Why newsrooms cover believers like a tribe they have never met

Imagine the opening of a nature documentary. A soft British voice, a slow pan across a field of pews. "Here, on the American plain, the evangelical gathers in great numbers on the first day of the week. Observe how he sings. Note his unusual habit of reading a very old book. Scientists remain puzzled as to how he votes."

That is a joke, and it is also uncomfortably close to a style of coverage that many religious Americans recognize. You know the one: the story that arrives at church with a clipboard and a quizzical expression, as though the congregation were a newly discovered tribe whose behavior must be decoded for the reader, who is assumed not to belong to it. Let me tell you what is wrong with that, why it happens, and what the alternative would look like. I will keep the facts straight and the humor aimed at the coverage, not at any person.

The claim, stated carefully

Let me define my terms, because this is an argument about a pattern, and patterns are easy to overstate.

The claim: much mainstream coverage of religious Americans treats them as a demographic block whose behavior is to be explained from the outside, rather than as individuals who hold convictions for reasons that can be stated, examined and answered on the merits.

What I am not claiming: that every reporter is hostile, that no newsroom employs a believer, or that no outlet has ever covered faith well. Some do, and some of the best religion reporting in the country is excellent. My claim is about a common default, a habit of framing, not a conspiracy. I am arguing about how stories are shaped, and you can check my argument against any week's coverage.

Here is the argument in four numbered steps.

1. Newsrooms notice what they find unusual, and for many newsrooms, devout belief is unusual. A newsroom's sense of what needs explaining tracks the experience of the people in it. If few colleagues attend worship weekly, a pastor's decision looks like an event, not a normal feature of life.
2. Stories about the unusual get explained rather than argued. The usual form is "why do they believe it?", with a sociologist or a pollster supplying the answer, not "is it true?", which a believer would answer. The subject becomes an object of study.
3. Labels do the work that reasons should do. Once a person is "an evangelical voter," his vote is attributed to his category, not to his thinking about taxes, schools, the border or the economy.
4. The cumulative effect is a picture of believers as a block to be managed, not citizens to be persuaded. And that picture, repeated, shapes what the rest of the country expects from them.

That is the thesis. Now the evidence.

The 1993 description, and the correction

The most famous example is also the oldest, and it has the advantage of being on the record, with a correction attached.

On February 1, 1993, the Washington Post published a front-page article about the political muscle of conservative Christian leaders. In the course of describing them, the article characterized the followers of television evangelists as "largely poor, uneducated and easy to command." The sentence caused an immediate uproar, and the next day the paper published a correction conceding that the description had no factual basis.

Notice two things. First, the claim was not a slip about a minor fact. It was a characterization of a whole group of Americans as stupid and docile, printed in a major newspaper as if it were a settled observation, and it passed through reporter, editors and desk without anyone asking whether it was true. That is the part that deserves attention: the sentence did not seem strange to the people who handled it. It matched what they expected. Second, the paper did the right thing and corrected it, and that is to its credit. I will not pretend a correction a day later undoes a front-page sentence, but I will say that the correction demonstrates the point of this post: the standard ought to be evidence, and when evidence was demanded, the characterization collapsed.

I am describing a single episode from decades ago, and I want to be careful about what it proves. It proves that a major paper once printed a stereotype as fact. It does not prove that the paper, or any paper, does so today. What it shows is how the stereotype works when it is not examined. For the rest of my argument I will rely on patterns you can observe yourself.

"Evangelical" as a demographic label

Here is something the coverage does constantly, and once you see it you cannot stop seeing it. The word "evangelical" in a news story is very often not a theological description but a demographic one: a box on a survey, a slice of an electorate, a category for a pie chart.

That is not nothing, because pollsters do need categories. But think about what is lost. In its older and proper sense, "evangelical" describes a set of beliefs: the authority of Scripture, the centrality of the cross, the need for personal conversion, and the duty to share the faith. It describes a tradition that includes Baptists, Pentecostals, Presbyterians, Anglicans, nondenominational churches and many Black and Hispanic congregations whose politics have nothing in common. A story that treats "evangelical" as a single voting bloc has flattened a wide variety of people into one, and has usually done it by a method that varies from one survey to the next, because pollsters define the term in different ways: by self-description, by denomination, by belief, or by some mixture. A reader seldom learns which.

The result is the strange phenomenon in which a person can be "an evangelical" in a headline without ever having been asked what he believes. And because the label stands in for the reasons, the reasons go unreported. Ask yourself the next time you read a story about "evangelical voters": did anyone quote a person explaining, in his own words, why he thinks what he thinks? Or did the story quote a professor explaining him?

A word on respect. I would give the same advice about any group. A story about Black voters, Hispanic voters or union members that never lets a single member speak is a bad story. The fault is not in the subject, it is in the method.

The holiday-season ritual

Every year, at about the same time, the coverage takes a predictable turn. In the weeks around Christmas and Easter, there is a story, and the story has a template: a local dispute over a nativity scene or a school program, a quote from a lawyer about the Establishment Clause, a quote from a person who says the holiday has been taken over by commerce, and a summary paragraph that treats the believers' concern as a "culture war" skirmish.

I want to be fair here, because there is a real argument on both sides. Some disputes are real, some are overblown, and some "war on Christmas" claims are exaggerated by people who profit from outrage, which is a real thing on the right too. I address the legal questions in Seven Christmas claims about the public square, checked against the law, and I argue there that many popular claims on both sides fail.

