The "Religious Right"
and the Pagan Press

Not long ago, while talking with me about the formative days of the conservative Christian political movement, Morton Blackwell observed, "A lot of organizing in the late 1970s was simply not visible to the media." Why? "Because," he replied, "you guys don't go to church, for one thing."

Blackwell, a Republican National Committee member and a skilled election mechanic, could have added salt to the abrasion by pointing out that the "guys" -- political correspondents for larger news organizations -- rarely tune into religious broadcasting. Nor do we often read literature put out by the Southern Baptist Convention, the Christian Coalition, or allied groups. All that is foreign to our life-styles and values.

This is one reason coverage of a movement that found initial focus in Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority and has since broadened into a major political force and sociological phenomenon tends to be shallow and uninformed.

Because much of the movement's rhetoric and many specific goals strike us as extreme, we overlook instances in which popular sentiment -- as measured by our own polls -- agrees with the conservative view. Though the movement has significant internal differences, we tend to depict it as monolithic. Even vocabulary can be a problem. For the sake of convenience (ours), we use the label "religious right." Many in the coalition prefer "pro-family conservatives." In both literal and metaphorical terms, we still don't go to church.

Another factor: while the several factions comprising the religious right make big news, it is not an established beat. Religion specialists typically write about doctrinal disputes or trends. Education reporters usually handle another front of the culture war -- the increasingly virulent fights in local school districts over curriculum. When the battle centers on elections or national policy -- Pat Robertson's presidential candidacy or last year's mud-wrestle over the Republican platform -- editors field their political reporters.

This division of labor follows a traditional pattern. But it deflects us from looking at this interlocked set of disputes as a complex whole.

A much larger problem is the cultural chasm dividing most national political writers and editors from the roughly 20 percent of the population that constitutes the core of the white, conservative, evangelical movement.

Several studies have shown that we journalists are not a very pious lot. Just as important, those of us who do attend religious services go to mainstream institutions. Five years ago, an innovative survey by the Williamsburg Charter Foundation analyzed religious practices of various groups in society. Among the "media elite," the study found exactly zero practitioners professing to be fundamentalist, born-again, or evangelical.

The born-again newsies, I've known during thirty-five years in the business have been very few in number and very quiet about their affiliation. In the fourteen years during which I've made periodic forays into religious right territory, I've encountered only a couple of conservative Christians from large news organizations patrolling that turf.

Newspapers, magazines, and networks frequently assign African-Americans to cover civil rights stories and related issues. Women journalists of liberal bent often write about feminist concerns. Even if we had more conservative evangelicals in the ranks, I doubt if they would be employed the way blacks and women have been. Conservative Christians are politically suspect.

After all, their agenda includes boycotting publications and TV shows they find objectionable, banning abortion, censoring ostensibly liberal textbooks, locking gays in the closet and feminists in the kitchen, and elevating creationism to legitimate academic science. For the overwhelming majority of mainstream journalists, particularly in the Bos-Wash axis, this is frightening stuff. It is a platform to be attacked and debunked rather than understood and analyzed.

These questions were much on my mind last December and January while I traveled in the South and the Pacific Northwest, taking a new look at what drives religious right activists. I had been following their story since 1979, the year Falwell launched his Moral Majority. Later, I covered different incarnations of the movement, manifested in Ronald Reagan's campaigns, the Robertson candidacy, and the GOP's holy wars last year.

One change over the years was striking. In the 1970s, local pastors and ordinary folks in the pews certainly viewed an unchurched visitor like me as an alien, but at the same time they treated me as an asset. I was someone who might tell their story to a large, distant audience. By last year the mood had turned frigid.

Anti-press preachments by the movement's national leaders partly account for the change. That line filters down to the rank and file. Ordinary evangelicals resent being described as fringe extremists when at least some of their demands appeal to other Americans.

While observing an intra-party Republican contest in Snohomish County, north of Seattle, I was approached by several partisans of the religious right slate, which was being unseated by a more moderate ticket. In separate conversations, all made the same request: please don't describe us as weird extremists; we're simply trying to protect our traditions and families.

In Oconee County, South Carolina, I wanted to talk with a parents' group that had besieged the local school system in a curriculum dispute. What should have been a routine transaction turned into a delicate negotiation. After several phone exchanges, the group's spokeswoman, Melanie Johnson, allowed that "we're praying over it" -- "it" being my request for a face-to-face meeting.

Why the need for deep deliberation? Because, she explained, the press usually doesn't report what we say, only what it thinks about what we say. The meeting finally did take place, once I had established that I understood their vocabulary and genuinely wanted to hear their side of the dispute.

From that conversation and others like it, I came away with a disturbing impression: one reason for the deepening alienation of religious conservatives is that they've just about tuned out the mainstream media. A businessman I encountered at a Christian Coalition meeting in Columbia, South Carolina, spoke for many in the crowd when he told me that he felt the need to "cleanse" himself after watching network news. Now he depends almost entirely on Pat Robertson's 700 Club and religious right literature for basic information.

Another example of the profound disconnect between the press and the religious right turned up in a February 1 Washington Post story. Reporting on the campaign by Falwell, Robertson, and others to prevent gays from serving in the military, the article described the evangelical rank-and-file as "followers [who] are largely poor, uneducated and easy to command." The assertion appeared, not in an analysis or opinion piece, but in a page-one news story.

That obsolete stereotype detonated loud criticism. In fact, the movement contains many affluent professionals and business proprietors, which helps explain why it is well financed. The Post immediately ran an apology in the form of a correction. Then the paper's ombudsman, Joann Byrd, devoted her Sunday column to the incident. She decried "blindspots in writing and editing that result from either distance or stereotypical thinking." She also noted that "several able editors" had read the story before it went to press.

Presumably, those editors would have instantly pounced on a passage linking blacks, chicken bones, and watermelons. They would have excised instantly sentences equating hews with avarice or questioning the femininity of feminists. We've trained ourselves, albeit grudgingly, to be biased against bias -- most of the time.

Besides, Jews have been plentiful in newsrooms for half a century or more; blacks and women arrived more recently. While integration of these and other groups hasn't always been smooth, we now know each other. Whether we would be more sensitive to -- and knowledgeable about -- the concerns of conservative Christians if we had more of them in our midst is an interesting question. Clearly, however, given the industry's financial constraints and the demands of affirmative action, we're not likely to acquire measurable numbers of evangelicals anytime soon. There are no numerical goals for cultural minorities.

Last November a half-dozen Washington journalists who call themselves the Second Wednesday Group organized a conference called Christians in the Secular Media. According to Christianity Today, one of only two small news outlets to cover the event, it attracted sixty participants from fifteen states.

In political terms, the group was mixed, including moderates who are almost as uncomfortable with the religious right's aspirations as is the average heathen journalist. They swapped personal experiences, much the way Africa-American and Hispanic journalists do. The consensus was that devout evangelicals constitute an abuse minority within the profession. One participant, echoing the view of many, told me later, "There is a strong bias among many editors against the religious right, and that affects attitudes towards us."

It's difficult to measure how pervasive this problem is because specific incidents are scattered and ambiguous. But it's an easy call to recognize that we need a broad sensitivity check as we try to deal in a professional way with a movement that promises (threatens?) to be active indefinitely. Whatever we think of its agenda, we must get ourselves to church, if only as observers.

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