AKMA’s Random Thoughts

More on Liberal Religiousism

Earlier this week I described Karen Armstrong’s invitation for all religions to make peace, not conflict, as a piece of Enlightenment exhortation more than “religious” discourse. As if to complement that claim, Jay Rosen (in The Revealer) follows up with an essay on one of the most prominent denominations of theological liberalism (as opposed to “liberal theology”) — “Journalism is Itself a Religion.”

(By the way, mark-up itself is a religion, and since The Revealer has displayed its HTML in the title bar of the article, I venture to suggest that the editors should use <em> tags in that phrase, instead of <i> tags. I’m a poor acolyte in that religion, but I am what the Book of Acts calls a “God-fearer.”)

Rosen makes a case that journalism partakes of the characteristics of religious faith: unquestionable dogmas, shared rituals, spiritual-cum-academic formation at a professional school, conversion experiences, and so on. People who worry about “religion” as a category see this kind of essay with some regularity; I used to begin my “Introduction to Religious Studies” class with Baseball Annie Savoy’s opening monologue from Bull Durham, “I believe in the Church of Baseball. . . ,” as a way of opening up the students’ assumptions about what really counts as “religion.”

At the same time, the essay — insightful and valuable as it definitely is — also illustrates the basis for my regretful sigh of last week. The article might read differently if Rosen had been in conversation with a vocational theologian; and Jeff Sharlet’s throwaway comment at the end of the essay (suggesting that Luther didn’t believe in the church, that Jeremiah didn’t believe in the covenant, which Jeff calls the “compact”) suggests a distance from, an outsider’s-eye view of, Luther and Jeremiah. The notion that disbelief constitutes a precondition for reform reflects a very outsider-y set of presuppositions (at least, to this insider).

I have worlds of respect for Jeff and Jay, but that respect would grow even deeper if their work that addresses my area of specialization showed greater interaction with (though not necessarily “deference to”) articulate spokespeople in the field they’re covering.

Posted by AKMA at January 11, 2004 01:18 PM | TrackBack