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Flashback: The late, great Walter Cronkite did some thinking about religion news

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Flashback: The late, great Walter Cronkite did some thinking about religion news

Did you know that the late, great CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite, one of the most important news icons of all kind, once worked as a “church editor” for a mainstream newspaper in Houston (apparently the old Houston Press)?

That was a detail from his life that I missed. I had read, long ago, that he was a “cub reporter” after his college years, yet before he broke into broadcasting. But time as a “church editor”? That’s a journalism title from the old, old days, one that is even more condescending than the more common and inaccurate label “religious editor (as opposed to “religion” editor.

Anyway, a religion-beat friend recently send me a photocopy of a 1994 interview with Cronkite that ran in The Christian Century, the influential mainline Protestant journal. I can’t find it online, although it was quoted by Religion News Service in an a short obit — “And that’s the way he was” — in 2009.

Encountering that “church editor” label reminded me of the old “Lou Grant” show episode that I used as the opening for my graduate project at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, which ran — in a much condensed form — on the cover of The Quill in 1983. The headline on that journal essay was: “The religion beat: Out of the ghetto, into the mainsheets.”

The “ghetto”? That was the “church page.” The overture of that Quill piece is long, but it will provide some context for the Cronkite remarks that I will share here:

As was often the case, Lou Grant was working on two problems at once. At first the problems seemed unrelated.

The Los Angeles Tribune had lost its religion editor. City editor Grant had searched far and wide and, of course, no one was interested in the position. After all, what self-respecting journalist would want to be stuck with the religion beat?

Problem number two was how to get rid of lazy, often-drunk, no-good reporter Mal Cavanaugh. All through this episode of Lou Grant the management of the Trib had been trying to find a way to get Cavanaugh to resign.

Then, a spark of inspiration. The script is simple:

LOU: Congratulations, Mal. You're the Trib's new religion editor.


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Podcast: Are sweaty men exercising at dawn (then praying) a New York Times story?

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Podcast: Are sweaty men exercising at dawn (then praying) a New York Times story?

Anyone who watches advertisements during football games knows that American men are doing just great, these days.

There appear to be gazillions of racially diverse circles of thin men out there — roughly 30-50 years of age — who get together all the time in sports bars with loads of disposable income to spend on beer and mountains of chicken wings in a wide variety of flavors. Others travel all over the place in their rad sports vehicles or those pick-up trucks that are part troop-carriers, part luxury vehicles.

There are some rotund, middle-aged, often bald, White losers out there, of course, but their family members or lovers are still around to laugh at their misadventures.

Yes, this screed from an elderly guy (on a diet, even) is directly connected with this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (CLICK HERE to tune that in). This week’s program focused on a fine, fascinating New York Times piece by religion-beat pro Ruth Graham. The double-decker headline on this piece proclaimed:

For Suburban Texas Men, a Workout Craze With a Side of Faith

In Katy, outside Houston, many men have taken up F3, a no-frills fitness group where members push themselves physically but also bond emotionally.

I heard from several readers praising this story (and followed buzz on Twitter) and people kept saying: What inspired the Gray Lady to do a positive story about a bunch of evangelical men (one with a “Republic of Texas” tattoo) bonding through exercise, fellowship, service and prayer?

The first answer: The story was written by a veteran religion reporter, not someone off the political or strange cultures desk. The men talk, they tell their own stories. They are not walking straw men ready for a beating. By the way: It also looks like F3 groups, or at least the one in this feature, are pretty diverse in terms of race. Hold that thought.

I think the crucial statement is at the top of the article and it isn’t the lede. Here is the note from the editors:

We’re exploring how America defines itself one place at a time. In a Houston suburb, men have been flocking to a workout group that promises more than just a sweat session; together, they aim to ease male loneliness.

Note the touch of humility: “We’re exploring how America defines itself one place at a time (I added the bold type). The goal here is to let Americans outside describe their own lives, as opposed to the Times doing that for them?


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Podcast: Those hellish SBC sexual-abuse stories? They may be coming to a zip code near you

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Podcast: Those hellish SBC sexual-abuse stories? They may be coming to a zip code near you

There’s an old saying in the real estate business about properties that get hot and then sell quickly: “Location, location, location.”

