Longtime readers of GetReligion may remember the defining image used in the very first post on this blog. It has shown up in headlines several times since then.

I am talking about the idea of religion “ghosts” that haunt many reality-based news stories in mainstream media. It is our belief that these moral and religious implications often go unreported, in part because, as Bill Moyers like to say, too many journalists are “tone deaf” to the religious themes that are all around them. In other words, these journalists do not “get” religion.

Today I ran into a ghost while reading a story about, well, ghosts. USA Weekend ran a pop culture feature story by Gwen Moran titled “Real-Life Ghost Busters” that was, on the surface, quite ordinary. Here is a sample, about the work of the husband-wife team of Dave Oester and Sharon Gill:

When you’ve investigated more than 1,000 hauntings in the past 14 years, you’re used to the unexplained. Oester, 56, and Gill, 55, are founders of the International Ghost Hunters Society, a group of nearly 15,000 ghost investigators and enthusiasts. Armed with digital cameras, voice recorders and a fascination with the freaky, the Deming, N.M.-based couple travels the country investigating haunted places. And with more than one-third of Americans sharing a belief in ghosts, according to a 2003 Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll, there are many places to investigate.

Unexplained noises (such as knocking, footsteps or muffled voices), electrical appliances turning on and off by themselves and other mysterious happenings can be signs of an active ghost. … Some people in haunted settings have a feeling that they’re not alone, or they get inexplicably cold. In the most extreme cases, people feel they’ve been touched by something or have seen objects move, even when there’s no one there.

Pretty straightforward stuff. But as I read it again something hit me, like a cold chill running down my spine, as the mystery began to sink in. There was nothing in this story that offered the slightest hint that the journalism professionals at the mainstream Gannett newspaper empire had any doubts about the reality of the spiritual world implied by this report. Shocking, huh?

Try to imagine a similar hands-off attitude toward a story on other claims of supernatural religious experiences. Try to imagine a pack of charismatic Episcopalians getting to make claims about the power of the Holy Spirit, without scads of doubters getting to share their viewpoints. Ditto for Eastern Orthodox parishioners with myrrh-weeping icons. Ditto for neo-Madonna mystics doing whatever they are doing at the moment. And, you know what? That skepticism is a good thing. It’s good to see reporters pushed to chart the edges of supernatural claims. It’s good to ask tough questions of people who claim to have had mystical experiences. Just do it.

But don’t look for questions of this kind in this fluffy feature. The high point, for me, was the helpful “news you can use” sidebar entitled “How to get along with ghosts.” This is simply too rich to edit.

Calm down. “Sometimes, ghosts aren’t that different from 12-year-old boys,” ghost hunter Dave Oester says. “They’re having fun spooking you.” It’s no longer fun if you aren’t scared.

Talk it out. Give your ghost a name. If the ghost performs dangerous pranks, like turning on a gas stove, explain why it can’t do that. “It may be that your ghost is trying to get your attention,” Sharon Gill says. “Acknowledging it may be enough to get it to stop.”

Get positive. If you have an angry spirit, it’s likely because someone in your home has the same kind of energy, Oester says. He and Gill worked with a family in which a spirit was slamming doors, scaring the family. “We helped them create a rule where all of the problems were to be left on the front porch before anyone came in the house. They had to work on being positive in the house,” says Oester, who notes that the family reported a ghost-free house within months.

Oh, but Moran is sure about one thing: “Blessings, exorcisms and the like are nonsense.”

So you can chat the ghost up and help it wrestle with its self-esteem issues, but do not — repeat, do not — think that calling a priest will help. No sir. No doubts about that, either. Whatever you do, don’t take seriously the claims of traditional religious teachings on the subject of good and evil, heaven and hell, angels and demons.

P.S. Those interested in another mysterious story in a mainstream newspaper can turn to The Dallas Morning News, where friend-of-this-blog Rod Dreher has published a chilling little essay titled “A ghost in the family: Did Grandfather’s spirit stay behind to mend broken bonds?” Honest, Dreher has a great book stashed in his head that could be called Confessions of a Bayou Exorcist and some smart publisher needs to pay him big bucks to get it written.

