Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America.

• Author: Pannill, Shelley

Ever since the 1720s, when the Reverend Increase Mather, father of the fire-and-brimstone breathing Cotton Mather, as well as a pillar of Bostonian clerical establishment, denounced the local broad sheet as spreading "cursed libel" and called for government suppression of its devilish views, religious leaders have seemed to find their antithesis, indeed their enemy, in the free press in America. It was no surprise for example, to hear the campaign manager for then presidential hopeful Pat Buchanan -- the self-proclaimed defender of traditional American (read: Christian) values -- assail "Nightline's" Ted Koppel as an "anti-Catholic bigot," with nods of approval coming from followers. Political and religious extremism aside, the conventional wisdom of the day would have it that the media are an elitist institution both devoid of religiosity and bearing a deeply secular bias.

Untrue, says Mark Silk. A staff writer for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution since 1987, and a teacher of religion and the media at Emory University, Mr. Silk has the intellectual baggage, not to mention the background, to contemplate press coverage of religion. He concludes that contrary to popular belief, and quite possibly unbeknownst to the press itself, the news media are animated by the same religious values that are embedded in American culture at large.

In his most recent book, Unsecular Media, Mr. Silk aims to debunk the myth of a secular press. He does so effectively and imaginatively, first in tracing the history of the traditional divide between the press and religion, as well as the history of cooperation between them. He then explores the moral formulas, or categories, that he claims have determined the coverage of religion in the American press since what was known as the "penny" press (news papers costing a penny) which appeared in the 1820s.

Press coverage of religion, he shows, has meandered from caustic reports of revivalist meetings (although sometimes reporters actually fell prey to the heat of the moment and zealously reported their conversions), to the establishment of a bland Saturday "Church" page in the 1920s, whose features included promotional copy received from churches and syndicated columns on the meaning of the Bible in a mainline Protestant perspective. "In the increasingly staid, family-oriented, non-controversial world of daily journalism," he points out, "hard-edged religion coverage was increasingly unwelcome." Mainstream media, he...