that it’s crucial, in the next few months, for me to find ways to share what’s happening here with people that I believe will be interested, but may not be plugged into the Substack world. I hope to visit a few podcasts (Does anyone know how to reach Jordan Peterson?) and do some strategic speaking engagements.

Meanwhile, my daughter has created promotional materials for friends of Rational Sheep to hand out at church, school, social events and (this is a joke) shopping malls. OK, bookstores are fine.

I thought I share a byte of that here, using the postcard-sized format. If anyone wants full .pdf files of these materials (including bookmarks and a tri-fold brochure), let me know at tmatt@tmatt.net and I’ll try to pull that off.

Meanwhile, here is the back of that card, with thanks to Rod “Live Not By Lies” Dreher and Father Gregory Mathewes-Green, my spiritual father, for the kind quotes. By the way, you can now pre-order Dreher’s next book, “Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age.”

Now, about the past and present.

In terms of my mainstream journalism work, my nationally syndicated “On Religion” column reached a landmark last week — heading into its 36th year. You can access more than three decades of that work at Tmatt.net (the column is older than the public Internet). However, I thought I would share the anniversary column here for anyone who hasn’t seen it elsewhere.

My headline: “Into year 36: When it comes to religion news, many journalists are in a class of their own.” Yes, I started work on this before the NPR debacle.

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After studying relevant police reports, Americans Against Antisemitism issued a 2023 document noting the obvious – that rising numbers of Orthodox Jews were being assaulted in New York City.

The Orthodox, especially Hasidic Jews, were victims in 94% of the 194 antisemitic assaults between 2018-2022 reported to the city's Hate Crimes Task Force. Most of these crimes occurred in Jewish neighborhoods and some were captured on video. Only two of the criminal cases led to convictions.

Assaults on Orthodox men and women "ranged from spitting, to punching, to someone being hit in the face with a brick," noted Batya Ungar-Sargon of Newsweek, in her book "Bad News." The crime wave produced few news reports until a 2019 mass shooting at a Kosher supermarket in Jersey City and a machete attack on a Hannukah party in Monsey, north of New York City.

Then came COVID-19 and Orthodox Jews, along with others in close-knit ethnic and immigrant communities, were hit hard.

"Because the national news media saw that they could cast the Jews as the villains of the virus instead of its victims, they suddenly couldn't get enough of them," wrote Ungar-Sargon, an Orthodox Jew. "Every outlet began running pieces … blaming Orthodox recalcitrance to social distancing or mask wearing for spreading the virus, not just among their own communities but to their neighbors, too."

Many of these pandemic-driven stories were valid – but packed with errors about Orthodox beliefs and traditions. Ungar-Sargon asked: Why did journalists jump into "hyperdrive" in this case, after downplaying all those antisemitic attacks? Why do many journalists see Americans they consider "less intelligent and uneducated" as "beyond salvation, irredeemable and filled with hate"? She has continued her work in a new book, "Second Class."

In the late 1970s, researchers began asking why journalists often struggle when covering religion stories or avoid religious news altogether. I wrote my 1982 University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign graduate project on this topic and some of that work was published by Quill, the magazine of the Society of Professional Journalists.

This week marks the start of my 36th year writing this "On Religion" column. I also spent 20 years leading the GetReligion.org project, which closed in February, but its archive remains online for those studying religion and the press.

A decade into this column's life, a Scripps Howard News Service colleague shared an unpublished manuscript that began with examining the addresses and ZIP codes of 3,400 journalists in markets such as Little Rock, Arkansas, and Knoxville, Tennessee, as well as Washington, D.C., and New York City.

Peter A. Brown asked marketing experts to analyze where journalists lived and found that they chose neighborhoods with labels such as "Bohemian mix" and "money and brains." Even in the heartland, journalists were more likely to be single than married, with children. They read The New Yorker instead of Christianity Today. They favored theater over suburban yard sales.

Brown concluded that journalists tend to share cultural and educational backgrounds, as opposed to articulated political or religious dogmas. Journalists often attend similar schools, are highly secular and share similar cultural heroes and enemies.

Far too many journalists, he told me, do not "share political, religious or monetary values with the general population." As for journalism about traditional believers, he added: "Any business that doesn't understand or respect the lives of somewhere between 25 and 40% of its potential customers isn't a business that is very serious about growing or even surviving."

That was a quarter of a century ago.

Today, Ungar-Sargon is convinced unexamined class issues shape journalism about millions of Americans. For example, political reporters rarely examine the beliefs of church-going Blacks and Latinos, as well as the cultural differences between religiously unaffiliated "nones" who are atheists-agnostics and those who are "none of the above" believers, who are often blue-collar workers or unemployed.

"If journalists keep down-streaming the role of religion, they are not going to understand how many people – Blacks, whites, Latinos and others – look at life," she said, reached by telephone.

"You can't sneer and act like it's completely lame for people to believe that God is real and has something to do with how they live their lives. .... If you do that, you are not going to understand ordinary Americans, especially working-class people."

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Thank you for your help and support!

Please leave comments to let me know topics that interest you. I’ll be doing a post next week in which I seek reader feedback on what I think is an important pop-culture issue.

Hang in there.