Crossroads -- Parts of this land are your land, parts of this land are our land

Some elite-market reporters are learning the value of living in flyover country

Back in the 1990s, one of America’s most famous commentators on religion and public life — Harvey “Secular City” Cox of Harvard Divinity School — learned a lesson that many mainstream journalists need to know about.

To cut to the chase, Cox travelled to Regent University, the graduate school founded by the Rev. Pat Robertson, and learned that the faculty and students there were way more complicated (diverse, even) than he expected.

I thought of that episode while prepping for this week’s “Crossroads” podcast, which focuses on a fascinating Columbia Journalism Review article written by Chris Moody, who was one of my students at Palm Beach University and then, in 2006, part of the first class of the full-semester Washington Journalism Center program. This was the headline on Moody’s feature noted, “More journalists are leaving big cities — and finding America.”

But let’s start with Cox, looking at a quote or two from “The Warring Visions of the Religious Right,” an essay the famous religious-studies professor wrote for Atlantic Monthly. Cox noted that it was hard to impress his sherry-sipping colleagues in the Harvard faculty lounge, but their eyebrows arched way high when he accepting an invitation to do some lectures at Regent.

Cox was warmly welcomed by the Regent faculty, which he was surprised to learn included Episcopalians, Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox believers.

Politically … the students and faculty members I met represented a somewhat wider spectrum than I had anticipated. There are some boundaries, of course. I doubt that a pro-choice bumper sticker would go unremarked in the parking lot, or that a gay-pride demonstration would draw many marchers. But the Regent student newspaper carried an opinion piece by the well-known politically liberal evangelical … Tony Campolo. … If there is a "line" at Regent, which would presumably be a mirror image of the political correctness that is allegedly enforced at elite liberal universities, it is not easy to locate.

The bottom line: Cox found some limits to the diversity at Regent, but they were limits that left him thinking about the cultural lines that defined his life inside Harvard culture. In terms of debates on critically important topics, in religion and politics, which school was actually more diverse?

Near the end, there was a Cox quote that — in my mind — connected with Moody’s piece for CJR. Cox noted:

Values are rooted in narrative; so the historical religious traditions, including Christianity and Judaism, along with secular philosophies of life, will have to be studied as viable life options. Without roots, disembodied "values" become mere preferences and eventually dissolve into the ether.

Like the people I met at Regent, I look forward to continuing this vital dialogue. I also agree that for too long evangelicals and more-liberal Protestants, Catholics, Pentecostals, and people of other religious traditions have huddled in compounds of their own making rather than asking what they can do together to encourage the spiritual renaissance they all believe America needs.

When it comes to influential “compounds of their own making,” it would be hard to name compounds with more clout than the elite newsrooms along the Acela Amtrak route in the deep-blue cities of the Northeast.

Moody’s piece starts with this assumption — that in the post-pandemic world of remote work — newsroom leaders have been more willing to let some of their reporters leave the coastal power cities and move into communities in what many call as “flyover country.”

Part of the hook for this piece is personal experience and Moody makes that clear. This summary is helpful:

As a journalist who decamped from Manhattan to Chattanooga, Tennessee, during the pandemic and now lives in the rural mountains of North Carolina, I can attest to the benefits of living well beyond the tidy zip codes that a plurality of journalists call home. My new neighbors are far more diverse in terms of their ideological views and socioeconomic backgrounds than the circles I ran in while living in New York and, before that, Washington. I had lost touch, and I’ve spent the past several years taking stock of my blind spots. In 2021, when officials in Washington were busy denying that inflation was a real problem, I listened to my neighbors express shock and concern over the sudden increase in the cost of lumber, construction supplies, or groceries — changes I wouldn’t have picked up on so quickly while living in New York.

There are anecdotes from people with elite bylines, including one — I chuckled at this — linked to a story that I dissected last year in a podcast and post for GetReligion: “WPost finds a 'good' religion vs. 'bad' religion sermon in small-town Georgia.”

