The Spring 2004 Wilson Quarterly discusses “Religiously Ignorant Journalists” by Christian Smith, from Books & Culture: A Christian Review (Jan.-Feb. 2004):
“Why do so few journalists covering religion know religion?” Smith asks. One reason, he suggests, is that “the knowledge class” presumed for most of the 20th century “that religion was simply irrelevant to anything that mattered.” That has left them playing catch-up in the post 9/11 era, trying “to figure out religion with little collective accumulated knowledge of it on which to rely.” Because news writers and editors are so often ill-informed, “they incessantly project their own biases into their religion coverage.”
They associate religion with “fundamentalism, violence, scandals, homophobia, dying churches, repression, exotic rituals, political ambition, cults, trivia.” It’s no surprise to Smith that “of all the possible important and interesting stories about American religion that reporters could cover, about the only one they could seem to imagine reporting on last year was the Catholic priest abuse scandal.”
Many people have underestimated religion and it’s ability to motivate people’s behavior. Given the general irrationality that can be found in religion, it is perhaps easy to misunderstand and underestimate it, but people don’t need rational reasons or rational ideologies to follow. Completely irrational beliefs are more than enough if those beliefs fulfill certain needs.
It’s clear that newspapers need to improve the quality of religion reporting — not only so that they can do a better job at informing readers, but also so that they can maintain some credibility among religious readers. You can’t reach people you consistently misrepresent and don’t attempt to understand.
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