Covering religion: Field insurgency in United States religion reporting

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Covering Religion: Field Insurgency In

United States Religion Reporting

By: Gregory Perreault and Kathryn Montalbano

Abstract

The present study analyzes the role of religion reporting with the journalistic field. Personnel cuts within newsrooms

and the development of “religion reporters” operating from religious institutions necessitate a re-exploration of the

changing field. At stake is the coverage of religion, a topic particularly pertinent to residents in the United States,

nearly 77% of which identify as religious to some degree. Simultaneously, the majority of the United States tends

to think journalists cover religion poorly. Through the lens of field theory, this study analyzes 20 interviews with

U.S.-based religion reporters who work for both mainstream and religious publications.

Perreault G, Montalbano K. Covering religion: Field insurgency in United States religion reporting. Journalism.

January 2022. doi:10.1177/14648849211073220. Publisher version of record available at: https://

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14648849211073220

Original Article

Journalism

2022, Vol. 0(0) 1–18

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DOI: 10.1177/14648849211073220

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Covering religion: Field

insurgency in United States

religion reporting

Gregory Perreault



and Kathryn Montalbano



Department of Communication, Appalachian State University, Boone, NC, USA

Abstract

The present study analyzes the role of religion reporting with the journalistic ﬁeld.

Personnel cuts within newsrooms and the development of “religion reporters” operating

from religious institutions necessitate a re-exploration of the changing ﬁeld. At stake is the

coverage of religion, a topic particularly pertinent to residents in the United States, nearly

77% of which identify as religious to some degree. Simultaneously, the major ity of the

United States tends to think journalists cover religion poorly. Through the lens of ﬁ eld

theory, this study analyzes 20 interviews with U.S.-based religion reporters who work for

both mainstream and religious publications.

Keywords

religion, niche reporting, lifestyle journalism, ﬁeld theory, ﬁeld insurgency, in-depth

interviews

It was a rally held on the west lawn of the U.S. Capitol that had all the makings of a “holy

sh**t” story: Washington for Jesus ’96 drew a wide range of former drug addicts, and

former occult members. The story, published in The Washington Post, described a

charismatic speaker who worked as the “sin prosecutor.” He would shout out a sin, to a

yelling throng of people responding “Guilty!” And then the story presented its now

infamous anecdote, still widely shared among religion reporters:

Corresponding author:

Gregory Perreault, Department of Communication, Appalachian State University, Walker Hall, 121

Bodenheimer Dr, Boone, NC 28608, USA.

Email: [email protected]

At times, however, the mood turned hostile toward the lawmakers in the stately white

building behind the stage.

“Let’s pray that God will slay everyone in the Capitol,” said Paul Crouch of the Trinity

Broadcast Network (Wilgoren and Parker, 1996).

Anyone familiar with the terminology of Pentecostalism will immediately identify the

problem: slay is a religious term indicating the movemen t of God within an individual. In

other words, slay conveys the opposite implication from how the journ alists heard the

phrase: they were not calling for violence but an act of blessing on the congresspeople.

The next day, The Washington Post posted a correction on the story, identifying their

misunderstanding of the phrase.

To this day, religion journalists share this anecdote as an indication of the low level of

religious literacy in the United States and, in particular, a lack of religious literacy among

U.S.-based working journalists. But what is also noteworthy about this story is that neither

Wilgoran nor Parker were religion reporters: they were crime and women’s issues re-

porters, respectively, assigned to cover the story at the last minute. How could they have

known? What they described is, to some degree, what they would have likely looked for

given their typical reporting.

This anecdote is indicative of the larger importance and value of the religion reporting.

Yet, even as the United States remains a highly religious country—77% of which identify

as religious (Pew Research Center, 2021)–religion reporting has stru ggled to ﬁnd footing

in the country’s journalistic sphere due to the lack of advertising support. In the same vein

of Ranly (1979) and Buddenbaum (1988), this study seeks to u nderstand the place of

religion reporting in United States journalism through the lens of ﬁeld theory—in order to

better understand how the new players in religion reporting are operating within the ﬁeld.

