Many journalists don't have no songs....

All the people say "Amen," as The Dispatch starts a "getting religion" news project

Yes, every now and then I get the urge to write a GetReligion post. After all, that website — critiquing mainstream coverage of religion news — lasted for 20 years and was a major part of my daily life as a journalist and professor.

If you are curious about what GetReligion did and why we did it, please read the finale. If you want to know more about why the website closed, then read this grieving earlier post. Meanwhile, GetReligion remains online as a massive research archive and the weekly “Crossroads” podcasts continue here and at Religion Unplugged. And I am in the 36th year of writing my national “On Religion” column.

It’s not like I have shut down that part of my brain.

That brings me to an important announcement the other day at The Dispatch — “Welcome to Dispatch Faith” — by its managing editor, Michael Reneau. This plug for a new project reminded me that how the press covers, or fails to cover, the world of religious faith is a subject that, at the very least, is Rational Sheep adjacent. It helps to know that Reneau is a longtime friend, a fellow East Tennessean and was (it’s a long story) an honorary student at the old Washington Journalism Center program.

I will get to The Dispatch announcement in a moment. But first, why is the hilarious (and insightful) Steve Martin semi-gospel tune, “Atheists Don’t Have No Songs,” at the top of this post?

Well, let me note the following quotation from retired CBS News commentator Bill Moyers, which includes an image that I have quoted several thousand times during my journalism career. This reference is from my essay, “Religion Coverage: Past as Prologue?”

"Even the agnostic cannot fail to notice that the headlines and airwaves are full of religion," commentator Bill Moyers once noted, speaking at Harvard Divinity School. Yet news broadcasts are so full of the "confused and condescending commentary of the religiously tone-deaf that there is little room for the authentic voices of religiously engaged people to be heard. So our ears are not trained to hear."

In my 2012 “On Religion” anniversary column, I expanded that image — adding another metaphor that ended up in the title of an Oxford Press project to which I contributed, “Blind Spot: When Journalists Don't Get Religion.”

… I keep quoting commentator Bill Moyers, who once said many journalists are "tone deaf" when it comes to hearing the music of faith. I'm also convinced we're dealing with a "blind spot" that has two sides, because leaders on both sides of the First Amendment simply do not respect each other and the roles their institutions play in public life.

OK, we need one more rather complicated flashback to explain why this particular Steve Martin tune came to mind when I saw the announcement at The Dispatch.

This long quotation is drawn from my 2011 “On Religion” anniversary column (“Journalists need to hear the ‘music’ of religion”). In this case, we go from “tone deaf,” to “blind spot” and then add “opera.”

Yes, it’s a mixed metaphor thing.

Any effort to improve [religion] coverage will fail if journalists are, as commentator Bill Moyers likes to put it, "tone deaf" to the music of religion in public life.

That's a great image. I tell editors that religion news is something like a cross between politics and opera.

The laws and structures that govern religious life can be just as complicated and technical as those that control our government, and there are hundreds of religious groups and movements in most news markets, not one or two.

Yet there is more to religion than laws, facts, creeds and hierarchies.

Every now and then, a reporter will be sent to cover a picky, boring, tense meeting and, suddenly, someone will start to preach or pray. The words can be folksy or Byzantine, inspiring or bizarre. But, suddenly, people are crying, hugging, shouting or walking out.

Reporters look on, dumbfounded. What happened? What did they miss? Truth is, they were covering a political meeting and then someone, in effect, began singing one of that group's sacred songs. The reporters could hear the words, but they couldn't hear the music.

Now, I am NOT saying that all journalists are atheists.

I am saying that most journalists “get” politics, yet fail to “get” religion. When it comes to managing to hear the music of personal and public faith, way too many journalists, well, just don’t have no songs.

This brings us to Reneau’s overture for the new religion newsletter at The Dispatch. In a way, he noted, there were hints about why a project of this kind was needed in his very first post when he arrived at The Dispatch.

But this is from right now.

After traveling to America in 1921, author G.K Chesterton recorded his impressions in What I Saw in America, in which he described the U.S. as having “the soul of a church” and as being “the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed.” Historian Robert Tracy McKenzie distilled Chesterton’s point in his 2021 book We the Fallen People: “As a nation of immigrants, they believed that the essence of what it means to be an American had less to do with birth than with belief.”

Chesterton was referring more to a civil religion than he was metaphysics; more to America’s founding ideals than he was the predominant strain of Christianity at the time. 

But it was impossible to “get” America in 1921 without “getting” religion — at least in a rudimentary way — and the same holds true today. Sadly, some of the most influential publications in the country seem to “get” religion less and less, as Dispatch CEO Steve Hayes recently pointed out.

Our hope is that this newsletter will — like my friend Terry Mattingly’s GetReligion website did for 20 years — serve as a corrective to that trend.

Those of you reading this in your inbox used to receive The French Press by David French. When David departed for the New York Times last year, Steve and Jonah wrote that we wouldn’t try to replace David’s incisive commentary—because we couldn’t. There’s only one David French. But we’ve featured regular reporting and essays in recent months from a growing stable of writers, each of whom brings a unique perspective to many of the same issues David would often write about.

These religion pieces have sought to continue doing what The Dispatch does best: add context and explanation to fraught (and often overwrought) issues, shine a spotlight on overlooked or misunderstood topics, and highlight sharp analysis from leading thinkers and honest brokers. We’ve published explainers on the split in the United Methodist Church, a Muslim thinker’s examination of famed atheist Richard Dawkins’ changing rhetoric on religion, a poignant personal essay on growing up Catholic in a largely Jewish neighborhood on Long Island, thoughtful criticism of the “trad wives” movement and its detractors, growing tensions in India between Hindus and religious minorities, and a whole lot more. 

With each piece we’ve commissioned, our goal has been the same: to help readers understand the myriad ways religion intersects with the public square and, when warranted, to critique the bad actors exploiting religion for their own gain.

Dispatch Faith will not be a newsletter version of those “Coexist” bumper stickers you sometimes see on the road. We don’t intend to flatten out the real and substantive differences between religions. This newsletter also won’t cater to only one branch of one faith or seek to drive away those who profess no religious faith. 

No, we want Dispatch Faith to help readers of all sorts better understand both religion in general and the nuances of particular faith traditions. Often, these essays will touch on religion’s influence on politics, policy, and culture writ large.

In other words, there is more to life in America than politics.

However, way to many journalists seem to think that all of life should be viewed through the lens of politics. They don’t “get” the opera of faith, or even bluegrass gospel.

That’s a fact that Rational Sheep folks will want to remember.