Mark Pinsky writing for the Columbia Journalism Review talks about his experiences as a religion writer for the Orlando Sentinel in getting to know that exotic life-form known as the Christian evangelical. Some excerpts:
For the first time in my life, I was living in a sea of believing, faithful Christians, and the cold shock felt like total immersion. As on the West Coast, I learned a lot on the job, interviewing ministers, leaders, and lay people. I attended church services more often than many Christians - some months more often than I attended my own synagogue. But the most intense part of my education came from outside the job, apart from the mediation of a reporter's notebook. At PTA meetings, at Scouts, in the supermarket checkout line, and in my neighborhood I encountered evangelicals simply as people, rather than as subjects or sources of quotes for my stories. Our children went to the same birthday parties. We sat next to each other in the bleachers while the kids played recreational sports. Our family doctor went on frequent mission trips and kept a New Testament in each examining room. In the process, I learned about the Great Commission, the biblical obligation of all Christians to share their faith with the once-born and the unsaved.
Evangelicals were no longer caricatures or abstractions. I learned to interpret their metaphors and read their body language. From personal, day-to-day experience I observed what John Green at the University of Akron has discerned from extensive research: evangelicals were not monolithic nor were they, as The Washington Post infamously characterized them, "poor, uneducated and easy to command." Like Ned Flanders, they are more likely to be overzealous than hypocritical, although there is certainly some of the latter. They don't march in lockstep to what Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell or Focus on the Family's James Dobson tell them, and they hold surprisingly diverse views on many issues. While making common cause politically, their theological differences range from the subtle to the significant. For evangelicals, religion is not just for Sundays - or Election Day.
This epiphany - it would be hard to call it anything else, except maybe a revelation - transformed the way I approached my beat. I discarded the traditional way of structuring my stories. No more, "While some wacko evangelical leaders over here say this, these rational secularists and moderate mainliners over there say that," with an author or academic in the middle tossed in for balance. While symmetrical, this is so schematic that it makes the result predictable and unrevealing. Instead, I decided to treat evangelicals as a discrete universe. I started to write about them in a way that would be interesting and informative to my suburban, Sunbelt readers - and to me. That is, "Some evangelicals say this, but others disagree," and why and what that means.
Despite the blustering of some leaders, I think I know why grass-roots evangelicals do not feel triumphant about the [election] results. True, in states like Florida they see Republican control of all branches of government, from Tallahassee to Washington, D.C. Conservatives and Christians dominate the AM radio dial, and the Fox News Channel leads the local cable television ratings. But despite all this, many of my evangelical friends and neighbors still feel besieged, beleaguered, and, to some degree, powerless.
The threat they cannot defeat at the polls is a pervasive, popular culture they consider to be, for the most part, a toxic mix of loveless sexuality and senseless violence. As a parent, a media consumer, and - in my heart - a blue-stater, I have to agree with them on this point, adding to the mix only my personal (elitist?) complaint: pop culture's relentless stupidity.
This is not to say that I agree with them on much else, politically or theologically. Yet neither does it keep me from understanding the sincerity of their beliefs, or from reporting them fairly. I may be flattering myself, but over time I think I have developed a relationship of mutual trust and mutual respect with the evangelical community and its leaders. Of course, that doesn't mean they've given up trying to bring me to Jesus. That's what evangelicals do, it's in their spiritual DNA, and I'm okay with that.
Kudos to Mr. Pinsky for his willingness to immerse himself in the culture he's reporting on and for exhibiting so much security in his own convictions that he doesn't feel threatened by those of others. Would that every journalist who writes on Christianity be as equally conscientious in their wish to get the story right rather than just reinforce Hollywood stereotypes.
Thanks to No Left Turns for the tip.