This article was first published in the State of Faith newsletter. Sign up to receive the newsletter in your inbox each Monday night.
When McKay Coppins covered Sen. Mitt Romney’s run for president in 2012, he stood out from other journalists on the campaign trail. It wasn’t just because he’s a unique talent, but also because, like Romney, he’s a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
“I picked up the nickname, ‘The Mormon Wikipedia.’ All these reporters around me would say, ‘I’m writing about this issue. ... I don’t understand what Mormon teaching is on this. Can you explain it to me really quickly?’ That became my role,” he said during a June 24 panel on religion journalism hosted by the National Press Club Journalism Institute.
According to Coppins, the experience taught him the value of having people with a wide range of religious experiences in newsrooms. Too often, reporters who are confused about a faith group or a specific teaching don’t have someone at work who can help, he said.
“I think it’s important not just with Mormonism but in general to have people who have real experience in various faith communities,” said Coppins, who is now a staff writer for The Atlantic.
But that doesn’t mean newsrooms must have a perfectly curated, religiously diverse staff in order to cover religion well (although it couldn’t hurt.) In reality, people of faith often misunderstand or at least have lots of unanswered questions about their own religious traditions, said Aysha Khan, a freelance religion journalist who previously covered Islam for Religion News Service, during the panel.
She said writing about the Muslim community as a Muslim helped her see her knowledge gaps. She ended up going to graduate school to study her own tradition.
“I realized there was a lot I didn’t know about ‘us’ and who comprises that ‘us,’” Khan said.
In other words, hiring a Catholic to write about Catholics or a Jew to write about Jews won’t guarantee a confusion-free reporting experience. It might be best for newsrooms to focus, instead, on hiring reporters who have a general respect for and curiosity about religion, people who won’t be embarrassed to ask lots of questions, Coppins said.
“What I’ve found is that people who have any kind of lived experience in religion, regardless of what the tradition was, generally approach religion with more care and nuance than other reporters,” he said. “That’s not always true but I always advocate for more people with any kind of religious experience being in newsrooms.”
Fresh off the press
Supreme Court sides with football coach in school prayer case
Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade
Why religious schools just won big — again — in front of the Supreme Court
How the fight over school prayer became a battle for the soul of the nation
Term of the week: Oak Flat
Oak Flat is a Native American sacred site in Arizona that’s at the center of a lawsuit that could soon be in front of the Supreme Court.
Last week, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the group of Native Americans seeking to protect the area, deciding that allowing destructive copper mining in Oak Flat does not violate the Constitution’s religious freedom protections.
“Oak Flat is like Mount Sinai to us — our most sacred site where we connect with our Creator, our faith, our families and our land,” said Wendsler Nosie Sr., who is part of the group that brought the lawsuit, in a June 24 statement. “It is a place of healing that has been sacred to us since long before Europeans arrived on this continent.”
One year ago, I spoke with Becket attorney Luke Goodrich about the way religious freedom law fails Native Americans. Judges often fail to understand the significance of tribes’ sacred practices, he said.
“There’s a real deafness and blindness on the part of the government when it comes to Native American practices that are tied to historic lands,” Goodrich said at the time.
What I’m reading ...
Throughout much of the 1960s and 1970s, more than 95% of U.S. adults said they believed in God. Today, that figure stands at 81%, according to the latest Gallup poll. One scholar told Religion News Service that the drop in belief could be caused, at least in part, by growing conflict over religion’s role in the political sphere.
As I noted in a recent story for Deseret magazine, this year marked the 60th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s first major school prayer ruling, which helped launch a culture war that continues to this day. It also marks the 30th anniversary of another memorable school prayer decision, which outlawed sectarian prayers at school graduation ceremonies. The Washington Post dove into the fascinating history of that 1992 case last week.
Religious schools won big at the Supreme Court last week when the justices ruled that Maine must treat faith-based private schools the same as other private institutions and allow them to access public education funds. But Maine officials may have the last laugh, according to The New York Times, since, in anticipation of the ruling, they preemptively passed a law stating that all schools receiving state money must abide by LGBTQ anti-discrimination rules.
Odds and ends
The Supreme Court’s abortion ruling may have arrived, but the story is far from over. As you read the news in the coming weeks, look for articles on state policy changes, political rallies and how government officials and community organizations, including faith groups, are preparing to serve families who no longer have access to abortions. And let me know what lingering questions you’d like me to answer in future stories and newsletters.