That’s precisely where we are right now with the sexual-abuse scandal that looms over the core institutions of the giant, complex, sprawling Southern Baptist Convention.

Where is the story heating up right now? Where is the story going in the future? The answer to both of those questions is: “Location, location, location.” This is true with current events (and events yet to come) and it’s also true with the must-read coverage of this big story. We focused on both sides of that equation during this week’s GetReligion podcast (CLICK HERE to tune that in).

First, let’s talk about the journalism behind this story, which has been building for several years now (see this Bobby Ross, Jr., “Plug-In” update for a starter). Everything begins in Texas and Tennessee and reporters there who are doing the heavy lifting — in Nashville and Houston, to be specific. You can see this, ironically, in this Washington Post story: “How two Texas newspapers broke open the Southern Baptist sex scandal.” Here is the overture:

Houston Chronicle city hall reporter Robert Downen was on the night shift one evening in 2018, just a few months into the job, when something caught his attention.

Scrolling through an online federal court docket, he spotted a lawsuit that accused Paul Pressler, a prominent former judge and leader of the Southern Baptist Convention, of sexual assault. While the case had been previously reported, newly filed documents painted an even more damning picture, including the revelation that Pressler had previously agreed to pay his accuser $450,000. Downen, then 25, probed more deeply and discovered other survivors of church abuse, who made it clear to him, he recalled, that “if you think this problem is confined to one leader, we have quite a bit to show you.”

Downen’s ever-growing spreadsheet of cases soon inspired a larger reporting effort to quantify the scope of sex abuse within the massive Protestant denomination. Journalists at the Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News teamed up to create a database of cases involving nearly 300 church leaders and more than 700 victims for their landmark 2019 “Abuse of Faith” series.

A wave of outrage in response to the series rocked the Southern Baptist Convention, prompting its Executive Committee to hire an outside firm to investigate.

Sexual-abuse accusations against Pressler had been rumbling for decades behind closed doors and in locked-tight legal proceedings. I first heard about them in the early 1980s, through a well-placed contact at CBS News, when I first hit the religion beat at The Charlotte News. There was smoke, but no one could get to the fire. The fact that this SBC giant’s accusers were young males only added to the tension.

If you know SBC life — I grew up as a Texas Baptist preacher’s kid and my whole family has Baylor University ties — then you may know this old saying: Texas is the wallet on which the SBC sits.


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Elite American super-cities are bleeding people: Any religion ghosts in this big story?

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Elite American super-cities are bleeding people: Any religion ghosts in this big story?

It’s hard to imagine any corner of American life that has not been touched by the coronavirus pandemic.

Obviously, there have been plenty of religion stories — along with the obvious angles linked to politics, business and technology.

Then you have stories that combine all of these elements. That is, they combine all of these themes if reporters are willing to look at the numbers and trends through multiple lens. However, as any GetReligion reader knows, not all lens are created equal.

One of the most important stories has been the impact of COVID-19 realities on some of the most important zip codes — “important” from an elite-news perspective — on the blue coasts. That brings us to that massive headline the other day in The New York Times, a paper that has, for the most part, treated evidence of New York City woes as part of a vast a right-wing conspiracy theory. Here’s that double-decker headline:

Cities Lost Population in 2021, Leading to the Slowest Year of Growth in U.S. History

Although some of the fastest growing regions in the country continued to grow, the gains were nearly erased by stark losses in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

This is, of course, an almost totally religion-free story. I was pleased to notice that the Times team took demographic issues — including birth-rate slumps — rather seriously, even if the editors didn’t (as usual) connect the dots and see the religious, cultural and moral elements of that important angle (please see this earlier GetReligion piece — “New York Times asks this faith-free question: Why are young Americans having fewer babies?” — for background).

Am I arguing that the flight from several important American super-cities is essentially a religion story? Of course not. Am I saying that issues linked to faith, family and culture are playing a role in this very, very important story? Yes, I am.


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Podcast: USA Today Network study of chaplain in COVID crisis avoids big, eternal questions

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For the last decade of his ministry, my father — the Rev. Bert Mattingly — was the Southern Baptist chaplain at the Texas Children’s Hospital. He assisted at several other facilities in the Texas Medical Center in downtown Houston, working with chaplains representing a number of other churches and traditions.

