I am sure every journalist who has ever worked on the religion beat for multiple years — let alone decades — has taken part in this exchange.
Q: So what do you do?
A: I’m a journalist who covers religion.
Q: So you’re a religious reporter. What kinds of things do you cover?
Yes, lots of people automatically turn “religion” into “religious,” but that’s a topic for another day.
But there’s the question for today: What kinds of things do we cover on the religion beat?
If you look, year after year, at the Religion News Association’s list of the Top 10 stories of the year, it’s pretty obvious that most of the big stories tend to fall into predictable patterns. Such as:
(1) Stories in which religion plays a role in partisan politics.
(2) Stories in which religious groups act like political parties and fight it out over hot-button doctrinal issues (often about sexuality) that most journalists define in political terms.
(3) Scandals that involve religious leaders (think sex and money) that play out like political dramas.
(4) Big, unavoidable events like terrorist acts, cathedrals burning, etc.
Am I being too cynical? Take a look at the 2019 list and see how many items fit into these kinds of patterns.
Long ago, I interviewed for religion-beat jobs at two major newspapers. At one, the editor admitted that he basically wanted news about scandals and politics. At the other, the editor (active in a mainline Protestant church) offered a broad approach to the beat that included culture, the arts, medical ethics, educational institutions, etc. I took that second job.
All of this brings me to a fascinating little memo that religion-beat veteran Michelle Boorstein circulated the other day in the “Acts of Faith” digital newsletter from The Washington Post. What was her goal?
In our extra-polarized times, I wanted to reach out to our most committed religion (spirituality/faith/ethics/meaning-making) readers and get a sense -- In your view, what are the most important topics in our realm for Washington Post journalists to cover?