Muckraking Is Biblical: Welcome To The Summer Of Exposés
(ANALYSIS) News audiences have been consumed by the onrush of the Donald Trump assassination attempt, Joe Biden’s extraordinary fall and Kamala Harris’ rise. But Catholics who follow religious events got other eye-popping news July 1 from CruxNow.com, an excellent and influential journalistic outlet on church events.
At a 2,400-word length, the Crux story detailed its meticulous investigation of leaders’ hidden sexual, physical and emotional abuse within the Missionaries of Charity.
This is not just another women’s religious order. The 5,750 white-and-blue clad sisters exemplify the best of Christian charity, offering solace and practical help to the poor, handicapped, aged and dying, originally in India and now in 139 nations. Their founder, the late Mother Teresa, is of course one of the era’s most revered personalities.
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She first gained global fame with Time magazine’s 1975 “Living Saints” cover story, won the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize “for bringing help to suffering humanity,” and in 2016 was canonized as a saint at the Vatican. Yet some of the misconduct occurred when she was in total charge, prior to her death in 1997.
Then, on July 17, the Emmaus Community reported an investigation that unearthed “sexual assault or sexual harassment” by its own founding leader, the late Abbé Pierre, among the most beloved figures in France for his efforts on behalf of the poor and homeless. In an earlier French scandal, the L’Arche organization had reported sexual abuse of women perpetrated by its equally respected founder Jean Vanier, the apostle to the mentally challenged.
Note these are Catholic-on-Catholic exposés, and the French reports came from the organizations themselves. Yes, conscientious Christians in media work may believe their vocation necessitates muckraking. (President Theodore Roosevelt coined that term, taken from an image in “Pilgrim’s Progress” by John Bunyan, to scold the remarkable investigative journalists who arose in early 20th century America).
Something like that has been occurring with America’s independent Christian media. In 2021, conservative Catholics founded The Pillar, with an investigative edge that complements the longstanding liberal candor at the National Catholic Reporter. Evangelical Protestants recently launched the similar online Ministry Watch, The Roys Report and Wartburg Watch.
Over the years, pioneering World and Christianity Today magazines likewise pursued evangelical sinning, in the latter case including an in-house scandal.
Nonevangelical Protestants? Not so much.
On July 8, a major secular scandal erupted with a Toronto Star essay about Alice Munro, the celebrated Canadian winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her daughter Andrea wrote about her stepfather’s sexual abuse when she was a young child, despite which Munro stayed with him and covered up the abuse for decades.
That news provoked a July 13-14 The Wall Street Journal story by noted biographer Jonathan Eig. He targeted scholar Robert Thacker, who learned about this just before his definitive 2005 Munro biography was published but omitted the information. Thacker argues that his book was about her writing, not her personal life. Eig doesn’t buy it.
He himself faced this issue in writing his own “Ali: A Life” and then “King: A Life,” which won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for biography (There was no such difficulty with “Luckiest Man,” his biography of baseball great Lou Gehrig). Eig’s personal hero Muhammad Ali turned out to be cruel toward women, a betrayer of friends, and so vain it bordered on narcissism.
The Rev.Martin Luther King Jr., of course, holds stature among modern religious figures equivalent to Mother Teresa’s. Yet Eig’s biography verifies prior reports that King plagiarized portions of his Boston University doctoral dissertation, was unfaithful to wife Coretta, and sometimes drank heavily.
Eig’s article contended that “great lives deserve honest biographies” and “will not only withstand scrutiny but, in the long run, benefit from it. … If we demand perfection from our heroes, we won’t have any.” King’s flaws were central to understanding his story because they were “weaponized” against him by the FBI (Sidelight: In a PBS “NewsHour” interview, Billy Graham denied this writer’s hunch that private FBI information explained his growing distance from King).
A June book from the evangelical InterVarsity Press shows another aspect of investigation, re-examination of older history. “Ownership: The Evangelical Legacy of Slavery in Edwards, Wesley and Whitefield” is by Sean McGever. He’s both an area director with the evangelical Young Life ministry and an adjunct teacher at Grand Canyon University, whose doctoral work examined the theology of that Colonial era.
The book’s subjects are the three founders of American evangelical religion. John Wesley (1703-1791) originated the Methodist movement in Britain and America, with its dynamism in evangelism, personal piety and social reform. His friend and fellow Church of England clergyman George Whitefield (1714-1770) was the innovative star traveling revival preacher on both sides of the Atlantic. New England Congregationalist pastor Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) was the colonies’ dominant theologian and remains influential.
All three were implicated in American slavery, a sad aspect that’s often deleted in accounts of their lives. As with other upper-crust families, Edwards was raised amid household slaves and continued the practice. Whitefield, an emphatic defender of the system, operated a plantation to support his Georgia orphanage, and his will granted no manumission to his slaves there. Wesley owned no slaves but observed mistreatment of southern slaves, yet only turned into an ardent abolitionist in old age.
Why rake muck?
For one thing, it’s biblical. Recall Scripture’s narratives about the venerated King David’s adultery and homicide, or St. Peter’s multiple denials of Jesus Christ. McGever’s book contends that truth-telling is not only necessary for Christians but provides spiritual benefits.
It encourages healthy reflection on the forgiveness of sins, the ways power is misused, the dangers of celebrity worship, the ongoing impact of racial evil, and the value in continually taking fresh looks at our own attitudes rather than — as with these three past heroes — remaining captive to the cultural assumptions in which we were born and raised.
Richard N. Ostling was a longtime religion writer with The Associated Press and with Time magazine, where he produced 23 cover stories, as well as a Time senior correspondent providing field reportage for dozens of major articles. He has interviewed such personalities as Billy Graham, the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI); ranking rabbis and Muslim leaders; and authorities on other faiths; as well as numerous ordinary believers. He writes a bi-weekly column for Religion Unplugged.