In the historic-era of the church pages or even the religion section of the newspaper, much

of religion news would be considered lifestyle journalism—a softer side of the journalistic

ﬁeld that is audience-focused and emphasized providing the audience “with factual infor-

mation and advice, often in entertaining ways, about goods and services they can use”

(Ha nusch, 2014: 1). Based on 20 long-form interviews with U.S.-based re ligion reporters,

from both mainstream and religious publications, this study seeks to understand how religion

reporters understand their role within the ﬁeld. We ﬁnd that mainstream religion reporters

largely described jettisoning much of the lifestyle journalism in their niche as a part of the

shrinking of their ﬁeld; instead, non-specialists increasingly conduct religion reporting as a

part of the general news beat along with courts, crime and education. The lifestyle portion of

their work has been taken up increasingly by religious publications, which mainstream

journalists have largely welcomed as way to ensure that lifestyle journalism still occurs in their

specialty, and hence, preserves the stability within the overall ﬁeld.

Field theory

This study operationalizes Pierre Bourdieu’s ﬁeld theory in order to understand how

religion reporting places itself within the journalistic ﬁeld. The ﬁeld operates as the

2 Journalism 0(0)

manner with which to understand the interactions between individuals and social phenomena

(Bourdie u, 1998). In general, ﬁeld theory reﬂects an interest in understand ing the “repro-

duction of ﬁelds of intellectual or economic striving” (Lizardo, 2004: 377), and the re-

production of intelligence is occurring in journalism. Fields tend to ﬁght to preserve their

space and maintain the status quo (Bourdieu, 1998). The journalistic ﬁeld tends to be

normatively stable—although this stability comes at the expense of innovation. Hence, critical

concerns about journalism’s lack of ability to innovate in terms of technology, ﬁnancial

structure would seem natural in that they reﬂect the normative stability of the ﬁeld (Belair-

Gagnon et al., 2020; Christensen, 2003; Perreault and Bell, 2020; Vos and Perreault, 2020).

Prior research illustrates how journalists have fought to maintain journalistic stability in

regards to norms and values—the ﬁeld’s doxa (Vo s e t a l. , 2012 ). News values, for example,

exemplify journalistic doxa to help determine the newsworthiness of an event (Willig, 2013).

The doxa both informs and is informed by the habitus—the “strategy generating

principle enabling agents to cope with unforeseen and ever-changing situations” (Bourdieu,

1998:77).Thehabitus, or the habits of the ﬁeld, can be deﬁned as the accumulated

experience in a ﬁeld that help actors understand the “understanding of the journalistic game”

(Tandoc, 2014: 562). Habitus is an ingrained feature of a ﬁeld, with actors needing to do

little conscious thought in order to know how to respond to a given situation. For example,

actors may mistake activities as natural when they actually have been culturally shaped.

Bourdieu (1998) uses an analogy of a baseball player who knows when to swing at a fastball

with little conscious thought. In a similar manner, journalists anticipate certain forms of

ournal

istic coverage in such a manner so that they know how to report on them with little

conscious thought (Perreault, 2021; Perreault et al., 2020; Perreault and Meltzer, 2022).

Through the ﬁeld theory lens, the goal of actors in the journalistic ﬁeld is capital,orthe

resources within the ﬁeld. Journalistic capital describes the “agency and prestige” (Sterne,

2003:375)withinaﬁeld and typically this comprises three forms of capital: economic,

cultural, and social (Benson and Neveu, 2005). Economic capital refers to the economic

resources available within the ﬁeld (Benson, 2004) and journalists might seek such re-

sources in order to do work toward cultural capital—acknowledged often by awards—or

social capital, which the size of an actor’s social network often measures (Siapera and

Spyridou, 2012). By contrast, circulation rates or advertising revenue tends to correlate with

economic capital in journalism (Benson, 2004; Benson and Neveu, 2005). Journalists have

demonstrated a willingness to part with economic capital if it would allow them to obtain

greater cultural capital (Vos, 2019). That said, as this discussion of capital indicates, these

forms of capital interconnect and in many cases are dependent upon one another.