That story was about a progressive Baptist whose church was “thriving” after he made the strategic decision to pray at a Pride event. His “thriving” church has about 100 in attendance. If you know anything about the Bible Belt, you know that a Baptist church with that number of people in the pews is actually rather small.

But I digress.

Here’s the big idea in the podcast: Elite newsrooms allowing reporters to live in the heartland offer opportunities for reporters to interact — as Moody noted — with voices and points of view that they would not have encountered otherwise.

In the end, however, a newsroom is only as diverse as the worldviews and source lists found in the work of its editors and superstars. Also, news budgets (another reference to my “The Evolving Religion of Journalism” Acton essay) are driven by the desires of a publications’ subscribers. Concrete information silos exist because customers want them.

What has happened to the worldview and diversity map of journalism? I will end with two crucial pieces of the Moody essay — some background information and then a killer anecdote.

A few years on, these journalists say they’ve found themselves exposed to communities they never would have otherwise known, allowing them to better comprehend the diverse nation they cover. In doing so, they also built stronger bonds with their readers, helping to address the ever-declining level of trust in the news media. …

Journalists weren’t always so consolidated. As late as 2002, the places where reporters lived “matched the distribution of the overall population fairly closely,” said David H. Weaver, a professor emeritus of journalism at Indiana University who has studied the demographics of American journalists through large-scale surveys since 1982. 

By 2019, however, a Pew Research study found that more than 20 percent of newsroom employees were huddled in just three American cities: New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC. Among digital news workers, 41 percent lived and worked in the Northeast. These digital reporters were least likely to call the Midwest or the South home. 

Now for that amazing anecdote, care of a candid confession from a talented New York Times scribe who, truth be told, is a graduate of one of America’s most influential evangelical colleges.

This is long, but essential:

Getting out of the coastal cities can also simply make for more perceptive journalism. When Ruth Graham was hired to cover religion for the New York Times in 2020, her editors agreed that the paper’s Manhattan headquarters wouldn’t be an ideal home for a reporter who needs access to large populations of conservative evangelical Christians. Instead, she settled on Dallas, a growing and diverse city in the middle of the country that also serves as a base of modern evangelicalism.

North Texas — where churches with several hundred members are considered “small” — provides Graham with unparalleled access to sources on her beat. Story ideas come from everyday life: conversations at the supermarket, billboards she passes on the highway, or the T-shirt brands the young evangelicals wear at the local coffee shop where Graham likes to write. Dallas is also a major thoroughfare for religious leaders, so Graham could ensure face time with the people she covers whenever they visited. “Everyone comes through Dallas,” she said.

A few years ago, a press agent asked Graham to have coffee with a potential source who said he was working on a Christian film project. She had never heard of him, but she took the meeting. While at the coffee shop, their conversation was interrupted by fans who asked the filmmaker for selfies. Whoever this person was, he was obviously already resonating. The man was Dallas Jenkins, director of The Chosen, now a massively popular series about the life of Jesus Christ.

“I would not have been able to pick Dallas Jenkins out of a lineup,” Graham said. “It’s that kind of encounter and moment that perks my ears up to know what people around me here are watching, thinking about, spending their time and money on.”

Yes, that final sentence there reminds me of the practical definition of “discipleship” that I developed decades ago while teaching at Denver Seminary. My secular definition consisted of three questions:

“How do you spend your time?”

“How do you spend your money?”

“How do you make your decisions?”

Ask those questions about people in pews (and also the “unchurched”) and you will gain valuable insights into their lives. As it turns out, these questions also work when journalists with open minds try to understand the lives of ordinary people around them and in other parts of this diverse nation.

Enjoy the podcast and, please, pass it along to others.

FIRST IMAGE: A recent Chris Moody appearance on the Megyn Kelly Show, discussing a popular series of podcasts trying to learn more about the mysterious life and career of Internet superstar Matt Drudge.