Because Nicholas Kristof is a good reporter, he knows he has a problem. Kristof, whose byline appears regularly in The New York Times op-ed pages, contributed a column about his problem on March 4 under the heading, “God, Satan and the Media.” The problem, acknowledged with welcome honesty, is that “nearly all of us in the news business are completely out of touch with a group that includes 46 percent of Americans.” These 46 percent are the ones who in a December Gallup Poll described themselves as born-again or evangelical Christians.
By no means does Kristof want to beat a drum for the religious beliefs or public policies advocated by self-identified born-again Christians. But in a burst of self-awareness he describes his problem with effective force. On the one hand are a slew of irrefutable realities: President Bush uses language about God and personal faith as if he really means it. The Left Behind series of novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins has sold 50 million copies. Revivalist-healer Benny Hinn appears on television in 190 countries. Almost twice as many Americans believe in creationism as in evolution, if surveys are to be trusted. And around the world, as Philip Jenkins and others have pointed out, what Kristof calls “fundamentalist Christianity” is spreading like wildfire. On the other hand is the worldview purveyed by the élite news media in the Unites States. Its most visible representatives are “generally reflective of the educational elite, particularly in the northeast.” They view crime as a result of social conditioning and not the work of Satan. They often adopt “a sneering tone about conservative Christianity itself.” They “show more intellectual curiosity about the religion of Afghanistan than that of Alabama, and more interest in reading the Upanishads than in reading the Book of Revelation.”
Kristof’s problem may simply be geographical. Were he living in Dallas, Denver, Des Moines, the Dakotas, or almost anywhere in the red (for Bush) states as opposed to the blue (for Gore), he would be far more likely to know journalists who share, as well as report on, evangelical Christian faith. But to his credit, Kristof realizes that the situation he describes for the éite coastal media is pathological. So he ends with an appeal for the media and the born-again masses “to reach out” to each other and to “drop the contempt.”
Without intending it, Kristof’s column amounts to well-timed advertising for a new book by John Schmalzbauer, who—it is pertinent to record—grew up under mild fundamentalist influences in Minnesota, attended Wheaton College, finished a Ph.D. in sociology with Robert Wuthnow at Princeton, and now teaches at the College of Holy Cross in Massachusetts. Schmalzbauer’s People of Faith: Religious Conviction in American Journalism and Higher Education (Cornell Univ. Press, 2003) presents the results of interviews with 40 Roman Catholics and evangelicals who are currently active in these professions. With Kristof’s problem in view, it is germane that while Schmalzbauer’s Catholic journalists include several who work for the Times, The Washington Post, and national broadcasters out of Washington, D.C., his evangelical journalists are employed mostly with newsmagazines, the wire services, and newspapers outside the Boston-New York-Washington corridor. Schmalzbauer’s book deserves full treatment for its own main arguments, but it can also be read as offering a partial response to the problem posed by Kristof.
Why are there so few self-identified born-again Christians active in the élite news media? Schmalzbauer offers two possibilities. First, evangelicals in general, and especially by comparison with other subsections of American society like Jews, are still in the first stages of academic professionalization. A consequence is that there simply are still not that many candidates from the evangelical geographical heartland—the Midwest and South—or social heartland—the middle- and lower-middle classes—who aspire to jobs on the Times or who secure such jobs.
But, second, Schmalzbauer also suggests that evangelicals who have entered élite levels of the academy or journalism regularly adopt strategies that obscure the character of their evangelical profession. For some it is a self-conscious choice to translate the explicit theological convictions of the church into more general frameworks of cultural analysis for the general marketplace. For others, it is a less self-conscious move, as Schmalzbauer puts it, “to combine ‘mutually irreconcilable realities’ into protean selves.” Or, in translation, to function simultaneously with several different centers of personal value while not worrying about integrating those different centers into a self-consciously religious whole. In either case, however, the result is to mask the religious identities or convictions of those who are active in public intellectual life. Even granting the under-representation of born-again Christians in the élite media, Schmalzbauer is saying to Kristof that maybe he knows more evangelical Christians than he thinks he does, but because of deliberate choice or protean practice, Kristof does not realize that these evangelicals are evangelical.
In response to provocative sallies like Kristof’s recent column, the wrong evangelical response—whether on the media front or in the groves of academe—is to gird up loins for cultural warfare. Practicing the innocence of serpents alongside the wisdom of doves has proven self-destructive many times over for evangelicals in the last century of American history. More appropriate are guidelines implicit in Schmalzbauer’s work, which begins by careful analysis of why existing conditions actually exist, but which also goes on to challenge evangelicals not only to do more in the élite media but to do it more self-consciously and to do it better. Not belligerence for the sake of belligerence, but savvy for the sake of the kingdom of Christ is one solution that John Schmalzbauer’s book opens to Nicholas Kristof’s problem.
Mark Noll is McManis Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College.
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