Advocates of improved religion-beat coverage often run into the following argument.

Newspapers are supposed to be skeptical (true) and that means we should only be covering stories based on facts. Religion is all about private beliefs, not verifiable public facts, so we shouldn’t be covering that emotional gobbledegook in the first place. Whenever you cover those stories people call in all upset and they don’t want to talk about the facts.

On one level, this makes sense.

On another, it’s totally bogus. Newspapers cover facts. OK, it is a fact that millions of people say that their beliefs affect how they live their lives, earn their living, raise their children and, heaven forbid, cast their ballots. The fact of these activities then affects issues of time and money. The last time I checked, sportswriters tried to cover the not-so-logical side of their beat and, increasingly, the same is true of political reporters. Are the arts based totally on “facts”?

It is also true that millions of people believe that prayer can change things and even heal. This is a belief that transcends denominational differences. These days, one might even run into a healing service at a Unitarian Universalist sanctuary.

Thus, it is interesting to read a very traditional journalistic report on the phenomenon of scientists doing research into the power of prayer. Reporter Benedict Carey of the New York Times sticks close to the basics, and pretty quickly runs into the “fact” wall:

Critics express outrage that the federal government, which has contributed $2.3 million in financing over the last four years for prayer research, would spend taxpayer money to study something they say has nothing to do with science.

“Intercessory prayer presupposes some supernatural intervention that is by definition beyond the reach of science,” said Dr. Richard J. McNally, a psychologist at Harvard. “It is just a nonstarter, in my opinion, a total waste of time and money.”

To understand the nature of the research, read the story. The scientists involved are trying to find ways to do neutral tests. They are trying to research the facts, even if they cannot provide explanations for why the facts exist.

And this is not a fringe activity. Clearly, this is news. Even if it causes sweaty palms.

Since 2000, at least 10 studies of intercessory prayer have been carried out by researchers at institutions including the Mind/Body Medical Institute, a nonprofit clinic near Boston run by a Harvard-trained cardiologist, as well as Duke University and the University of Washington. Government financing of intercessory prayer research began in the mid-1990′s and has continued under the Bush administration. …

Two large trials of the effects of prayer on coronary health are currently under review at prominent medical journals. Even those who defend prayer research concede that such studies are difficult. For one thing, no one knows what constitutes a “dose”: some studies have tested a few prayers a day by individual healers, while others have had entire congregations pray together. Some have involved evangelical Christians; others have engaged rabbis, Buddhist and New Age healers, or some combination.

Maybe the fact is that this is a mystery. Can newspapers cover this, quoting intelligent voices on both sides of the debate? This approach might even work in other controversial science issues. You think?

Here at GetReligion we’ve protested when writers draw glib connections between religious belief and heinous behavior. “Follow the Mullahs,” Stephen Grey’s report in the latest Atlantic, is a refreshing exception to that pattern. Writing about efforts to authenticate a message attributed to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Grey introduces the phrase forensic theology:

Authenticating terrorist documents is just one of its uses. It can also help identify perpetrators, and targets for surveillance, sometimes far more effectively than conventional intelligence practices. Its greatest potential, however, may be strategic: with theologians at the center of the battle, forensic theology may help us pinpoint the groups that present the greatest threat.

Grey, who formerly led an investigation team for the Sunday Times of London, Yigal Carmon of MEMRI (the Middle East Media Research Institute) as a pioneer in the field. (On this page of specialists who can comment on this year’s presidential campaign, Washington University in St. Louis lists Frank Flinn, an adjunct professor of religious studies, as a consultant in forensic theology.)

Here is a central warning from Grey’s report:

According to Alastair Crooke, the former European Union negotiator with Hamas and other radical Islamic groups, who is now working on a project to increase Western policymakers’ understanding of Islam, many such groups, including Hamas and Hizbollah, are utterly opposed to the activities of bin Laden and Zarqawi — indeed, to any form of jihad outside what they regard as occupied territory. Yet the U.S. government classifies Hamas and Hizbollah in the same terrorist category as al-Qaeda. “The biggest mistake the West makes is to disregard these differences and to demonize almost the entire spectrum of political Islam,” Crooke says.

