God is My Co-Author

By Gal Beckerman, Columbia Journalism Review. Posted September 27, 2004.

Okay, maybe the sound of prayer issuing from a journalist’s mouth is not so bizarre — what reporter on deadline hasn’t beseeched a higher power? But this was different: in a bland khaki-colored room deep in the bowels of the Empire State Building, fifteen aspiring journalists sat in front of their laptops with their heads bowed. “Thank you, Lord, for loving journalism,” intoned the morning’s instructor, an AP reporter who would soon give a lesson on constructing leads. “Thank you, Lord, for cherishing words, for loving good, clear writing.”

They were all evangelical college students taking part in a month-long summer seminar of the World Journalism Institute, a J-school with a mission to prepare young evangelicals to enter the mainstream media universe.

The students, here in New York from as far away as Lookout Mountain, Georgia (population: 1,581) and schools like Vision Bible College in Marsing, Idaho, are mostly in their early twenties, clean cut, earnest, and deeply religious. They laugh at the notion that they are a cadre of religious zealots being trained to infiltrate the newsroom and violate the sacred doctrine of dispassionate, objective journalism. Yet the students themselves aren’t entirely clear just how the journalistic and spiritual parts of their identity fit together. Are they evangelical journalists, or just journalists who happen to be evangelicals?

Robert Case II, who directs the program, has his own answers to these questions. A former philosophy teacher at Central Washington University, in 1997 he was on the board of God’s World Publications, a publisher of evangelical newsletters and books, and helped conceive of, as he puts it, “a boot camp for aspiring journalists of faith.” The institute opened in 1999, and the next year Case moved from Washington State to Asheville, North Carolina, to run it.

Case is a charismatic man with a football player’s neck and gray hair closely buzzed, and was dressed, the two times I saw him, in red, white, and blue suspenders and shiny black and white wing-tips. He doesn’t come off as particularly fanatical, and his initial objective for the institute does not sound radical.

He thinks evangelicals have closed themselves into what he calls a “ghetto” of their own making. They have fled mainstream culture rather than engage it. But if evangelicals expect to be depicted fairly and fully by the elite media, Case says, they need to get their hands dirty and play a role in the institutions that define the larger culture. This doesn’t mean he wants journalism to be done differently. He just wants enough evangelicals to be at places like The New York Times and The Washington Post so that reporters begin to see them as living, breathing people and not backward bible-thumpers.

“The homosexuals are our role model in this,” Case says. “They had the same problems we do twenty, twenty-five years ago — a despised minority hiding in the closet, and all the stories in the media looked to point out their weaknesses. They overcame this by integrating into the mainstream.”

Case’s other, longer-term objective is, by his own admission, more controversial. It is to bring “an evangelical or biblical perspective to the newsroom.” Case thinks that evangelicals, seeing the world as they do through the ethical and moral lens of religion, could make much-needed adjustments to journalism’s focus. The institute was not necessary fifty years ago, he says, when “Judeo-Christian values were regnant in America and something like Roe v. Wade would never have become an issue.” But now that we live in a “postmodern, post-Christian world,” Case says, newsrooms are once again in need of a moral compass. He doesn’t want to dismantle the principles of good journalism, which, he says, are “eternal.” He doesn’t want to evangelize. He just wants the “religious aspect of life” to be articulated in stories, and for issues like abortion or gay marriage to be framed in a way that allows for more than just a secular perspective. It boils down to this: “Most of the elite media are tone deaf to religious concerns,” Case says. “They just don’t see the value to any issue that has a flavor of religion. A secularist will always ignore the religious side of life and way of thinking. Evangelicals won’t.”

Gal Beckerman is a former assistant editor of CJR.

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