Covering religion - newspaper coverage of religion - Column

Christian Century, June 19, 1996 by Martin E. Marty

WHEN A newspaper devotes a colorful six-page Saturday section to religion, it announces that it intends to do something right by religion. Most would judge that the Dallas Morning News is doing something right for religion and its readers, but the section has been good for the paper too. Bob Mong, who started the feature,.says it is the most successful new section in 30 years.

Although Dallas is known for its huge churches and congregations, it is fairly typical of the region and the nation. According to Martin B. Bradley of the Glenmary Research Center, 60.3 percent of the people in Dallas County are attached to a religious institution, which is only slightly lower than the figure for the region (65.2 percent) and for Texas as a whore (64.1 percent). If the Dallas Morning News pays more attention to religious affairs and ideas than any other daily, it's not necessarily because the churchgoing market is larger there than elsewhere. In New England and the Middle Atlantic regions, where newspapers tend to slight religion, 59.7 and 63.4 percent of the population claim to be religious adherents.

If constituent representation were the focus at the Dallas Morning News, the religion editors could make readers happy by devoting its pages to four groups, each of which comprises more than 100,000 of the county's 1.1 million religious adherents: Southern Baptists, with 321,341 members; Roman Catholics, 207,535; black Baptists, 154,548; and United Methodists, 112,771. The remaining three or four hundred thousand belong to scores of other religious bodies. While the newspaper editors do well to avoid consistently alienating members of the four large groups, they devote a great deal of attention to the smaller and even esoteric bodies.

Although it may be too predictable for novelty seekers, the format of the section is comfortable for those of us who like to know where to find things. The fifth page is for advertisements, which follow denominational lines. The Baha'i faith, Freethought, Islam, interdenominational churches and the Unitarian Universalists are all represented with notices of service times and phone numbers. Catholics are stingy about advertising, Baptists eager. The ads help pay for the section, yet it is clear that the section is not designed to surround advertisements with copy.

"Views and Reviews" covers three or four books and three or four musical products. It often brings up "Art Matters," and includes a religious Arts Calendar and a Religion Watch to cover the media. This is not a bulletin board for televangelism; PBS and cable features of merit are noted.

"Voices" features staff and guest columnists, and includes items picked up from wire services or borrowed from other religion sections. A "Good Works" page features those who work in the name of their faiths, and includes an entry on 'Where to Volunteer" that has an ecumenical reach. Profiles of individual volunteers are often quite moving.

The department called "Community of Faith" is not the same as the "church bulletin board" that killed many metropolitan newspaper sections. Congregational leaders will ruefully tell you that their own members do not read such newspaper bulletin boards; they're simply not interested in a revival or potluck or car wash at the church across town. "Community of Faith," on the other hand, offers news from around the globe and profiles of local congregations.

Only a roaring antireligious atheist would find reasons to criticize the basic idea and intention of the Dallas Morning News religion section. Indeed, even the atheist is likely to be treated fairly in this section, which has a broad definition of faith and spiritual life.

Among some recent feature stories: staff writer Christine Wicker gave a realistic view of racial divisions in religion, focusing on a relatively successful interracial ministry at Victory Baptist Church. She paid attention to some acts of repentance and resolve by the Southern Baptist Convention. In "A Crisis in Giving," Ed Housewright addressed a close-to-home issue for most religious congregations and movements. "These are tough times for many churches," he reported in his analysis of financial crises. Princeton's Robert Wuthnow was one of many analysts cited. The article included an implicit plug for stewardship as opposed to gimmickry.

Special contributor Diane Winston, who is completing a doctorate at Princeton, tackled the plagiung question of how churches can hold the interest ofteens, end tells how some congregations have succeeded. It's hard to picture a parent of teens, or anyone who cares about kids, not reading this article. It's clear in this case how religion news can be a window on broader cultural themes that are often overlooked by cynical reporters.

Deborah Kovach Caldwell dealt with a topic that touches United Methodists and other denominations closely: what to think of a "Confessing Movement" that seeks "a return to the roots of Methodism." The critics "see something to the movement," Caldwell reported, "but are edgy about some of its representations of alternatives within the necessarily pluralist-minded denomination." Wicker profiled Thomas Moore, author of Care of the Soul, and Diane Kunde offered an enterprising piece on contract chaplains, those "industrial-strength" people who assay a "ministry of presence" on the job, especially in industries. Not much experimentation on that line has occurred in these decades of fiscal hard times, but Kunde introduces readers to some chaplains on that lonely front.