"Good" religion vs. "bad" religion -- in mass media and in life

A (not New Age) meditation on questions linked to closing GetReligion a year ago

A year ago today, I clicked a mouse and closed GetReligion.org — a website dedicated to examining how the mainstream press struggles to cover religion in the news.

In our 20-year run, we published every single day and often two or three times a day. A tech pro estimated that we produced between 15 and 20 million words. The website is still open, as an archive for people researching this subject.

There was a lot to write about.

During that time, I heard plenty of conservatives and “religious people” — the two groups overlap quite a bit — saying that it this journalistic failure to “get” religion had a simple cause: Journalists are “secular” people who hate religion.

I kept arguing that this explanation was simplistic.

Yes, I met some secularists during my years in newsrooms. But that was not the norm. Instead, I worked with lots of folks — skilled folks and committed to their craft — who had decided that there was “good” religion and “bad” religion. Here is a bite of what that sounded like, drawn from a lecture that I gave to an audience of newspaper editors in the mid-1990s.

… I raised a style question at the Rocky Mountain News while working on a 1988 story linked to abortion. Why is it, I asked an assistant city editor, that we call one camp “pro- choice,'' its chosen label, and the other “anti-abortion,'' a term it abhors? We could, I said, use more neutral terms. I wasn't fond of “anti-abortion,'' but at least it was literal. On the other side, I suggested a phrase such as ``pro-abortion rights.'' This might be wordy, but would avoid the spin of “pro-choice.''

The assistant editor said “pro-choice'' was accurate, because the real issue was choice, not abortion. In that case, I said, we should be even-handed and use “pro-life.''

The city editor stepped in. Minus a few descriptive words, here's what he said: Look, the pro-choice people are pro-choice. The people who say they are pro-life aren't really pro-life. They're nothing but a bunch of hypocritical right-wing religious fanatics and we'll call them whatever we want to call them.

Now, let me stress that this particular journalist was one of the best editors I ever had, in terms of affirming the need for solid coverage of religion and working hard to see that happen. Simply stated, the editor liked — maybe “trusted” is a better word — progressive religious groups more than conservative ones (especially evangelical and Pentecostal Christians).

In the final GetReligion.org post — “Farewell, after 20 years: Why we did what we did” — I noted:

Many times, readers called GetReligion a “conservative” website because we kept stressing the need for the mainstream press to be accurate, fair-minded and even balanced when covering religious groups, on the left and right.

The basic idea we kept hearing from some readers was that there are religious groups that have beliefs that are acceptable and others that do not. There was no need to accurately report the views of believers who were, according to many newsroom leaders, wrong.

In that finale, I noted that, more and more, I was using — primarily in tweets on X — the following equation to describe a core doctrine of the niche-news era in which journalists (on the left and the right) now live: “Good people can do nothing bad. Bad people can do nothing good.”

That’s a flawed statement in terms of journalism or theology. It’s an equation that causes journalists to miss lots of important stories, while warping many of the stories that get covered.

You could call this an issue of “liberal” bias against “conservatives,” but I would argue that the big issue is deeper than that. Here’s a tweaked passage from a 1998 column (the 10th anniversary of “On Religion”) that I wrote about sociologist James Davison Hunter) and his classic book “Culture Wars.”

The old dividing lines [in American religion] centered on issues such as the person of Jesus Christ, church tradition and the Protestant Reformation. But these new interfaith coalitions were fighting about something even more basic — the nature of truth and moral authority. …

[In] "Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America," … he declared that America now contains two basic world views, which he called "orthodox" and "progressive." The orthodox believe it's possible to follow transcendent, revealed truths. Progressives disagree and put their trust in personal experience, even if that requires them to "resymbolize historic faiths according to the prevailing assumptions of contemporary life."

The bottom line: It is my impression that one of the key components of “bad religion” is that it is a faith — usually ancient — built on the belief that there is such a thing as “revealed,” “transcendent” and “unchanging” doctrinal truths. In “good religion” the doctrines evolve on the basis of personal experience and, yes, changing times.

For one more dash of background, see this GetReligion.org post from nearly a decade ago: “So are most journalists truly secular? No, many seem to practice their own one true religion.” At one point, I argued:

… (M)any elite journalists (and in some newsrooms perhaps most) are not secularists. When push comes to shove, they are believers in a faith in which people who practice orthodox forms of religion — faiths built on transcendent truth claims — are seen as, well, crazy heretics.

