<\/strong><\/p>\nFreedom of the press clearly includes the right to question the actions and motives of religious figures and institutions. Our constitutional safeguards for the press developed partly in response to efforts by Puritans like Cotton Mather to have editors and publishers tossed into jail for satirizing local pastors and mocking Christian beliefs in their pages.<\/p>\n
But freedom doesn\u2019t excuse prejudice or poor handling of serious material, especially people\u2019s religious convictions. What\u2019s new today is the seeming collusion\u2014or at least an active sympathy\u2014between some media organizations and journalists, and political and sexual agendas hostile to traditional Christian beliefs.<\/p>\n
When this happens, the results are bad for everybody.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s no accident that freedom of religion and freedom of the press are both named\u2014in that order\u2014in the First Amendment. The country\u2019s founders believed that protecting these two freedoms would be vital to the American experiment. They saw that a self-governing people needs truthful information and sensible opinion from sources other than the state. They also believed that morality grounded in religious belief is fundamental to forming virtuous people able to govern themselves.<\/p>\n
These beliefs about American liberty were once widely shared by media professionals. In the mid 19th century, one might often find anti-Catholic sentiment on the editorial pages of America\u2019s major papers\u2014just as we do today. But it served a Protestant consensus. Newspapers attacked \u201cPopish\u201d infiltration, the better to push Protestant goals like prayer and Bible reading in public schools.<\/p>\n
The question back then was not whether<\/em> religion had a place in our public life. Most newspapers assumed, along with most of the cultural establishment, that religious faith and the role of believers were vital to shaping public morality, laws, and policies.<\/p>\nThe importance of religion for America\u2019s civic life was never at issue. The rights of religious believers, their leaders, and their communities to preach, teach, organize, and engage society and its political issues were also never at issue. The only<\/em> issue was whether Catholics should fully enjoy those same rights.<\/p>\nOf course, 2010 is not 1850. A lot has changed. More change is coming. Both Barna Group and Pew Research Center data show two key qualities to our religious landscape today.<\/p>\n
First,<\/em> Americans remain a broadly Christian people. Somewhere between 75 percent and 80 percent of us self-identify as Christian. And Americans continue to have a very high rate of religious practice compared to other developed nations.<\/p>\nSecond,<\/em> old religious loyalties are softening. The percentage of people who claim no religious affiliation has doubled since 1990. For young adults age 18-29, a quarter of them are unaffiliated. And their view of Christianity is more negative than any previously recorded generation at the same age.<\/p>\nThis is interesting information. But it\u2019s probably more interesting to our knowledge classes than it is to the ordinary people who get lumped into these social trends. My point is that we need to understand and use social data. But we also need to be skeptical about them. They don\u2019t predict or determine anyone\u2019s future. The late media scholar Neil Postman liked to argue that social science isn\u2019t really \u201cscience\u201d at all, but a disguised form of moral theology.<\/p>\n
\n[T]here is a measure of cultural self-delusion in the prevalent belief that psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists and other moral theologians are doing something different from storytelling. The New York Times could help if it stopped reporting their work on its Science page. It could help even more if it added a Moral Theology page to which \u2018social scientists\u2019 of every variety (including economists) could regularly contribute.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Many factors explain our current religious landscape. But four strike me as most useful. First,<\/em> more of our immigration now comes from non-Christian cultures than at any time in the past. Second,<\/em> economic, scientific, and technological changes have shaken up our traditional patterns of thinking and learning. They’ve also changed our understanding of the world and of ourselves. In the process, they’ve diminished the place of religion. Third, <\/em>Christians have done a terrible job of transmitting our faith to our own children and to the culture at large. The reasons for that would need another discussion on another day. But in general, I think too much of American Christianity is habit and inheritance. And too little of it is personal conviction and witness\u2014even within the family.<\/p>\nBy the way, for me, the argument that the so-called \u201creligious right\u201d alienated a generation of young people with its activism seems flatly wrong. And it would have little merit even if it were true, since the mass media play a huge role not just in informing the public but also in shaping opinion\u2014including opinion about religion. Religion has always<\/em> played a big role in American public life. The religious right comes from the same soil as the religious left did in its civil rights and peace movement forms. The content is different. The roots are much the same. I know that from personal experience, because I worked on both the Bobby Kennedy and Jimmy Carter campaigns as a young Capuchin. My own thinking as a young priest was heavily influenced by groups on the religious left like Pax Christi.<\/p>\nThis brings me to my fourth and last<\/em> factor in thinking about our religious trends. Some of you, I’m sure, have read Christian Smith’s collection of essays The Secular Revolution. <\/em>The book has two key themes. First, American public life went through a massive secularization between 1870 and 1930, and the process continues today. Second, the process wasn’t an accident. Secularization didn’t happen naturally. It wasn’t the inevitable result of \u201cprogress.\u201d<\/p>\nSecularization took place in large measure\u2014as Smith and his fellow scholars prove in great detail\u2014because academics, educators, journalists, economists, and scientists consciously attacked and overthrew America’s Protestant establishment. In the words of Smith,<\/p>\n
\n[This] rebel insurgency consisted of waves of networks of activists who were largely skeptical, freethinking, agnostic, atheist or theologically liberal; who were well educated and socially located in knowledge-production occupations; and who generally espoused materialism, naturalism, positivism, and the privatization or extinction of religion.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
As Smith and his colleagues show, knowledge professionals have their own kind of orthodoxy. They place a high premium on their own skill and autonomy. This has consequences. It predisposes them to be uncomfortable with, and even hostile toward, any claims of revealed truth, religious institutions, traditions, doctrines, and authority.<\/p>\n
These are strong statements, but history supports them. Obviously, exceptions do exist. Many people in the knowledge occupations do believe in God. Many practice a religious tradition. The Catholic Church, after all, has one of the longest and greatest intellectual traditions in human history.<\/p>\n
The point I want to leave you with is this: Journalism is a \u201cknowledge profession.\u201d But like any other profession, the work of journalism doesn’t necessarily translate into self-<\/em>knowledge or self-<\/em>criticism. And any lasting service to the common good demands both. Journalism has its own unstated orthodoxies. It has its own prejudices. And when they go unacknowledged and uncorrected\u2014as they too often seem to do\u2014they can diminish our public life.<\/p>\nReligion journalism deals with the most fundamental things about human meaning, things intimate, defining, and sacred to many millions of people. So master and respect your material. Know yourself and your prejudices. Acknowledge mistakes, and don’t make them a habit. Be as honest with yourself as you want your sources to be. Understand believers and their institutions as they understand themselves. <\/em>And if you do that\u2014and do it with integrity, fairness, and humility\u2014then you’ll have the gratitude of the people you cover, and you’ll embody the best ideals of your profession.<\/p>\nMany thanks.<\/p>\n
\nCharles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap., is the author of <\/em>Render Unto Caesar: Serving the Nation by Living our Catholic Beliefs in Political Life<\/a> (Doubleday, 2008) and the Archbishop of Denver, Colorado.<\/em><\/p>\nCopyright 2010 the Witherspoon Institute<\/a>. All rights reserved.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Source: The Witherspoon Institute In an address delivered today before the Religion Newswriters Association, Archbishop Charles J. Chaput of Denver commended America’s journalists of religion and challenged them to approach their important work with integrity, fairness, and humility. It\u2019s good to be with you today. Of course, most speakers say that, but I actually mean […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1784],"tags":[1447,11,48],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7798"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7798"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7798\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7801,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7798\/revisions\/7801"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}