I went to work with him several times. During one visit, we passed a small sitting room and my father said this was his private “crash” spot where he would go when he was overwhelmed and needed to pull himself together. Each of the chaplains had a safe place like this and only the chaplains receptionist knew these locations. (This was before cellphones were omnipresent.)

I also remember lots of prayers and the big questions. A hospital chaplain prays all the time, especially in a facility full of families with children facing cancer or leukemia.

There’s no way around the fact that most of a chaplain’s prayers are linked to big, eternal questions that never go away. Questions like this: Why is this happening to my child? Where is God in all of this pain? Does God understand that I’m scared? What do I do with my guilt and my anger? Is heaven real?

I thought about my father (and a beloved uncle who was a hospital chaplain for half a century) as we recorded this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in). That’s easy to understand, since we were talking about a massive USA Today Network feature — from The Louisville Courier-Journal — that ran with this title: “ 'Hurry, he's dying': A chaplain’s journal chronicles a pandemic's private wounds.”

This is a remarkable feature story, in terms of human drama and suffering. It was built on the kind of source reporters dream about, in terms of a body of written material packed with dates, times, places and human interactions — a chaplain’s personal journal of the coronavirus crisis.

Yes, this is a stunning story. The writing is first rate. However, it’s strangely silent when it comes to the content of this chaplain’s ministry — in terms of the big questions and the prayers that follow This Norton Healthcare chaplain has no specific faith tradition, church or approach to theology. Readers never even learn if Adam Ruiz is ordained and, if so, by whom. My research online found a clue that he might be part of the mainline Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). Here is a crucial chunk of the intro material in this feature:

Like colleagues across the country, Ruiz’s already tough job providing spiritual care amid loss had grown exponentially more difficult. Illness and death multiplied. Fear and uncertainty gripped front-line doctors and nurses. Visitor restrictions meant suffocating isolation for patients and families. Grief was interrupted, funerals denied. A mountain of need sprang up overnight.


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Dramatic funeral service for George Floyd: Was there Gospel in it, or only politics?

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I do not know if Donald Trump watched the George Floyd funeral. After all, that was a very long service, even by black-church standards.

But if the president did watch this event — which unfolded on several cable channels — I am sure that his take on the rite’s contents would have been remarkably similar to that of the elite journalists who attended.

I am sure that Trump watched the funeral and said to himself: “That was all about politics.”

After reading several of the national-media reports, I think it’s clear that the principalities and powers of the establishment press watched the funeral and said to themselves: “That was all about politics.”

Was there a hefty dose of politics during the funeral? Of course there was.

Did this political content deserve news coverage? Of course it did.

But if you read the mainstream coverage of the service, you would never know that Christian faith played a key role in the trouble life of George Floyd and of the mother who fought so hard to raise him right.

You would never know that references to Jesus and “the Lord” were heard during this service just as much, or more, than the names of major political figures or even Floyd himself. You wouldn’t know that Floyd — during some crucial years when he fought to pull his life together — was a major player in urban ministry projects in Houston’s Third Ward. He wasn’t just a “mentor” in sports programs.

Of course, we all know that African-American churches only deserve news coverage to the degree that their activities impact local and national politics. Right?

To get a taste of what I am talking about, check out this large chunk of reporting at the top of the USAToday coverage:

About 500 friends, family, politicians and entertainers streamed into The Fountain of Praise church in Houston for what co-pastor Mia Wright called, "a home-going celebration of brother George Floyd's life.''


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Jess Fields got tired of short, shallow news interviews: So he started doing loooong podcasts

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Jess Fields is a small businessman (ask him about cigars), an Eastern Orthodox family man and a news consumer who is especially interested in stories about religion. He has also worked in nonpartisan think tanks linked to issues in state and local governments. He is enthusiastic about life in Houston (due to personal Texas Gulf Coast history I will have no further comment on that).

All in all, Fields is not a logical guy to start a podcast about religion, politics and other subjects that interest him. So why did he do exactly that?