Thus, in the news, liberal religious believers are often seen as prophets whose faith can be affirmed by many elite journalists. Orthodox religious believers, however, may be portrayed — to quote Bob Dylan -- as "Infidels" who have rejected the true faith of the modern world. These heretics are on the wrong side of history, you see.

All clear?

At this point, readers may be asking: What does this have to do with Rational Sheep and the videos attached to this post, which focus on a trendy spiritual practice called “EFT Tapping.” In this context, “EFT” stands for “Emotionally Focused Therapy.”

This brings us to some biographical information offered in a feature by Jemina Kelly, a columnist for the Financial Times, one of the world’s most prestigious news publications. Just to be careful about quoting this material, here is a screenshot (hat tip to Rod “Living in Wonder” Dreher) of that:

Dreher wondered if the “coven” reference was some kind of inside joke. He quickly discovered that this was not the case and pointed his own readers to the following, written by Amelia Abraham, another member of that pagan coven:

As a queer person myself, despite not being particularly spiritual at all, I have even somehow found my way into a coven. Named Sisters Of The Sanitary Cloth (a half-joke of a moniker), it’s basically a Whatsapp-cum-support group for 13 women in London. It reached its supernatural apex for me when we met up under a full moon one night to cast some spells on a lesbian-identified member of the group who had been having trouble conceiving a baby via IVF. Just weeks after the hex, she finally became pregnant. A true act of sorcery, it converted me into a believer. But other than the obvious qualities of witchcraft — like, you know, magic — what is it that specifically draws us LGBTQ+ people in?

“What really drew me into witchcraft was how it didn’t focus so much on making everyone live under the same rules,” says Antonina, who is 19-years-old, queer, and a self-labelled witch. She moved to the UK from Bulgaria, where she was raised around Christianity, and finds witchcraft to be a more welcoming form of spirituality, pointing out that you don’t have to be straight, cis, or be part of the gender binary to practise. “Sexuality isn’t treated as a taboo, there’s no shame around it as there is in other religions,” she says. “As long as you aren’t harming anyone or anything you can live how you want to and I think that’s so important for individuality and freedom of expression. All kinds of love can be viewed as pure and holy!”

Here is the key question for this weekend: “Is this secular?”

Well, the reference to a “coven” is clearly “religious,” in terms of a modernized form of faith.

But what about the EFT Tapping concept? Maybe that is some kind of value-neutral technique that different kinds of people (believers even) use in different ways? (Click here for a collection of YouTube videos about this practice.)

Some people may consider this practice “secular” or, at the very least, “not religious” — sort of like the debates about what is “yoga” and what is not “yoga.” Note that I embedded a YouTube video in this post about “Christian” tapping.

The key word here appears to be “therapy.” Dreher noted, drawing on the “Three Worlds” cultural theories of Philip Rieff (Carl Trueman commentary here) that, once again, the magic ingredient is the denial of transcendent, absolute, concepts of truth and morality.

What people need, you see, is nonjudgmental therapy. Here is one final quote from Dreher:

Rieff, an interpreter of Freud, said that we in the West came up with psychology, and the “therapeutic” mode of being, to cope with the death of God and of authoritative frameworks of knowledge and morality. That is, if God is dead, then the best we can do is apply modes of coping with the anxiety that comes from this knowledge.

The therapeutic mode has thoroughly penetrated Christianity. This is what Christian Smith meant by his discovery of “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism” as the de facto religion of Millennials and Gen Z today (and, I would say, many older Christians). They profess to believe in the God of the Bible, but their interpretive framework is not authoritative, but therapeutic, picking and choosing how to relate to God, and which of the Bible’s teachings to follow, according to what “works” for them. The only real authority they feel is their individual consciousness.

Yes, note the familiar echoes of James Davison Hunter.

In conclusion, let me return to an earlier question. Read the Kelly quote in the screenshot again and ask: “Is this secular”?

Once you have answered that, look at this Rational Sheep discussion through the eyes of someone, let’s say, who is working in Hollywood or Big Tech, while also thinking about the years of GetReligion discussions about the forces at play in the worldviews of many (not all) elite journalists.

Is “good religion” essentially a personal, experiential, therapeutic approach to faith? That would contrast sharply with the small-o “orthodox” claims of those preaching “bad religion.”

What think ye? Accurate?