The Oct. 11 issue of The New Yorker (not yet available online) includes an eight-page article about Creflo Dollar, who preaches what is widely called prosperity theology. The article, by New York Times writer Kelefa Sanneh, mines some of the rich details a reader would expect in a New Yorker profile, such as these:

Dollar has also become something of a hip-hop icon. He appears in the music video “Welcome to Atlanta,” by Jermaine Dupri and Ludacris, and 50 Cent recently rhymed “Creflo Dollar” with “pop my collar.” When the rapper Ma$e decided to devote himself to God, Dollar became his spiritual father.

Sanneh deftly pokes fun at the widespread corporate-speak at Dollar’s World Changers Church International. We read of a man in charge of “ministry systems,” of the sign designating Dollar’s office as an “Executive Suite” and of the weekly “cabinet meeting” by the church’s leaders.

But he also uses a disdainful tone that veers between a meaningless list of clichÃ(c)s (“Dollar is a slick TV preacher who sometimes impersonates a down-home Holy Roller”) and gratuitous adjectives (“This was, in a sense, his second conversion, and he describes it with the shivery enthusiasm of a true believer”).

Sanneh is amazed that Dollar is friends with both Evander Holyfield and Oral Roberts, which should surprise no one who knows much about Roberts (who never met a prosperity preacher prosperity teacher he hasn’t liked). Sanneh defines prosperity theology in an overly ecumenical fashion: “Dollar’s commitment to the combined power of faith and finance puts him firmly in the American mainstream, alongside P. Diddy, President Bush, and a lot of other people in between.” By that definition, Dollar has just as much in common with Senator John Kerry or Sir John Templeton.

Sanneh’s worst mistake, though, is one that suggests he doesn’t understand the meaning of evangelical, one of the most common words in American religion: “An earlier generation of Evangelicals found their own style — Jimmy Swaggart was the lachrymose drama queen, Pat Robertson was the down-home scholar of world events, Reverend Ike was the shameless hustler.”

Fair enough on the Jimmy Swaggart joke — it’s timely comic relief after Swaggart’s cringe-inducing remarks about killing any potential gay suitor.

But please pay attention, all you acclaimed New Yorker fact-checkers: evangelicals are keen on the authority of Scripture over their lives. Evangelicals are not known for saying Scripture is flat-out incorrect about wealth, as Reverend Ike frequently has done in asserting that the lack of wealth, rather than the love of it, is the root of all evil.

GetReligion often complains when reporters use fundamentalist as a synonym for evangelical. A promiscuous definition of evangelical is no less troubling.

Journalists cannot always predict which stories will cause a ruckus, but reporter Jeffrey Weiss of the Dallas Morning News knew that his report about a local “Bus 19″ exhibit was going to raise eyebrows. The bus had been attacked by terrorists, with 11 people dead. Now it was being used as part of a tour to promote the cause of Israel. It was being displayed in North Dallas as part of the Yom Kippur holy day.

The congregation doing this? Baruch HaShem Messianic Synagogue, which is linked to the movement that calls itself “Messianic Judaism,” with Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah. (The photo is from the massive 1997 Promise Keepers rally on the National Mall.) Weiss notes:

Here’s the problem: “Messianic Jews” say they can both be Jewish and believe that Jesus was the Messiah foretold in Jewish Scripture. Every other group on earth that calls itself Jewish says that’s impossible.

That dispute was at the heart of my story: Some local Jewish leaders who consider Baruch HaShem deceitful objected to its use of a symbol of Jewish martyrdom on a day sacred to Jews. Baruch HaShem leaders said they were acting in accord with their values — Jewish values — and offending no one.

So should the newspaper describe them as Messianic Jews? Christians? Religious frauds? True believers? How can we be fair and accurate and not confuse our readers?

This is part of a hot debate within journalism. Should newsrooms allow controversial groups to define themselves?