But the framing is the point. The story is almost always written as a clash of interest groups: here is Group A, and here is Group B, and here is the court. Rarely does it ask the question a believer would ask, which is: what does this holiday mean to the people who keep it? A story that treats the manger as a prop in a litigation does not capture why a family puts one up. If you wrote a story about a Hanukkah menorah or a Diwali lamp the same way, as an exhibit in a legal dispute, you would be accused of missing the point, and rightly. The same courtesy would be nice for the believers who make up most of the country's population of worshipers.

Why it happens, without a conspiracy

I do not think this is mostly malice. I think it is mostly distance, plus a few professional habits, and plain distance is something we can fix.

Distance. I will not cite a figure, because surveys of the press corps vary by year and method, and you should check them yourself. But the common impression is that many reporters at major national outlets sit further from the pews than the public they cover. Whether or not that holds for any given newsroom, consider a reporter in a major city who has never sat through an evening service in a small-town church: he will find it hard to write about one without the voice of the outsider.

Habit. Newsrooms love conflict, and the easiest religious story to tell is a conflict story. A congregation feeding two hundred families is not news. A congregation suing a city is. So the believer shows up in the paper when he is fighting, and rarely when he is serving, and the reader draws a conclusion.

Shortcut. A pollster or professor is easier to reach than a pastor, and a statistic is easier to quote than a conviction. The label substitutes for the interview.

Anxiety about politics. Because religious conservatives vote in recognizable patterns, many stories treat the faith as a political instrument. That has some truth, and it ignores how much of religious life is about everything but politics.

I could go on, but notice what is absent: any need to assume bad faith. The fix is not to scold reporters. It is to give them the better habit.

The Founders' view of believers

Let me anchor this in the record, because the American founders thought quite differently about religious citizens than a demographic chart does.

George Washington, in his Farewell Address of 1796, called religion and morality indispensable supports of political prosperity. He asked where the security for property, reputation and life would be if the sense of religious obligation deserted the oaths administered in courts of justice. He treated believers not as a voting bloc but as a foundation of the republic's habits, as I explain in Why Washington's Farewell Address called religion and morality indispensable. A generation later, Alexis de Tocqueville traveled the country and reported that Americans treated religion as the first of their political institutions, not because it gave them laws, but because it shaped the mores that made liberty possible. Whatever you think of their conclusions, both men did what the modern label does not: they asked what religion does for free people, and listened to what the people said.

You may also read the Founders' own words on the Founders page, and the way the press covers other institutions in How the Press Covers Supreme Court Decisions, and What the Stories Leave Out. The pattern of explaining a group rather than arguing with it appears there too.

The strongest objection, answered

The best objection to everything above goes like this: "News organizations cover groups by category because that is how politics works. Religious voters are a measurable voting bloc, and reporting that fact is not bias. Besides, religious conservatives have plenty of their own media, and nobody forces anyone to read the mainstream papers. And finally, some religious leaders do behave like political operatives, and covering them that way is accurate."

Here is the answer, in three parts.

First, I agree that counting a bloc is legitimate, and that some leaders are political operatives. A story about a political operation should describe it as one. My complaint is not with the existence of such stories. It is with the absence of the other kind, the story that treats believers as people with reasons. The objection defends a legitimate genre, and my claim is that the genre has crowded out the rest.

Second, the "go read other media" point concedes the argument. If the general press covers a large part of the public poorly, the public has been underserved, and the answer is better coverage, not a retreat into separate information worlds. Most of us would like our newspapers to be able to explain us to our neighbors.

Third, the test is symmetrical, and I apply it to my own side. A conservative outlet that treats "secular voters" or "urban voters" as a bloc to be mocked commits the same offense. Fair coverage means asking people what they think, including the ones you disagree with.

What fair coverage of faith would look like

Here is a short list, a checklist an editor could tape above a desk.

1. Let believers speak for themselves, at length, in their own words, before the expert interprets.
2. Say what the label means. If a story says "evangelical," say how the term was defined: by self-identification, church membership or belief.
3. Distinguish traditions. A Black Baptist, a Hispanic Pentecostal and a white Presbyterian are not interchangeable.
4. Cover what congregations do, not only what they fight about. Food pantries, hospital visits, recovery programs and schools are the larger part of religious life.
5. Cover the arguments as arguments. When a religious person gives a reason, test the reason. Do not substitute a psychological explanation for an answer.
6. Staff a religion beat with people who know the vocabulary, and who have sat through a service.
7. Apply the same rules to every faith. Skepticism toward one tradition and tenderness toward another is a double standard, and readers see it.

Do that, and you get what newspapers say they want: a more accurate picture of the country. You get believers, too, who feel that someone has bothered to meet them, which is not too much to ask. And you get a more honest argument, which is the thing the rest of us are trying to have.

The case in brief

1. Much coverage treats religious Americans as a demographic bloc to be explained rather than as people with reasons, and the habit comes mainly from distance, not malice.
2. The 1993 Washington Post description of evangelicals as poor, uneducated and easy to command, and the paper's correction, show how an unexamined stereotype passes as fact.
3. "Evangelical" in a headline is often a survey category, not a theology, and it flattens many traditions into one voting bloc.
4. Holiday coverage tends to frame faith as an exhibit in a legal dispute, and conflict stories crowd out the far larger story of what congregations do.
5. Fair coverage lets believers speak, defines its labels, distinguishes traditions, tests reasons as arguments and applies the same standard to every faith.

What you can do: read this week's religion coverage in your local paper with the seven-point checklist beside you, and send the editor a short, courteous note about one story that did it well.