More Elizabeth II coverage: Washington Post goes deep on her Billy Graham contacts

Confession: I am still paying next to zero attention to American telly when it comes to rites linked to the death of Queen Elizabeth II. I’m tuned into BBC World and, via YouTube, streaming Sky News.

The few times I’ve flipped over to the major U.S. networks left me with the same impression as before — that the Royal Family is viewed as kind of a cleaned-up version of the Kardashians, with the queen as a sad, nobel celebrity matriarch. See this earlier post: “Elizabeth the Great: Why do many journalists choose to edit faith out of her Christmas talks?”

I think the big gaps (other than details about her faith) have been any sense of (a) the gravitas added by her World War II service, including her work driving an Army ambulance. Also, it’s poignant that, (b) until the stunning abdication of King Edward VIII, she was raised with zero expectation of becoming queen. This relatively normal childhood (until age 10) created tight ties to her parents and shaped her views on family.

Yes, the BBC has had a very heavy emphasis on the admiration for the queen seen in mainline, establishment churches and minority faiths. At some point I would like to know if the admiration for Elizabeth II common among American evangelicals also exists in the UK. Click here for a roundup of that, including these typical remarks from Bishop Andrew Forster of the Church of Ireland:

"Throughout her life she set Christ, and his message and his teaching, as the primary thing that has helped her and blessed her and I think made her into the incredible monarch, sovereign that she was."
Bishop Forster described the late Queen as the "grandmother of the nation".
"Maybe it was because people understood that she had an understanding of some of the issues that we might face behind closed doors, some of the issues of increased frailty, of family strife — there was that sense of a grandmotherly figure who understood the challenges of life," he said.

In my previous post, I noted that a Washington Post feature about the queen’s “most memorable remarks” that said her public appearances were “peppered with words of wisdom, faith and occasionally personal reflections.” There was content about her Christmas messages, while omitting any faith content.

However, the religion desk — veteran Sarah Pulliam Bailey (a former GetReligion contributor) — went in depth on one of the most interesting religion-news angles from the queen’s long life: “Fact checking ‘The Crown’: Queen Elizabeth’s faith and her close relationship with preacher Billy Graham.”

Once upon a time, newspaper editors thought that religion was the kind of narrow, insider subject that could be locked into a weekly journalism ghetto called the "church page."

No, honest.

That eventually evolved into the "religion" page, but the idea was pretty much the same. This concept began fading about the time I reached the news biz, in the early 1980s.

Now, I don't think there is anything wrong with having a section or a column dedicated to religion-news topics. I had better think that, since I have been writing that kind of column for 30 years or more. It's nice to have a place in the news format in which you KNOW you can get a religion topic into print.

The crucial point, however, is that religion is a subject that wants to roam all over the place, if journalists take it seriously. It should end up on A1, on the education beat, in the business section, in the sports pages, etc., etc. I have had a lot of fun through the decades (and wrote a book about it) following religion ideas, symbols and trends into the world of popular culture and entertainment.

So with that in mind let me (a) highly, highly recommend a new Sarah Pulliam Bailey piece about the Netflix series "The Crown" that included scenes about Queen Elizabeth's faith and her 1955 encounter with a young American evangelist -- as in Billy Graham. At the same time, I would like to (b) ask people out there in dead-tree-pulp land where The Washington Post editors played this story in the actual newspaper, as opposed to its "Acts of Faith" status online. I sure hope that this ran, in print, in the Style or Entertainment sections. That's where it belongs.

The piece is a must-read, if you have the slightest interest in these two towering figures in 20th Century world culture. This is top-flight popular culture writing that also -- as you would expect -- pays serious attention to the religious content.