For years, these debates centered on abortion coverage. Journalists called one side pro-choice, its label of choice, and the other side anti-abortion, a term it hated. It was a classic example of slanted language. Some let the groups self-identify, then put the terms inside of quotation marks — “pro-choice” vs. “pro-life.” Eventually, most newspapers dropped the slanted pro-choice term and substituted something literal, such as pro-abortion rights.

These word games are incredibly important on the religion beat, perhaps even more so than in political coverage. Weiss noted ongoing controversies about what to call members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Mormons? Mormon Christians? Christians? It’s even hard to work with a group as vanilla and, in Dallas almost all-powerful, as the Southern Baptist convention. A few claim they are not Protestants, because the try to trace their roots back to John the Baptist.

The battle over the Messianic Jews is especially hot, because of the bitter debates over who is and who is not “Jewish.” Hardly anyone knows how to define that term. I discovered this once again last year writing about the long-delayed National Jewish Population Survey of 2000-2001, which is based on interviews with 4,500 Jews. Sponsors at the United Jewish Communities called it the most detailed statistical portrait of American Jews ever assembled. Critics had less flattering things to say.

That survey defined a Jew as someone whose “religion is Jewish, OR, whose religion is Jewish and something else, OR, who has no religion and has at least one Jewish parent or a Jewish upbringing, OR, who has a non-monotheistic religion, and has at least one Jewish parent or a Jewish upbringing.” Say what?

… (All) definitions include some and exclude others, said research director Laurence Kotler-Berkowitz. This survey, for example, was clear to include Jewish Buddhists. But its “non-monotheistic religion” clause excluded two people who had converted from Judaism to Islam. The “whose religion is Jewish and something else” clause created another problem.

“We included people who said they were both Jewish and Catholic or Jewish and something else,” he said. “But if they identified themselves as Jewish Christians or we found some evidence that they were Messianic Jews, then we excluded them from the study. We had to draw that line.”

I was confused. So a person could be Jewish and Christian? That depends, I was told. A person could be Jewish and Catholic, in light of the teachings of Vatican II. Say what? And a person could be Jewish and an Episcopalian, but not an Episcopal evangelical. Or Jewish and Unitarian. But not Jewish and Southern Baptist or Jewish and Eastern Orthodox. Jewish and United Methodist? Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps in New York, but not in Texas. Jewish and Lutheran? Not Missouri-Synod Lutheran.

The key was that the person could be a Christian and a Jew, in this survey, as long as the researchers did not sense that the person was part of a Christian movement that insisted that belief in Jesus was directly linked to salvation. Put that in your newsroom stylebook.

Clearly, this is dangerous territory. Anyone who has worked on the religion beat for a month knows that.

But it is possible to do solid, careful work that lets voices on both sides of these issues define their own views and speak their peace. This approach may make lots of people mad, but it’s the path that journalists have to walk if they want to be fair. Want to hear an example of what I mean? Click here to hear Barbara Bradley Hagerty negotiate this journalistic minefield.

This is one of many stories that I intended to write about last week or even earlier, but let me bring it up here on a quiet non-hurricane weekend. As regulars to the blog know, I have been highly interested in recent stories in the New York Times, the Associated Press and elsewhere, in which reporters seemed to be tiptoeing around a tense area in journalistic style — the rule about referring to an unborn child as a “fetus.”

In part, this journalistic question seems to be rooted in coverage of a leap forward in technology — those amazing 4D-imaging machines now being used virtually everywhere. This digital window is having an impact. It is hard to refer to these images as pictures of fetuses.

Recently, this issue came up again in the newspaper of record. This time, reporter Sam Lubell — in a story called “The Womb as Photo Studio” — carefully walked the edge of the razor and followed the letter of the stylebook law. Thus, here is the lead:

It’s a rite of passage for many expectant parents: baby’s first ultrasound. The fuzzy images of the fetus, produced during an examination in an obstetrician’s office, are prized by couples, passed around proudly among friends and relatives.

