As the students drifted away from the Zoom call one-by-one, one young woman stuck around. This was during the pandemic, and who wanted to be on Zoom more than they already had to be? I was wrapping up a talk about data journalism to a group of them, and there’s a line I use about the importance of data in understanding what’s really important to people and institutions. I usually phrase it like this: “I had a pastor who said, ‘Don’t tell me what you believe. Show me your bank statement, and I’ll tell you what you believe.’”
I love that expression; people will tell you what’s important to them, but if you watch their behavior, and in particular how they spend their time and resources, you’ll get a very good understanding of what their priorities really are. Even if you’re not religious, you can relate.
When the others had left, she asked if I wouldn’t mind one more question. “You mentioned your pastor …” she started before pausing. I don’t recall her exact words, but she continued by telling me that her faith was important to her, and then asked if religious faith was compatible with journalism. It was - is - a very fair question.
At the root, she was asking if she would fit into a newsroom as a person of faith. Would she be forced to hide who she was in order to have professional success? Would her colleagues and editors mock her or sideline her? It was, I had to admit, a possibility. I couldn’t guarantee her that someone would think less of her because of her faith. I hadn’t been terribly open about my own faith around my colleagues, I said, but then I started to mention more of it in situations where it seemed relevant and even in casual conversation. If they thought less of me, I didn’t pick up on it. And maybe I provided a glimpse of what my own faith could mean for them. I encouraged her not to hide her faith, but to employ it as she would in any situation, as intimidating as that might seem.
I’m a Christian. To be more specific, I’m a member of the United Methodist Church, although I was baptized and raised in a Lutheran congregation in Pennsylvania. Like a lot of Americans, for a long time faith was not a particularly important part of my life. To my mother’s great relief, it has become much more of a factor in the past 25 years. We started regularly attending church the Sunday after 9/11 (“seems like a good time to go,” my spouse wisely said) and found the kind of community that has nurtured and challenged us. I sing in my church choir and have served on various boards and committees. I even got to deliver a message once, one of the more nerve-wracking moments of my life (and I was a rhetoric major in college).
But for most of that time, before and after I started to have a more active faith, I didn’t really think much about how it intersected with my professional work. I was interested in how my colleagues covered religion - at my first job, the newspaper had an Episcopal priest as its religion columnist, and his writing was graceful, subtle and worth reading. But most of the places I worked didn’t pay that much attention to faith, aside from covering popular figures like the Pope, denomination fights or those times when religion was invoked in political campaigns. I didn’t think about it in terms of my own faith.
Like other callings, journalism can be seen by its practitioners as something of a religion itself. But personal religious faith wasn’t much of a topic among my newsrooms colleagues, many of whom were young and either otherwise occupied or didn’t feel comfortable talking about it. They might not have because in many newsrooms, faith can be an uncomfortable subject. Most news organizations are secular, and some insistently so. When they do cover religion, it’s often with an eye towards the abuses committed in its name or the secrecy that often cloaks its rituals. The newsrooms I’ve been a part of weren’t places where we talked about faith a lot. But we did talk a lot about doubt. Doubt - skepticism, really - is such an elemental part of journalism that it has become one of our sacred texts: “Your mother says she loves you? Better check it out.”
Journalist Jon Ward has written about how being a political reporter made him a better Christian, and I can see how that would work. My friend Marshall Allen, the former ProPublica reporter who died a year ago, offered another view. In 2018, Marshall, who was a evangelical missionary for three years, wrote a piece about the Biblical basis for investigative reporting. None of it is hollow or grasping; he describes the Gospel of Luke as a piece of warts-and-all reporting. Of truth-telling.
I’m convinced that being a more involved Christian has made me a better journalist and a better teacher. As Marshall wrote, there is a lot of overlap. It starts with truth, or at least what we imagine the truth to be, and then seeking out the answers that can strengthen or undermine it. There are a lot of things that I was convinced were true when I was a young man that turned out to be, at the very least, more complicated. My early religious instruction was centered around the idea that God was all-powerful and all-knowing and entirely good, and as a teenager I quickly ran into that staple of skeptical thinking: where did evil come from, then? How does it persist? My answers then were too easy. Journalism requires the same kind of process: simple explanations often fall short, and you have to pursue a deeper understanding, accepting that some parts of that understanding can remain out of reach.
For Christians, the ideal is Jesus, but the Bible devotes a lot of text to telling the stories of people who weren’t Jesus: people who followed him, people who he came into contact with, people who tried to argue with him and eventually, to kill him. I’m much more like those other people than I am like the son of God, despite my best efforts. That’s part of what faith means to me: not some pinnacle of perfection but a continual journey with questions, diversions and setbacks. I think of Thomas, the doubting disciple who needs to see the risen Christ before he believes (and gets a lesson in faith for his skepticism). That journey makes me a better journalist, because we’re tasked with telling the stories of people who are flawed, who are on their own journeys. And we have civic responsibilities, moral duties, too.
I was thinking about my own experience with faith as I responded to the young woman. Yes, faith was entirely compatible with doing journalism, I said, because the things that faith demands of us - kindness, humility, the need to seek out and encounter what is beyond us and our understanding - are important qualities in any reporter or editor. But that’s only part of it, and those alone exclude some of the vital parts of faith as I understand it. The more important question she was asking was, “Do I have to compromise my faith to be a good journalist?” I do not doubt that the answer is no, and told her so.