“I'm glad that we're all here because we now have urgent work to do,” Ms. Goodstein said in her keynote speech. “Religious literacy has probably never been more important, or more of a challenge. The grounds are shaking, the fissures are cracking open all around us, and the faultlines all seem to intersect. Race, class, gender and underneath it all like molten lava: religion.”
The sense of urgency surrounding religion journalism has emerged from the rise of fake news and the ascendance of Donald J. Trump, who has pioneered a “post-truth politics” that places a premium on narrative over fact. Perhaps more than ever, people are beginning to care less about the factual truth of the news they consume, and more about whether it speaks to their experience of the world. All journalists in attendance appeared to agree: journalism has to change not only in order to better challenge false conceptions about religion, climate change and immigrants—to name a few topics—but also to simply survive.
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