Through the years I have attended my share of conferences and seminars about the status of religion coverage in the mainstream press. This is what I do.

Anyone who does these gigs is going to hear lots of common themes. If the academic or media gathering is broad-minded enough to feature voices from the cultural right, one can guarantee hearing — within the first five minutes — a mantra that sounds something like this post-Passion news critique:

In short, the media have taken a burst of passionate Christian enthusiasm for an orthodox movie, and responded with an increase of religion programming that too often dismisses rather than debates that very orthodox vision. When surveys of the national media have shown that half of journalists are religiously unaffiliated and 86 percent never attend church or synagogue, it’s not a surprise that they just don’t get it.

Of course, there are agnostics who can read demographics and history and do a great job on the God-beat. And there are lots of believers who can’t write or report their way out of a paper bag. The point is that there are plenty of journalists who don’t “get religion” for a variety of reasons. That’s a given.

This particular quote comes from the end of a new column by the conservative critic L. Brent Bozell III of the Media Research Center. In its latest 12-month study of religion news on ABC, CBS and NBC, the center found that the number of stories has more than doubled from a similar study done in 1993 — from 336 stories a decade ago to 699 last year. The center decided, however, that these numbers held a paradox — more religion news, only with “less religious context.”

As a practical concern, it’s easy to see why the story count is up. All kinds of interesting things have been going on, from the viewpoint of elite journalists on the coasts. Waves of news reports about the potential horrors that might be unleashed by “The Passion of the Christ” followed increased coverage of Catholic sex scandals, religious themes in the age of terrorism, Pope John Paul II’s 25th anniversary and the election of Gene Robinson (right), the first openly noncelibate gay bishop in the small, photogenic and influential U.S. Episcopal Church. The researchers noted:

The hottest Protestant story of the year was the installation of openly gay Episcopal bishop Gene Robinson, but reporters on that story treated it as a milestone against discrimination, focusing on its political impact, not its scriptural or theological implications. Most of the TV time on the happy-talk morning shows went to Robinson and his supporters (ten interviews to just one for an opponent). Just like in other political stories on the gay issue, the labeling was very imbalanced, since Robinson’s critics within the church were described as “conservatives” 42 times, but Robinson’s supporters drew just five “liberal” labels. Robinson himself was so revered that not once was he ever described as either “liberal” or even as an “activist.”

But there is more to this God-beat trend than a few major stories. Bozell noted increased signs that mainstream journalists are, in addition to covering disasters and celebrations, trying to tap into a rising tide of interest in “spirituality” and even “faith.” This has been happening for years in print media and it now may even break into television news, a zone in which there are zero God-beat specialists.

What can we expect this coverage to look like? Will any increase automatically be a good thing, for those of us who care about picky, factual things like the history, rites and doctrines of the major religions? Will all faith fads and trends be created equal? Bozell does not think so and he has his reasons.

Progressive religious fads often emerge from academia, where professors can be located to tout ­ as the most credible, objective, social-scientific findings ­ loopy conspiracy theories like “The DaVinci Code” or phony “gospels” that teach Jesus was less like God and more like a profound Grateful Dead groupie. Sadly, the media’s Rolodex of religion experts was dominated by academics who are hostile to religious orthodoxy. They are never described for the viewer at home as boutique liberals or hard-line secularists.

Personally, I think the number of hard-core secularists out there could all fit in the faculty lounge of the poli-sci department of your local tax-dollar-funded state university. What is more interesting is what is happening among the elite thinkers — from Harvard to the New York Times — who are obviously pro-spirituality, but they are anxious to divide the world up into good, tolerant religious believers and bad, doctrinal religious believers. Yes, reporters could ask Dr. James Davison Hunter about this trend.

Years ago, at one of those private, God-beat seminars, I heard a religion scholar make an interesting statement. She said that one of the man reasons that journalists needed to improve religion-beat coverage was to “undercut Judeo-Christian hegemony” in American life. An executive from a giant newspaper chain was not so sure about this. He said that he thought that the reason journalists should strive to improve the work on this beat was to do a “better job of covering the lives of our readers.”