Religion reporting

As noted earlier, religion reporting primarily emerges out of the lifestyle journalism

approach to journalism (Rodgers, 2010). Despite stead y and substantial growth in lifestyle

journalism over time, few studies explore this aspect of the journalistic ﬁeld within

journalism studies scholarship (Hanusch et al., 2017, 2020). Lifestyle journalism rou-

tinely ﬁnds itself at the juncture of pressure from normative journalistic values and the pull

of commercial interests. While commercial interest certainly looks different in religion

Perreault and Montalbano 3

journalism as opposed to travel journalism—and it is perhaps uncomfortable for some to

consider the commercial interest of religion—it nevertheless follows that journalists

reporting on religion ﬁnd themselves covering a topic essential in de termining how people

spend their money (Silk, 1997). Similar to other forms of lifestyle journalism, religion

reporting tends to be oriented toward personal life (Perreault, 2014).

Religion reporting would seem to be not all that different from other subﬁelds that mix

hard news journalism as well as lifestyle journalism—politics, science and health and

wellness would all require similar levels of expertise and face competition from non-

journalistic actors (Maares and Hanusch, 2020). Religion reporting perhaps faces a

different audience however—if religion indeed “determines belief systems, the ways

people orient themselves to the world, how one perceives his or her place and how one

interacts with others”—then it would follow that the stakes of getting the story wrong

might be quite a bit higher (Gormly, 1999: 25; see also Nord, 2004). In other words, while

many journalistic niches require subﬁeld-speciﬁc expertise, religion reporting might face

higher stakes in regards to the trust of their audience and given that the topics are liable

draw press hostility (Miller, 2021; Perreault, 2021; Perreault et al., 2020).

Particularly at stake in contemporary religion is lived religion—religion delinked from

institutions and reﬂective of how people actually practice their faith on a daily basis (Orsi,

2006). An implication of lived religion in journalism is that the focus on institutions may

miss the critical factors of, as Campbell (2010) as argued, “how an individual’s religious

practices are conceived of, how religious symbolism is interpreted and applied, or how

religious rituals are enacted within contemporary culture” (8). Journalists in legacy media

tend to cover institutional religion for several reasons, including access to sources as well as

the fulﬁllment of news values that tend to serve a broader perceived audience (Belair-Gagnon

et al., 2020; Hoover, 1998). This occurs even as research suggests that a journalist’s imagined

audience is just that: imagined, with journalists knowing far less about who their audience is

than they think (Nelson, 2021). Hence, it may be that news and other information housed in

digital and social media platforms can more readily record and reﬂect the experiences of lived

religion that many spiritual people today not only embrace alongside attending ofﬁcial

religious gatherings, but in some cases have substituted for institutional religion (Campbell,

2010). Moreover , people experience not only institutional religion and lived religion, but also

implicit religion, which scholars have attributed to secular, contemporary practices—such as

the

use of

digital technologies, the cultures of sport-fandom, and allegiance to political

parties—resemble religion and religious experiences and can even effect changes in the

individuals themselves (Campbell and Evolvi, 2019). Hoover (2006) similarly argued that to

understand a religious culture, one must look at consumption to trace “how symbols,

practices, and discourses from the media sphere relate to those meanings and motivations that

we and they might identify as ‘religious’ or ‘spiritual’” (1 14).

If journalism studies scholarship in this area argues one thing uniformly, it is that much

religion reporting tends to be quite poor—a result in particular of the lack of religious

literacy among U.S. journalists (Hoover, 1998). The misunderstood intentions from the

evangelical rally from the introduction represents a not-uncommon situation in reporting

on Muslims (Munnik, 2017 ; Perreault, 2014; Said, 1997), Mormons (Decker and Austin,

2010; Perreault et al., 2017; Scott, 2005), and evangelical Christ ianity (Haskell, 2007 ;

4 Journalism 0(0)

Hardy, 2007). The most egregious examples of misunderstood intentions often occur

where no religion specialists are involved as has been shown to be the case in sport s

(Ferrucci and Perreault, 2018) and gaming (Perreault, 2021).

