Celebrities Rule: How Should Reporters Assess The Name Fame Game In Religion?
Archbishop Timothy Broglio during an interview at the chapel on Osan Air Base, Republic of Korea, Aug. 26, 2015. Photo via U.S. Air Force.
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(OPINION) As of the 2022 midterms, the United States had 49 million registered Democrats and 39 million registered Republicans, according to estimates from World Population Review.
Recent National Basketball Association and National Football League annual attendance combined to 39 million. And last November, a religious leader named Timothy P. Broglio took charge of a U.S. organization with 67 million members.
Timothy who? That would be the archbishop who is the newly elected president of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, who will lead the church in the U.S. through the 2024 election season and on the 2025. If you think his task is placid, note this liberal jeremiad — care of National Catholic Reporter — about his election.
Weeks before, Kristen Waggoner became a prime culture wars figure.
Kristen who? This evangelical attorney is the new president of the Alliance Defending Freedom, a legal nonprofit that represents religious conservatives in matters like LGBTQ disputes, as in this critique of the Democrats’ marriage act. Her ADF is branded a “hate group” by the equally controversial Southern Poverty Law Center.
Point being that important leaders within segments of American religion are generally far less prominent than athletes, entertainers, politicians or tech billionaires. Publicity usually falls to clergy who run purchased-time broadcasts, utter political sound bites or are trapped in scandals.
Think Pat Robertson.
Things were different not so long ago when Billy Graham, Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders were titanic cultural and media personalities. In an earlier time, so to speak, Time magazine would devote a cover story to Christian thinkers C.S. Lewis (1947) or Reinhold Niebuhr (1948, written by Whittaker Chambers), Presbyterian bureaucrat Eugene Carson Blake (“Can Protestants Unite?”, 1961) or U.S. Catholic Cardinals Spellman (1946) or Cushing (1964).
Since the media and the internet are crazy over lists (is this David Letterman’s doing?), how about a well-reported article — not about our American era’s top 10 religious celebrities but which ones exercise the most influence, seen or unseen? Consider that Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik (Joseph who?) commanded an important segment of Judaism, “Modern Orthodoxy,” with minimal media notice.
Or take a current example. Did the mainstream media turn out to observe the leaders of major Protestant denominations attending the annual Conference of National Black Churches in Orlando, last Dec. 13-15? One person who might have attended such a gathering is the rarely covered leader of a claimed 6 million members in the Church of God in Christ, Presiding Bishop and Chief Apostle John Drew Sheard. (John who?) Sheard’s Detroit office is 313-864-7170. The media contact at Memphis headquarters is Robert Coleman Jr., 901-235 -2160 or pr@cogic.org.
This not particularly original story idea was provoked by a Nov. 3 Religion News Service item headlined “Major Christian Leaders Asked Jan. 6 Committee to Investigate Christian Nationalism.”
There’s a timely question: Nowadays, what Christian leaders still rank as “major,” and why?
Backing up a bit, these officials want the U.S. Congress to “thoroughly investigate” this phenomenon’s perceived “threat” to religious liberty “and the importance of defeating it.” It’s a project of Christians Against Christian Nationalism, formed in 2019 by the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, which issued this February report on the movement in tandem with the Freedom From Religion Foundation.
Among endorsers of the appeal to Congress were BJCRL Executive Director Amanda Tyler; the chief executives of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, Episcopal Church, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and the United Church of Christ; high executives of the American Baptist Churches and Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.); and the president of one predominantly Black denomination, the Progressive National Baptist Convention.
As a matter of membership, we’re talking about millions of Protestant churchgoers (in denominations that have experienced decades of decline), and when we add endorsement by the interim general secretary of the National Council of Churches that nominally would add several million Eastern and Orthodox church members. But reporters need to carefully assess the extent to which these officials represent the concerns of those millions, and therefore how much practical influence they have on lawmakers. The same is true for other religious organizations and movements.
A side media note: RNS reporting on this effort was funded under a grant from the Stiefel Freethought Foundation, which wants government based “on love and reason rather than bias or dogma.”
That means the foundation, among other things, seeks to “secularize American public policy,” to “weaken the influence of the American fundamentalist ‘religious right,’” and to “strip tax exemptions from groups that discriminate in services or employment.” Worth noting?
Richard Ostling is a former religion reporter for The Associated Press and former correspondent for TIME Magazine. This piece first appeared at Get Religion.