These are radically different motivations and, if acted on, would lead to radically different kinds of coverage. I think this tension is part of what Bozell was seeing in the television-news coverage over the past 12 months.

This is one case where I would cast my vote with the newspaper executive.

One of the challenges that veteran God-beat reporters face is finding a way to send something new and fresh to their editors during the annual holiday seasons. Now, you could get away with quirky and strange stories during the Christmas season because, you know, that’s a cultural thing. But journalists have tended to play it straight during Holy Week and Easter, along with the heavy seasons in the other world religions. Seen any funny Yom Kippur or Ramadan stories?

With that introduction, let me assure you that numerous GetReligion.org readers have sent us copies of the following Associated Press story. Yes, we have seen it. No, we have nothing that we want to say about it, other than what I just said. Clearly, the rules are changing for Holy Week and Easter coverage. Here is a chunk of that AP report from Glassport, Pa.

First, the Passion of the Christ. Now, the torment of the Easter Bunny?

It may not have been as gruesome as Mel Gibson’s movie, but many parents and children got upset when a church trying to teach about Jesus’ crucifixion performed an Easter show with actors whipping the Easter bunny and breaking eggs.

People who attended Saturday’s show at Glassport’s memorial stadium quoted performers as saying, “There is no Easter bunny,” and described the show as being a demonstration of how Jesus was crucified.

Melissa Salzmann, who brought her 4-year-old son J.T., said the program was inappropriate for young children. “He was crying and asking me why the bunny was being whipped,” Salzmann said.
Patty Bickerton, the youth minister at Glassport Assembly of God, said the performance wasn’t meant to be offensive. Bickerton portrayed the Easter rabbit and said she tried to act with a tone of irreverence.

I think we will cut things off at that point. Although, now that I think of it, AP clearly showed restraint in the reporting of this story. Obvious questions remain that journalists would want to know. With what was the wabbit whipped? What color was the bunny suit? Was the bunny in chains?

This blog item is brought to you without art, for obvious reasons.

Well, my column is out for the week and my classes are done for the day. This is Holy Week, of course, and for the Orthodox that basically means we live at church. It’s a beautiful time, though hectic. There are so many stories that I want to point out and comment on from the past few days that I don’t even know where to start. I’ll try to catch up.

• The Washington Post ran a wonderful story by Joel Achenbach about a new collection of columns, essays and news stories by the late Michael Kelly, a journalist who was highly sensitive to religious themes and content in the news.

Apparently, Madelyn Kelly keeps finding notes all over the place from her late husband — signs of what he was thinking, what he wanted to write about, perhaps hits at future pieces for Atlantic Monthly. The Post article opens with one such smudged Post-it note in some kitchen papers that said simply: “Death of the 3rd God (Marx/Freud/Darwin).”

Try to imagine that one making it into print.

• The art gods at the New York Times recently got interested in Orthodox iconography, first in a major feature story and then, strangely enough, in a stand-alone editorial. No pun intended, as you will see.

Part of me wanted to cheer. Part of my was totally mystified by what they wrote. For example, what can we make out of this conclusion?

How viewers move through the galleries seems especially striking at “Byzantium” because the exhibition itself abounds in symbolic poses. The 300 years represented in “Byzantium” capture a spiritual and artistic impulse radiating outward from Constantinople, which, after 1261, was again the center of the Orthodox Church. That impulse echoes in image after image from across the Byzantine world. Throughout the galleries, iconic Virgins gesture toward the infants they hold in their arms. The gestures vary, but each specific pose expresses a different state of being, a different projection of authority and grace. It’s as though one could become a different person by choosing to point with the left hand rather than the right.

And there, in front of a 14th-century icon, stands a young woman — a visitor — trying out the open-handed gesture that Mary uses to point to her son. As the young woman adopts that posture her head tilts slightly to mirror the tilt of the Virgin’s head. We are so used to the word “iconic” that we forget how forceful the stylization of actual icons can be. But it isn’t merely the formality of the poses that makes these images iconic. It’s their emotional radiance, the astonishing difference that a hand held this way — or that — can make.