As Buddenbaum (1988) noted based on a survey of the religion beat in the 1980s,

“most larger papers give their religion journalists enough time and space to cover the news

adequately, but they may give the reporter too little authority” (68)—an indication of a

lack of cultural capital. This problem of cultural capital was further exacerbated in the

1990s, when producers of religion news often felt like they were working in the “news

ghetto,” a weaker position within the ﬁeld than if they had chosen to work in political

reporting (Mason, 2012). Political reporting here serves as the niche for which a good

journalist would naturally use religion reporting as a stepping stone. And indeed , religion

reporting runs into few other niches more than political reporting (Mason, 2012). This

fusion of religion and politics has been particularly salient in recent years given the

prominence of religiously- oriented political candidates in a number of countries (Eddy,

2021; Wilcox and Robinson, 2018). Hence, it may follow that religion reporting has, since

the 1990s, attained a greater degree of cultural capital that is perhaps siphoned from

political journalism’s central place within the ﬁeld (Tandoc, 2019).

This leads us to pose the following research questions:

RQ 1: How do journalists who cover religion understand their work within the

ﬁeld of journalism?

RQ 2: How do journalists who cover religion conceptualize the difference be-

tween working at religious news and secular news organizations?

Method

In order to address the research questions, researchers identiﬁed religion reporters through

the Religion Newswriters Association, an association of more than 300 that includes a range

of religion journalists who work for publications both secular and religious, as well as

academics who study religion. For the purposes of recruitment, researchers deﬁned jour-

nalists as “people who work for a journalistic medium as their main job” and “carry out

journalistic activities” such as publishing on current, relevant topics (Fr

ohlich et al., 2013:

815). We reached out to 40 journalists through a method of purposive sampling (Koerber and

McMichael, 2008). For the purpose of ensuring participant anonymity, and given that many

legacy newsrooms in particular may have just one or two religion reporters, it is necessary for

us to withhold the names of the speciﬁc publications at which participants worked. That said,

this research was conducted aiming to represent an array of journalists that come from a

range of organizations: primarily print versus primarily digital news, name-brand news

organizations versus smaller niche publication, secular versus religious publications, as well

as personal demographics. Participants were recruited via email and contacted via Zoom after

IRB approval. Interviews were conducted from December 2020 to February 2021.

The interviews probed the journ alists’ experience with religion journalism and their

practices in religion journalism, applying a qualitative interview methodology to draw

Perreault and Montalbano 5

more depth from the questions used in the Ranly (1979) and Buddenbaum (1988) surveys.

A total of 20 journalists were interviewed via a semi-structured questionnaire, with an

average interview time of approximately 1 h.

Questions were divided into four areas: (1) questions about journalists’ professional

background and current occupational context, (2) questions about journalists’ general

practices in covering relig ion, (3) questions about how journalists deﬁne religion and

journalism, and (4) questions about what journalists actually privilege in their coverage.

Questions were posed such as, “Can you explain your general approach to covering

religion?” and “How do you compare religion news coverage by secular and religious

publications?” For the purposes of this focus, the authors only examined responses to the

questions that directly applied to the research questions.

All of the participants were located in the United States. The sample of journalists de-

scribed their work as happening at mainstream, secular publications (n = 12) and religious

publications (n = 8). A majority of participants could be described as digital journalists

operating in a legacy media newsroom—traditional newsrooms that operated with a digital

mindset (Ferrucci and Perreault, 2021; Holman and Perreault, 2022; Perreault and Ferrucci,

2020). The sample was gender balanced with men (n = 10) and women (n =10),andthe

majority of respondents described their ethnicity as “white” (n = 13), two respondents

identiﬁed as “Hispanic,” two respondents identiﬁed as “Asian,” and three identiﬁed as

“Black” or “African-American.” Religiously, most respondents iden tiﬁed as some form of

Christian—mainline Protestant (n = 5), Catholic (n = 4), evangelical (n = 4), and Eastern

Orthodox (n =1)—although there were also individual responde nts who identiﬁed as Muslim,

Jewi

sh, Hindu

and Pagan. Two journalists requested to not identify their religious tradition.

The researchers conducted video interviews until they agreed they had reached sat-

uration of responses. The interviews were transcribed in two stages: through an initial,

auto-transcription provided by the video calling service used for interviews (Zoom) and

then the authors revisited each interview and ensured accuracy by listening to the

transcripts and conducting line-by-line edits for accuracy by comparing the audio with the

auto-transcription. The authors analyzed the data to arrive at themes that addressed the

research questions using a constant comparative approach (Glaser and Strauss, 2017). The

constant comparative approach is often associated with grounded theory; however, as

Fram (2013) argues, the constant comparative analysis is well-suited to etic coding, driven

by theory and literature. During this process, aspects of the responses considered were any

allusion to the journalis tic ﬁeld, journa listic practice and journalistic deﬁnition making.

