Bill Moyers Saw What Newsrooms Missed: Faith Still Matters
(ANALYSIS) The year was 1976, and Jimmy Carter, a Sunday school teacher from Georgia, had shocked major newsrooms by discussing his born-again faith.
Presidential candidates were not supposed to do things like that.
At CBS News, special correspondent Bill Moyers received a green light for a primetime feature, “What It Means to be Born Again.” After seeing the finished piece, a network executive pulled Moyers aside to chat.
The man's face was so serious “that I thought he was about to tell me he'd been born again,” Moyers told me in 1987.
No, the executive said: “That was the worst show I have ever seen in my life.”
The program was “cut to bits,” Moyers said. Network leaders "didn't think it was news. They just didn't understand what was going on.”
The broadcaster faced this disconnect many times. Moyers died on June 26 at the age of 91, after a long and complex career in which he served as a speech writer and press secretary for President Lyndon B. Johnson, followed by decades of work with CBS, NBC and PBS. However, before that, the Rev. Bill Moyers was a Southern Baptist pastor in Texas towns like Brandon and Weir. He was proud of those roots and his convictions as a progressive Baptist.
“By no means is Moyers a typical Southern Baptist,” I noted in a 1993 "On Religion" column. "He is the rare Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary graduate whose books and tapes are popular at New Age conventions. He is a hero wherever there are Baptists whose annual donations to National Public Radio are greater than their gifts to Focus on the Family."
Preaching before the first presidential inauguration of Bill Clinton, another Baptist progressive, Moyers got down to basics, sharing a saying he heard from his father that Cain and Abel were "the first Baptists because they introduced fratricide" to the biblical drama.
At the heart of Baptist life "is what we call soul competency," he explained. "Created with the imprint of divinity, from the mixed clay of earth, we are endowed with the capacity to choose, to be a grown-up before God, making my own case, accounting for my own sins, asking my own questions and expecting in good faith that when all is said and done, I'll get a fair hearing and just verdict."
Visits to churches were common in his broadcasts for a simple reason. Because of his unique background, Moyers was not afraid of religion or offended by the language of faith. While he frequently sparred with conservative believers, Moyers also -- behind the scenes -- criticized what he considered tragic gaps in newsrooms.
In 1982, Moyers agreed to a lengthy interview soon after I began my religion-beat work at The Charlotte News. It was the first of several conversations, in part because he was familiar with my University of Illinois graduate school research exploring why so many newsrooms struggle when covering religion.
"I think the church is a ... greater force in American life than journalists think it is," he said. Many journalists insist on viewing religion through a political lens -- period. But, for the “majority of people in this country, the church is still the governing force in their lives.”
Far too many national-level editors and producers, Moyers added, believe that events and issues are “simply not important” unless they can be linked to partisan politics in Washington, D.C. This attitude then trickles down to local newsrooms.
“Most people in Washington — both in the press and in government — feel like they have outgrown religion," said Moyers during the 1982 interview. Thus, religious faith is "something that is in their past," something "unsophisticated" that they cannot take seriously.
Unfortunately, it's hard to erase this blind spot because elite journalists tend to be “working stiffs, but they are not working class.” It doesn't help that — in his experience — many of America's top journalists are educated in the Northeast and, to a lesser degree, the major cities of the Midwest and West Coast, he said.
The irony, Moyers noted, is that “the First Amendment has ... left a cleavage in the minds of journalists, who are protected by it, towards religion, which is also protected by it. ... They have tended to keep religion in the background by looking at government as the only source of news.”
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Terry Mattingly is Senior Fellow on Communications and Culture at Saint Constantine College in Houston. He lives in Elizabethton, Tennessee, and writes Rational Sheep, a Substack newsletter on faith and mass media.