The presidential race took a turn to religion recently. It was an opportunity to clearly and definitively locate the two presumptive candidates on the map of American religion, and it mostly failed. And it was mostly the fault of the press corps. The boys and girls on the bus are well-versed in the talking points, image strategies, the horse race—all the conventions of modern presidential campaign journalism.
Somewhere in each reporter’s notebook is a tab marked “religion.” The problem is that, unlike most of the other topics they’ll be reporting on, their understanding of religion is a mixture of broad bromides about the nature of religion in American life, mixed perhaps with entirely subjective notions of religion born of their own personal experience with it.
Read Full Article »