Now, trying to capitalize on this phenomenon, a number of companies are selling elective ultrasounds that have little to do with neonatal health. The services, often in small offices or shopping malls, amount to fetal photo studios and use newer 3-D ultrasound technology to produce more realistic images than conventional machines.

Another tricky issue soon follows, as Lubell mentions that one of the most common uses of the technology is to determine the gender of the unborn child. Might this be linked to the controversial issue of gender-selection abortion? Perhaps that is an issue for another story.

When dealing with third-person paraphrases, the story stays with the medically correct “fetus.” The problem is that the story also quotes real, live people. Thus, there is a somewhat awkward dance of journalistic vocabulary. For example, note this reference to the emotional impact of the new technology:

“Women love it,” said Matt Evans, a lawyer, who started his company, Baby Insight (baby -insight.com), about a year and a half ago. “They get to see their baby and have an emotional experience with their baby.”

Or there was this quotation from new mother Shirlesa Glaspie, of Lanham, Md., who said the experience has been both frightening and revelatory.

“He’s yawning, he sticks his tongue out, he smiles,” she said. “It gives you a realization of what’s going on when your stomach is moving around and bouncing around.”

And so forth and so on, swinging back and forth between the voices of people and the style of journalism. The tension is real and there is no easy way around it. But this points to a larger story: When will the people who lobby against abortion realize that this form of technology is on their side? Is the future of pro-life work linked to ultrasounds, rather than picket signs? Might be a story hidden in this style issue.

Some of you may remember that, while stuffed inside my shuttered concrete and metal fortress West Palm Beach fortress, I sent out a missive the other day on the theological implications of being hit multiple times by hurricanes in the space of a few weeks.

It included the following lines that were went in jest, sort of. Maybe. Maybe not. I am not a Calvinist, so I can say it is all a mystery.

God shows up in quite a few of the news stories during hurricane season, but, so far, no one has put in print the question that you actually hear down here on the sidewalks and in the pews. The question is simple: Why is this happening? Close behind that question is this one: Why is God doing this to us? And then this one: Was it something we did? Why is Pat Robertson mad at us this time?

In the past few days, more than a few people have sent me the graphic that accompanies this post, which has been floating around in people’s email listservs. Has it actually been published anywhere? It proposes a somewhat partisan explanation for what has been happening to Florida, in light of the 2000 election. It is sort of Pat Robertson for Unitarian activists at www.MainstreamCoalition.org.

The thing’s pretty funny, if you ask me. However, look at one tiny detail on that pre-Jeanne map — that blue-tinted Palm Beach County. Let me assure you, as a resident of this fair locale, that we have not been missed by the storms. (Wait, I need to save my work because I think the campus computer network is still shaken by storm damage. There, I’m back.) Also, St. Lucie County as been pounded.

So, while I have questions about the fine details in this map, I stand by my statement that the whole subject of theodicy and hurricanes is fair game. Some one ought to take it seriously.

And that someone is not columnist Mark Morford of the San Francisco Chronicle. Still, I have to admit that he gets off some funny lines in his “Does God Hate Florida? After four brutal hurricanes, why aren’t Bush evangelicals talking about the Almighty’s wrath?” Here’s the opener:

You know it’s true. You know if, say, San Francisco had just been blasted by not two, not three, but fully four lethal trailer-park-eating earthquakes, why, the Right-wing Bible set would be yelping with barely disguised joy.

Of course they would. They’d be jumping up and down and saying I told you so and pointing to Volume 18 of “Left Behind” and claiming that this was, of course, God’s wrath upon the sinners and the gays and the heathens and sodomites and the tofu eaters and the Toyota Priuses and the yoga studios and the anal sex and the incense burners and the Zen meditation centers.

Ha ha snicker, they’d say. Serves you right, they’d sneer. Shoulda voted Republican, they’d add.

And so forth and so on, paragraph after paragraph (some of which are actually funny), while adding zero content to the discussion. Maybe, even though he is a columnist, he could have tried interviewing an actual theologian or two, offering competing perspectives. Just a thought. The religious left is easy to find out there, but, hey, the Southern Baptists even have a seminary nearby. Give ‘em a ring.