What happens when Christianity turns its attention on itself?

Debra A. Wagner, Editor, The Best Religion News Writing: Changing Boundaries (The Associated Church Press, 2004)

By Gal Beckerman

What to make of a book entitled “Best Religion News Writing“? Two obvious questions come to mind before even flipping open the deceptively breezy-looking, pastel cover: Well, firstly, what is “religion news”? Is it the news of institutional happenings, papal health, and gay ordinations? Or is it something else entirely? Stories of how religion is lived, how Catholics perceive death or Methodists war? And, once that’s settled, what qualifies some of this writing as “the best”? Is cool objectivity the target, as in most journalistic writing, or is emotional engagement demanded?

To all these questions, this book answers, simply and emphatically: Yes. Culled from a wide range of mainstream Christian publications large and small — U.S. Catholic and The Mennonite, the Presbyterian News Service and Sojourners — the pieces in this collection are herded into three sections, corresponding, apparently, to the most essential areas of human existence: war, sexuality and death. (I wondered where the section on taxes went). And based on what the editor, Debra A. Wagner, has chosen to label “religion news writing,” it seems this genre, in her eyes, has no bounds. It is memoir and hard news and editorial and testimonial. All of the above, it’s all here. And it’s also not clear what about this group of disparate articles, tenuously held together with old rubber bands, is “the best.” Much of the writing, I’m sorry to report, has the eloquence of a church newsletter.

It would, in fact, be easy enough to dismiss this mishmash of fallen-short journalism and overwrought Christian opining as a poor attempt to capitalize on the popular “The Best…Writing” series (i.e. Best New Music Writing, Best New Food Writing, etc.). Featured so prominently by the cream and sugar at every Starbucks in every Barnes and Noble, who could really blame this Christian publishing house for jumping on board?

Beyond the instances of artless prose or lack of cohesion, however, something interesting does emerge from this collection. These articles form a sort of artifact of their time. They tell us something about the gaze Christians are turning on themselves and how that gaze might be changing.

The book is subtitled “Changing Boundaries.” I imagine that what the editor meant to express is that the territory Christians can safely talk about is shifting and expanding. But it also points to the manner in which these issues, such as sex and war, are being presented and debated. I’m no historian of religion writing, but it seems safe to assume that, for the most part, and especially in white-bread publications such as these, a certain bland predictability has always prevailed. These magazines and news services cannot, by nature, be too subversive. They are the Christian world’s Pravda, their internal report from their inside people. Many of these pieces fit this mold — glorifying Christianity and especially its institutions; peppered with a kind of righteousness that distorts whatever is being reported on.

But I was surprised to find many articles falling into two broad categories that offered a kind of two-pronged affront to this orthodoxy. I found writing that maintained distance, taking a scientifically rigid approach to reporting. And I found writing that tingled with passionate dissent. Plentiful examples of both of these types made this book seem to aspire to more that just a collection of stories about seeing God in the light of the setting sun or the laugh of a child.

The case of Gene Robinson, the openly gay Episcopal priest ordained last year as the ninth bishop of New Hampshire, is featured prominently in the section on sex. The two main articles chosen to cover this controversial debate are from the Episcopal News Service and Religion News Service. They do a highly competent job presenting both sides of the issue. Entitled “Mixed Reaction to New Hampshire Bishop Election,” the article by the Episcopalians’ own newswire includes a diversity of voices, from Rev. Robert Taylor of St. Marks Cathedral in Seattle, who called the election “a Holy Spirit moment,” to Rev. Todd H. Wetzel, executive director of Episcopalians United, who explained why he thinks Robinson is “the most dangerous man in the Episcopal Church.”

More important even than the healthy sound of bickering voices is the dispassionate tone of the article, all sides presented fairly, without editorializing — the stuff of any secular newspaper. Without knowing its provenance, it would be difficult to tell that these were Episcopalians writing about such a highly contentious issue that threatens to split apart their own church.

Few of the pieces attempt this objective distance. Most are like the piece of reportage on Israel and the Palestinian territories called “Of Whitewash and War,” by Kathryn Kingsbury and published in The Mennonite. It starts out with the war reporter’s cool reserve (“Gunfire rather than dreams punctuated the night”) but it’s soon clear that Kingsbury sees the Middle East for the timeless Christian lessons its conflict can enforce, not for the conflict blazing before her eyes. Spat on and yelled at by Jewish settlers in Hebron, she blocks it all out to focus on the goodness of one young boy who whispers “Shalom” to her under his breath, rather than trying to understand the complex mix of politics and religion that motivates the raving mass around him.

These are the types of pieces I expected — news stories transformed into Christian allegory or morality tale. But their presence only highlighted the refreshing quality of those few that stayed an arm’s length away.

And then there were the editorials and essays that took the church to task for any number of issues. I don’t know to what extent Christian institutions actually embrace this level of debate and argumentation, but here, under the authoritative rubric of the best religious news writing, this questioning of everything appears, to someone who wouldn’t know better, to be a central part of mainstream Christian identity.

And yet, the “Best Religion News Writing” comes from a distinctly liberal, mainline, and increasingly marginalized perspective. Most of the articles on the Iraq war, for example, are highly critical of the Bush administration, its doctrine of preemption, and any member of clergy who would unquestionably support it. At least two pieces explain how the Iraq war does not pass muster from the perspective of just war theory. In one piece, in the United Methodist Reporter, Pastor Wes Magruder laments, as his “first pastoral failing,” not discussing with a young woman from his congregation whether her decision to join the army in Iraq was “consistent with her Christian convictions.” Ten angry response letters follow Magruder’s testimonial.

Two pieces of dissent stood out. One, “Whitewash or Renewal” in U.S. Catholic, is a j’accuse directed at the Church, claiming that it hasn’t fully faced up to the implications of the abuse scandal. The writer, Kevin Clarke, even quotes a source who compares the Bishops to Balkan war criminals. The other piece, in the section on death, is one of the better pieces of writing. In it, an undertaker, Thomas Lynch, implores (with a genuine absence of self-promotion) Christians to embrace not just “good deaths,” but also “good funerals.” He rails against the trend of memorial services that don’t display the body, that downplay it, seeing the corpse, instead, as just a shell. “A funeral without a dead body,” writes Lynch, “has the religious significance of the Book of Job without the sores and boils, Exodus without the stench of frogs, Calvery without a cross, or the cross without the broken, breathless, precious body hanging there, all suffering and salvation. It is Easter without the resurrected body.”

But if you are looking to get excited about the richness of mainstream Christian writing, this isn’t the place to look, not least because the collection generally avoids the fierce, evangelical conservatism that has displaced the old mainline as the new mainstream of American Christianity. And yet, to catch a glimpse of what some Christians look like when they stare at themselves in the mirror, when they stick out their tongues and when they avert their eyes, this is as good a place as any to start.

Gal Beckerman is a former editor at the Columbia Journalism Review. He is currently writing a history of the Soviet Jewry movement, to be published by Houghton Mifflin. His last essay for The Revealer was “Cultists Are People, Too.”