People like me--religious conservatives who are reasonably intelligent and sociable--aren't supposed to exist. You may recall the furor a decade ago when a Washington Post story described Christian conservatives as "largely poor, uneducated and easy to command." It's bad enough a reporter for one of the country's top newspapers made an error like that. It's staggering that it got through several layers of copy editing. For all the caterwauling about "diversity" in the media, you'd be hard-pressed to find the same uniformity of thinking in any Catholic church on Sunday as you'll find any day of the week in most American newsrooms.
True story: I once proposed a column on some now-forgotten religious theme to the then city editor of the New York Post. He looked at me like I'd lost my mind. "This is not a religious city," he said, with a straight face. As it happened, the man lived in my neighborhood. On his morning walk to the subway, he had to pass two Catholic churches, an Episcopal church, a synagogue, a mosque, an Assemblies of God Hispanic parish, and an Iglesia Bautista Hispana. He didn't see these places because he doesn't know anyone who attends them.
In the main, the men and women who bring America its news don't hate religion. In most cases, they just believe it's unimportant at best, menacing at worst. Because they don't know any religious people, they think of American religion in categories that have long been outdated.
My fellow reporters think I'm putting them on when I tell them I've been a practicing Catholic for 10 years and have only heard one sermon about abortion and none about contraception. Outside the Jewish community, Israel has no stronger supporters than among American evangelicals. That's been true for at least a generation, but the news has yet to reach American newsrooms, where there's a general assumption that these "fundamentalists" are anti-Semitic. Because journalists tend not to know religiously observant people, they see religious activity the only way they know--in terms of secular politics.
So what? Everybody knows that pro-life marchers and churches that resist gay "marriage" aren't going to get a fair shake from the newspaper. But this phenomenon is both broader and deeper than individual stories. In a media-driven society, the press sets the terms of public debate. It establishes the inescapable narrative of how society reacts to its challenges.
Anti-religious media bias also has profound implications for American politics. In an article published recently in "The Public Interest," social scientists Louis Bolce and Gerald De Maio say that journalists' parochialism blinds them to one of the biggest stories in American politics: how the Democratic Party has become a stronghold of fervent secularists, and how secularism "is just as powerful a determinant of social attitudes and voting behavior as is a religiously traditional outlook."
