Two well-known religion writers — one in England covering the Anglican Church’s struggle with homosexuality and one in Los Angeles chronicling the U.S. Catholic Church’s sex scandals — have recently quit their jobs. Both cited the fact that covering the hypocrisy and sordid behavior of the clergy, and seeing the suffering of the Church’s victims eroded their own faith to the extent that they could not stay on the Jesus beat.
Now I am moving on, [Stephen Bates, who recently stepped down as religious affairs writer for the London Guardian, wrote]. It was time to go. What faith I had, I’ve lost, I am afraid – I’ve seen too much, too close. A young Methodist press officer once asked me earnestly whether I saw it as my job to spread the Good News of Jesus. No, I said, that’s the last thing I am here to do.
William Lobdell, who covered religion for the Los Angeles Times, was raised a Presbyterian, flirted with evangelical Christianity and nearly converted to Catholicism. But what he learned about the church while covering the sex scandals took away his faith:
I couldn’t get the victims’ stories or the bishops’ lies — many of them right there on their own stationery — out of my head. I had been in journalism more than two decades and had dealt with murders, rapes, other violent crimes and tragedies. But this was different — the children were so innocent, their parents so faithful, the priests so sick and bishops so corrupt.
So what kind of faith did these writers have that was so easily eroded by the hypocrisy, depravity and duplicity of human beings? Maybe there are no true believers in the newsroom, just like there are no atheists in foxholes. I would think that reporting would breed the kind of skeptical cynicism that is antithetical to a belief in God or trust in a religion. Both that belief and that trust are merely intellectual constructs that provide no warranty against the bad behavior of other people. Indeed, to expect priests and preachers to behave any better than the rest of us is naive. It’s like holding politicians to a higher standard of behavior.
It would be an interesting experiment to put an unbeliever on the Jesus beat and see if he got faith, despite the scandals. Maybe if he covered enough uplifting, heartwarming stories of faith, he’d get some. Of course, he’d have to become inured to the depravity of the clergy and ignore the abuses hidden behind the facade of religion.
But an unbeliever probably wouldn’t take on the Jesus beat, unless it was solely as an investigative reporter seeking to uncover wrongdoing. Otherwise, it would be like being on the unicorn beat, writing about something you’re convinced doesn’t exist.