Well, he told me that he “grew tired of the edited mudslinging that passes for ‘interviews’“ and decided that he “could do better.” His goal is to produce “long-form interviews with guests from multiple perspectives, providing a neutral platform for different views to be heard and considered in a respectful manner.” In other words, his interviews are really long.

Fields got off to a hot start with a newsworthy chat with the Rev. Tony Spell of Life Tabernacle Church just outside of Baton Rouge, La., the man behind a blitz of coronavirus headlines because of his rejection of “shelter in place” orders. Spell has been arrested and faced all kinds of questions when it appeared, on video, that he backed a church bus dangerously close to a protestor.

That led to this:

#1 — Pastor Tony Spell — On Refusing to Comply with Coronavirus Orders

We interview Pastor Tony Spell of Life Tabernacle Church in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Pastor Spell and his congregation are refusing to comply with Louisiana's stay-at-home orders due to the coronavirus pandemic. He has been arrested for violating the orders, but continues to hold packed church services. This is the most comprehensive interview Pastor Spell has granted.

Pastor Spell has his critics, as you would imagine, so Fields decided to do a lengthy interview with one of them — Rod Dreher (who lives in Baton Rouge).


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Dawn of the dead: Faith-based colleges face challenges even bigger than coronavirus

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Dawn of the dead: Faith-based colleges face challenges even bigger than coronavirus

Every week or so, John Mark Reynolds does something that presidents of academic institutions rarely do -- he cleans his office at Saint Constantine School.

This isn't a symbolic gesture in an age of ominous trends, and now a global pandemic, that threaten private education. Reynolds always takes his turn -- with other members of his team -- cleaning administration offices at this classical school in Houston.

"We have no administrators who are just administrators. Everyone teaches. Everyone shares many of the jobs that need to get done," said Reynolds, reached at his "sheltering in place" home office. "We have a maintenance team, but we all help out. The first lady and I plan to water some plants later today. …

"We call this the economy of small."

Saint Constantine is a K-16 Orthodox Christian school, which means it offers four years of college credits. College tuition is $9,000 per year.

"Our whole model was created to survive the collapse of liberal arts education, while striving to preserve the core of liberal arts education through an Oxford-style tutorial system," said Reynolds. "This pandemic is only exposing the weaknesses of what was already a business model fraught with peril."

College educators have long known that painful challenges were coming in 2025, due to falling birth rates and the end of high millennial-generation enrollments.

Now, the coronavirus crisis is forcing students and parents to face troubling realities. A study by McKinsey & Company researchers noted: "Hunkering down at home with a laptop … is a world away from the rich on-campus life that existed in February."

What happens next? The study noted: "In the virus-recurrence and pandemic-escalation scenarios, higher-education institutions could see much less predictable yield rates (the percentage of those admitted who attend) if would-be first-year students decide to take a gap year or attend somewhere closer to home (and less costly) because of the expectation of longer-term financial challenges for their families."


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Podcast: Stop and think. How will coronavirus affect nurseries, worship and last rites?

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At this point, it’s clear that the coronavirus story has moved past concerns about whether members of ancient Christian churches can catch the disease from wine in golden Communion chalices.

People will debate that issue for one simple reason — people have researched that issue for centuries and argued about the results. That story is the tip of the iceberg, when it comes to reporting on how religious congregations — past and present — have reacted during times of plague.

So read up on the “common cup” issue and then move on. Oh, and resist the temptation to spotlight the inevitable proclamation from the Rev. Pat Robertson. And there will be more to this story than Episcopal bishops turning a scheduled meeting into a “virtual” gathering.

That’s the message at the heart of this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in). And while many journalists tend to focus on Catholic churches — lots of people in sanctuaries that photograph well — I think that editors and producers need to consider how this crisis could impact highly independent Protestant megachurches and institutions linked to them. Mosques and synagogues will be affected.

Everyone will be effected. Reporters will need to focus on specific facts and broad trends.

While we were recording the podcast, I told host Todd Wilken that journalists may want to note that spring break is not that far away. In addition to sending legions of young people to jammed beaches and crazy watering holes, this is also a time when churches and colleges organize short-term mission trips to locations around the world. Sure enough, I saw this notice on Twitter a few hours later, from a campus in Arkansas:


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