Journalism Needs a Wider Scope on Religion

Ed Simon is co-editor of the anthology The God Beat: What Journalism Says about Faith and Why It Matters, which explores the New Religion Journalism movement—an offshoot of the New Journalism genre of the 1960s and ’70s that fused news writing with the storytelling techniques of novelists, memoirists, and poets. He discussed his book with Audrey Clare Farley, author of The Unfit Heiress: The Tragic Life and Scandalous Sterilization of Ann Cooper Hewitt.

AUDREY CLARE FARLEY: You claim New Religion Journalism emerged after 9/11, when it became evident that journalism had “a secularism problem.” Can you explain?

Ed Simon: For a long time a variation of the “secularization thesis” endured in an almost unspoken way. This assumption held that religion was a vestige of an archaic past, and that the future entailed its disappearance. But two decades later we know that religion isn’t going anywhere, and newsrooms had to adapt.

Does the secularism problem persist? Many say the media was blindsided by the rise of Christian nationalism. I think that it has a Christianity problem. By that I don’t mean anything as reductive as saying that journalists are belligerent to Christianity, but the opposite. When many hear the word “religion” they think Christianity, Protestantism, or even evangelical Protestantism. There needs to be a wider scope on what religion means.

New Religion Journalism questions the theism/atheism binary, exploring the “borderlands between faith and doubt” that many occupy and that polling can’t capture. Does this explain the genre’s enduring relevance? Yes, absolutely. Too often there’s this dichotomy between faith and doubt. The vast majority of us are sometimes believers and sometimes not. The New Religion Journalism, especially when it turns its focus inward, examines the full complexity of belief, where sometimes we’re certain of faith and sometimes we’ve no idea what faith even is.

You write, “Theological speculation is for naught if at its core it doesn’t engender love of our neighbor.” Are these essays as much acts of love as they are acts of critical inquiry? As with the original New Journalists of almost two generations ago, the writers who were so generous to work with us are passionately connected to their subjects. Few things seem less objective than love, but I think if the original New Journalists taught us anything it’s that the reporter is always part of the story, so with honesty they included their own minds—and our reporters included their own hearts.

Would someone like David Foster Wallace be considered a New Religion Journalist? Wallace was concerned with the ambiguities of faith, but also the ways in which faith works. His writing about addiction explores something that’s deeply spiritual, though perhaps not “religion” conventionally understood. Writing about programs like the Twelve Steps is congruent with New Religion Journalism as we’ve defined it, because it’s so at home with the complexity of belief.