Where are reporters supposed to turn for a balanced list of 2020 religious pundits?

In a time of intense anxiety across America, an influential clergyman brands a president he opposes for re-election as “essentially” the same as a foreign “dictator,” and even calls him the “Fuhrer.”

When? Who? Though opponents of Donald Trump have applied an alternative N-word— “Nazi” — during the equally tense 2020 campaign, The Guy is talking about some harsh words aimed at Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was seeking his controversial third term.

The president’s accuser was the Rev. Charles Clayton Morrison, who served 39 years as editor of the “mainline” Protestant Christian Century magazine, who despised Roosevelt’s military preparedness and the draft. As an anti-war socialist, he thought Adolph Hitler’s conquests, though displeasing, could create “a united Europe governed from the German center, with a unified planned economy” that would supplant “perverted” capitalist influences.

Journalists of that era would have been well advised to also seek out contrasting religious views from a trio of eminent Roosevelt friends in the New York City clergy establishment, Protestant Professor Reinhold Niebuhr at Union Theological Seminary, Jewish Reform Rabbi Stephen Wise and the recently appointed Catholic Archbishop Francis Spellman. Reporters always need to know who to call for diverse points of view.

The Guy’s musings about matters 80 years ago are provoked by a list of 20 campaign sources suggested to the media by the Religion News Association’s handy ReligionLink website.

Journalists can reflect on how times have changed. A 2020 listing can offer no divines with the public stature of those 1940 leaders. ReligionLink cites no thinkers from religious periodicals like the Century, or Christianity Toda, or the Catholic America, Commonweal,or conservative EWTN media cluster, or the Jewish upstarts at www.tabletmag.com.

For some reason, the list bypasses religion analysts at the Washington think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute, Ethics & Public Policy Center, Brookings Institution or Center for American Progress. With legal conflicts raging, the listing proposes calls to Rachel Laser at Americans United for Separation of Church and State but no attorney backing contrary religious liberty claims from the Becket Fund or the Alliance Defending Freedom — groups active in arguing cases at the U.S. Supreme Court.

On a list heavy with academics, it’s surprising not to see John C. Green of the University of Akron, the poli sci patriarch on the religion factor since the 1980s, or any specialist on the vast Southern Baptist Convention and white southern evangelicalism.

Let's get one thing clear right up front about this post. I have no intention of comparing Adolph Hitler with Pope Francis. Got that?

However, long ago -- while at graduate school at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign -- I did a readings course about post-Holocaust trends in world Judaism. You can't read about that horror without reading about Hitler.

I wish I could remember who said this, because I would like to give full credit, but one of the authors I read said that, most of the time, commentaries about Hitler almost always tell you more about the writers than about Hitler. I know I ran into this concept again years later when I interviewed journalist Ron Rosenbaum, author of "Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil."

What does this have to do with Francis?

Journalists on the religion beat, news-consumers at large, please ask yourself this question: When you stop and think about the public impact of Pope Francis, how much are you reacting to the pope's own words, as opposed to news-media (and church media) commentaries about his words? When you read elite media coverage of a new statement by the pope, are you confident that you know what the pope said as a whole, as opposed to one or two sentences that have been used to create a headline?

With these questions in mind, please consider this new think piece from The National Catholic Register by Sister Theresa Aletheia Noble, which ran under the headline, "5 Ways to Avoid Unhelpful Pope Francis “Mind Reading." Here is her overture: