Pitfalls in Covering Religion and Politics
By Paritosh Bansal
Amy Sullivan
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Journalists assigned to cover the ever-more-important role of religion in politics and society in America suffer from blind spots, erroneous assumptions and that ever-popular bugaboo of the Religious Right: a liberal bias.
Amy Sullivan, of the Washington Monthly, and Rod Dreher, of Dallas Morning News, kicked off the Western Knight Center’s four-day seminar entitled, “Religion, Politics and Policy: From the White House to the School House.”
Sullivan, who has served as the editorial director of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life and written extensively on the subject, said the problem lay in unfounded assumptions and reporters’ unwillingness to go beyond the surface when it comes to covering matters of faith.
She said many reporters make problematic assumptions about the “God gap,” the idea that people who go to church more tend to vote Republican, while those who go to church less vote Democrat.
“It has been mostly assumed that Democrats don’t go to church as often because Democrats have become more secular,” she said. “It is quite possible that Democrats have stopped going to church because the church has become more closely associated with conservative ideology. The point is not necessarily that Democrats have left the church, so much as the church has left Democrats.”
Another problem, Sullivan said, is that “a lot of reporters are not willing to question the contents of faith.” Politicians assert they are religious and are therefore assumed to be religious without much critical coverage, she said.
As an example, Sullivan spoke of how the press handled President Bush’ comment that Jesus Christ was his favorite political philosopher. When he was asked to explain what he meant by that, Bush said he could not.
“He should have been pushed to explain what people need to know about his faith, how it would affect his policy and why it is a qualification for office,” she said.
In contrast, Sullivan said, the press uses a different standard with Democrats. “They are assumed to be fake when they talk about religion.”
Also problematic is the media’s tendency to look at groups as big blocks without appreciating the diversity within a group, she said. For example, many reporters assume that Catholics all have similar political attitudes and actions.
“We sort of understand now that these blocks don’t vote as one mass. But we don’t necessarily understand very well the distinctions,” Sullivan said.
Dreher, a Dallas Morning News reporter, approached the problem from a more philosophical point of view, taking the position that most American journalists harbor a secular bias without even realizing it.
“Journalists by and large don’t get religion,” he said. “A question that human beings ask of themselves in every generation is what is good, what is evil, and how can we know good from evil.
“[Journalists] don’t think of reality as a conflict between good and evil. We fail to grasp the forces that drive actions in the world and people’s reactions to actions in the world,” he said.
Journalists fail to do this because they do not appreciate the concept of the metaphysical dream, an intuitive feeling about the immanent nature of reality, Dreher added. “We journalists don’t think of reality in terms of a narrative, a story,” he said. “This is a failure of imagination.”
Politics is a wholly secular enterprise - all shades of gray. On the other hand, religion is all about ultimate things - good/evil, right/wrong, divine/profane. Some things can’t be negotiated, he said. But those ideas have consequences for individuals and for society.
Journalists take a much simpler route. They cover religion and culture in fundamentally political terms. “Journalists find it easier to understand it that way,” he said.
Dreher gave the example of the recent story about Sen. John Kerry’s communion, saying the media turned it into a struggle of church vs. state.
“It is more difficult to take it up in terms of what is the nature of revealed religion, what kind of claim does it have on the individual soul, and what kind of right does the church have to govern its own membership,” Dreher said.
The media’s predilection for this approach is strengthened by an underlying liberal bias, he said. “Liberal secularism is the basis of the metaphysical dream for many in American journalism. We don’t see it as biased because our views strike us as normative. They strike us as the correct perception of reality. We take sides, instead of trying to show reality the way it is.”
Data shows that the press in America has been “obsessed with documenting the rise of the religious right, especially within the Republican Party.” But in so doing, it ignored the parallel rise of the secular left in the Democratic Party.
“The secular left has its own doctrines, and is equally rigid about enforcing them,” he said, adding that the media fails to perceive that.
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