My first reaction is cynicism. Are we supposed to sing along with Madonna (the other one): “Strike a pose”?

Then I stop and think: Am I being fair?

• How lazy can I get? Check out the excellent Christianity Today weblog summary of what the major news magazines are doing this year during Holy Week. What’s the problem? They have already had to put Jesus on the cover during the media blitz for “The Passion of the Christ.” So what’s left? Click here.

But speaking of the Passion, as in the real one, special interest should be paid to David Van Biema’s “Why Did Jesus Die?” feature at Time. Here are the money paragraphs that frame this strong and serious piece:

And what will they take away from this unusual dovetailing of Christ narratives? It’s always dangerous to predict religious behavior, but it seems likely that before traveling into the uplifting realms of Easter Sunday, they will spend a little more time in the dire valley of Good Friday. When the Roman Catholics among them hear the priest recite the verse from Isaiah — “He was wounded for our transgressions … by his stripes we are healed” — they may remember that it was with those words that Gibson commenced his reimagining of the scourging of Jesus. When many Lutherans engage in the meditative adoration of the Cross and when congregants at even the least liturgical Protestant churches sing, “Let the water and the blood/ From Thy wounded side which flowed/ Be of sin the double cure,” they too may more vividly imagine the Cross and the blood. And they all may be more inclined to ponder a question whose answer at first seems as though it should be as simple as “Jesus loves me, this I know” but in fact has divided theologians and clergy for centuries, with no end in sight: Why did Christ die?

That is, not who (on earth) killed him or even exactly how much he suffered. But what was the cosmic reason for his agony? What is its purpose, its divine calculus? How precisely does his death, usually referred to in this context as the atonement, lead to the salvation of humanity?

This is, quite frankly, the kind of highly reflective religion-beat piece that Time once offered all the time. Kudos.

• I think Richard Ostling has decided that the Anglican warfare over sexuality and the sacraments is a GLOBAL, rather than a strictly domestic, news story. Check out this lead from last weekend:

The spokesman for bishops who claim the leadership of a majority of the world’s Anglican Christians denounced the gay rights policies of the Episcopal Church in the United States … after a two-day caucus in Atlanta with U.S. conservatives.

Archbishop Peter Akinola [pictured] said the future of true Anglicanism in the United States lies with conservative groups within the Episcopal Church that oppose gay marriage and the church’s approval of an openly gay bishop.

And who is this man and why does he deserve this kind of play in an Associated Press report?

Akinola leads Nigeria’s Anglican Church, which has 17.5 million members, and the Council of Anglican Provinces of Africa, a continent that includes half the world’s 77 million Anglicans. He is also the spokesman for “Global South” archbishops who have severed normal ties with the Episcopal Church.

• Surely this is a sign of the times — on several levels. The British edition of Cosmopolitan has decided that there is more to life (perhaps even eternal life) than sex and credit cards. According to the religion writer at UK Reuters, Tom Heneghan, this is another signal that a shopping-cart approach to “spirituality” is catching on and may even be as important as multiple orgasms:

“I’ve come to the painful realisation that men and shoes are not enough to make me happy,” Hannah Borno, the magazine’s new Spirituality Editor, wrote in the March edition. “The key to true contentment lies elsewhere.” …

As in many other European countries, this new search for spirituality has nothing to do with established religions, which these days attract only a small fraction of the population.

“We’re looking at spirituality rather than organised religion, because that’s where there seems to be a demand from our readers,” Borno explained. “They want something a bit more alternative.”

The article did not address a crucial question: Will this trend affect negotiations in the global Anglican sexuality crisis?

• Now this one is totally silly. I think. Through a cooperative online effort, the Methodist Church in England and the Christian satire site called ship-of-fools.com have selected (sort of) an 11th Commandment. Check out the five winners. So are these actually 11-15?

Thou shalt not worship false pop idols
Thou shalt not kill in the name of any god
Thou shalt not confuse text with love
Thou shalt not consume thine own body weight in fudge
Thou shalt not be negative

You can insert your own wisecrack or alternative commandments at this point.