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Sunday, April 20, 2003

By Ann Rodgers-Melnick, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

From joyous scenes of relatives of released POWs shouting praise to Jesus, to funerals where tears mingle with declarations that a fallen soldier has been called to serve God in heaven, Christian faith has been in very public view this war-torn Holy Week.

	Steve McVey and other seniors at Wirt County High School in Elizabeth W.Va., observe a moment of silence for soldiers in Iraq near the end of a school day earlier this month. Jessica Lynch, the recently rescued POW, attended the school. (Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette)

It's a far cry from the 1980s, when Peggy Say, sister of Terry Anderson, the Associated Press reporter held hostage in Lebanon, lamented that reporters erased all reference to religion from her explanations of how she was coping

This Easter, in what seems to reflect a resurrection of faith in public discourse, reporters are actually asking questions such as, "Do you believe this is an answer to prayer?"

Longtime observers offer explanations ranging from the spiritual -- journalists are turning to God as they age -- to the cynical -- CNN and MSNBC are trying to woo cultural conservatives back from Fox News. But whatever the reason, there is little question that uncensored expressions of faith are far more prevalent in the news today than a few decades ago.

Public discussion of faith has ebbed and flowed throughout American history, but the past 30 years have seen, in one observer's view, a slow "return of that evangelical voice which sort of got suppressed and went underground after World War I."

Mark Silk, director of the Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College, believes that the strident secularism of the 1960s shaped the journalists of the '70s and '80s. Post-Watergate reporters, raised in an era when unbelief was trendy and journalism schools didn't touch the subject of faith, "didn't report it because they didn't understand it," Silk said.

Silk believes that Jimmy Carter's 1976 run for the presidency was the first sign of a cultural shift. Carter spoke of having been "born again," and political reporters tried to explain what he meant. Today, President Bush's speeches are suffused with Christian themes, as was the speech of former President Bill Clinton, who wasn't taken as seriously due to personal credibility problems.

The coverage of the current war in Iraq, according to Silk, continues this growing comfort level in mainstream American culture with public expressions of faith.

Aly Colon, director of diversity programs for the Poynter Institute, a journalism think tank in Florida, sees the same trend.

"I don't know if it's the influence of Eastern culture, or because baby boomers have given up drugs for religion, but there is a much more holistic view of how we see our lives today than we used to see in the past. There is a recognition that having a faith affects the way you live," he said.

During the Lebanese hostage crisis of the 1980s, Gregg Hartung, director of the Pittsburgh-based Presbyterian Media Mission, developed the original yellow ribbon campaign at the request of families who believed that their loved ones had been forgotten. While there was some coverage of faith aspects of that story, especially for those hostages who were ordained clergy, it was not the running theme that it has been in recent coverage of released POWs, Hartung said.

"I think there is less resistance to talking, or less hesitancy to talk, about one's faith now," he said.

The religious right, however, has had a strong hand in shaping the discourse, which is why it has a distinctly evangelical Protestant vocabulary, even when the speaker isn't Christian.

"A Joe Lieberman comes in and starts saying things that are exactly what the evangelicals say, campaigning in a way that he never campaigns in Connecticut," Silk said.

There is a danger that journalists and politicians alike may unconsciously allow evangelical Protestant concepts to shape their coverage of other faiths, Silk said. He referred to Bush's tribute to the religiously diverse Columbia astronauts.

"He is using what, to my ear, is mid-Victorian language about the dead astronauts having been called home. Well, what does it mean for a Hindu to be called home, much less a Jew?" Silk said.

"The religious discourse is really rather parochial, but they don't realize it."

While acknowledging a long, slow change in the willingness of secular news media to portray people's faith, Terry Mattingly believes that at least one of the 24-hour news channels made a calculated ratings move in Iraq. MSNBC is trying to outfox the Fox News Channel, said Mattingly, professor of mass media and religion at Palm Beach Atlantic University and a syndicated religion columnist.

In an attempt to blunt Fox's appeal to cultural conservatives, "They've had some stuff on the air that has shocked me because it's so unlike their normal style," he said.

Referring to states that voted for Bush in 2000, he said: "If you go out into Red State America where a lot of the military comes from and ask the families of soldiers in Iraq what is on their mind, they are going to talk about God, unless you censor them. I think there has been a very conscious decision not to censor the voices of the military families, so you end up with God talk."

Some reporters also may have discovered that they get better answers when they ask people in crisis about faith rather than feelings. If reporters ask specific factual questions about whether they prayed and who they prayed with, parents "may very well walk you through the first 12 hours of their life after their son's plane got shot down," he said.

But Mattingly doubts this attention to faith runs deep. Just six months ago, CNN expunged a powerful religious angle from its coverage of the capture of the Beltway snipers, he said. The network had done a live interview with the trucker whose call led to their capture at a rest stop. Two weeks earlier, he had organized about 50 Christian truckers to pull over and pray together for the capture of the sniper.

"When he was interviewed live on CNN, he talked about his prayer meetings and said that he thought God had helped us find the sniper. But when the story went into the loop [for replay] all of those quotes were taken out," Mattingly said. "They were a little uncomfortable with this guy saying that God helped them catch the sniper or that a bunch of truckers had gotten together to pray about it."

George Weigel, senior fellow of the Center for Ethics and Public Policy, a conservative think tank that urges journalists to examine the faith dimensions of public issues, is more optimistic.

"I think the American media has figured out that religious belief, and specifically Christian belief, is not the oddity from the fever swamps it once imagined faith to be. Reporters themselves may remain decidedly secular, but they're smart enough to recognize that religious conviction plays an important role in the lives of the overwhelming majority of Americans," he said.

And journalists at the elite media appear to be less secular than in 1980. Then, a study found that 14 percent of journalists at national news organizations attended religious services regularly. When that study was recently replicated by the Center for the Study of Social and Political Change, attendance had doubled to 30 percent, still far below the 64 percent national average. The proportion with no religious affiliation plummeted from 50 percent to 22 percent.

Colon, at the Poynter Institute, has witnessed the erosion of journalistic disdain for faith.

"When I was a young journalist, I had someone come up to me and say, 'I can't believe that you could be intelligent and a Christian,' " he said.

"The whole notion that Christians and other people of faith are ignorant, narrow-minded people as a whole is being dismantled."

He believes that it reflects the aging of the baby boomers who dominate the larger newsrooms. People who were raised to believe that faith was too private for polite conversation suddenly wanted to talk about it, he said.

"I think the 1990s in general was a decade of spiritual searching for a lot of people," he said. "A lot of people had become very successful financially, and in terms of materialistic advancement, but it left them feeling, 'Is this all there is?' And a lot of the baby boomers are coming into an age where they start to feel their own mortality."

In fact Sept. 11 was a wake-up call for many people, Colon said.

"I think there was this myth of national invincibility, almost a Titanic mentality. The twin towers became the iceberg that upended that secular faith in some way," he said.