After each response was coded, them es and thoughts emerging from the coded interviews

were compared to ﬁnd associations, differences and unities among them and in order to

establish resonance. All participants were granted anonymity in part because this study is

most interested in understanding perspectives on an institutional level. In the ﬁndings

section, individual participants will not be cited in order to reﬂect that the institutional

discourse. That said, particularly in reﬂection the differences to entrants of the ﬁeld, we

will describe participants to broadly indicate their role in mainstream news or work for

religious publications.

Finally, for the purposes of this study, we describe all participants as “religion re-

porters” in that, that is how they self-identiﬁed and self-described.

6 Journalism 0(0)

Findings

The lesser-brother of political reporting. Our ﬁrst research question was posed as, “How do

journalists who cover religion understand their work within the ﬁeld of journalism?"

Religion reporters saw the ﬁeld as limiting the specialty. These limitations resulted as

much from the ﬁeld as from external factors. Furthermore, they expressed limitations in

the comprehensiveness of the reporting they conducted—arguing that there was a

substantial focus on coverage of institutions and a sort of generational divide exhibited in

how much coverage was granted to “lived religion”—or the religion as it is practiced by

individuals in the mundane experiences of everyday life.

In the journalistic ﬁeld, the religion specialty is largely regarded as the lesser-brother to

the political beat, many journalists argued. This was particularly prominent among

journalists in mainstream newsrooms. One journalist put it that the attitude in the

newsroom was , “Oh well, that’s just kind of ﬂuffy stuff right that’s not that’s not as real as

covering you know government corruption and other sorts of issues when, in

fact….religion intersects with every element of life. ” Journalists said there was little

career motivation to volunteer for the religion desk, and it had to be a “kind of passion

project” that journalists described as having to “beg” their editors to be put on. Largely,

religion reporters saw the niche as becoming increasingly a sub-s pecialty within general

news—a beat that “a lot of other people run into.” Many journalists saw this as a positive

development path to become one of the hallmark specialties of the news section like

courts, crime or education. So even as religion desks have shrunk or closed, religion

reporting has seemingly grown larger than ever. However, others saw this a liability, given

that specialists were not doing the reporting.

The reason the ﬁeld has limitations, journalists argued, is that religion reporting re-

mains “very much bound by how the larger publication understands religion...or doesn’t

understand that.” In the case of one journ alist, he was assigned to a split health/religion

beat when he pitched a story—a story he pictured to be a front-page piece—about the split

of the largest Protestant denomination in the United States. Instead, the editor “spiked the

story.” When he confronted his editor, the editor told him: “Every time you write about

that stuff, nobody reads it...Every time you write about [news about the denomination],

we get too many letters to the editor and nobody reads it, but fanatics.” This was a

perplexing rationale from the editor: that no one reads the reporting, and yet the reporting

results in too many letters to the editor.

But as another journalist put it, religion is a difﬁcult topic to bring up in a newsroom

unless it is “in particula rly deﬁned ways ” and, as such, “They

can further they

can end up

redeﬁning the problem.” The public views the niche with more suspicion than other

coverage areas, journalists noted. Journalists reasoned that there might even be a sort of

unconscious bias that religion reporters are all religious. If the niche were sports, it would

certainly be more likely than not that the average sports reporter has some level of

appreciation for football and baseball but it does not necessarily follow that they are fans.

Hence, participants took issue with the assumption of their own religiosity: “Folks often

accidentally say religious journalists instead of religion journalist, because they just

assume that folks who cover it are rooting for the world of religion; that they’re sort of

Perreault and Montalbano 7

biased in favor of churches.” One journalist argued that this perspe ctive comes from

higher in the journalism hierarchy and descends from there: “The higher you go in the

journalism feeding chain, the less they respect the role that religion plays in American

life.” As a result, several journalists argued, a gap grows between religious activities that

audiences would like to know about, and the activities that journalists can cover in

newsrooms.

The heavy emphasis on institutions in reporting reﬂects the ﬁrst of these limitations.

One journalist, who holds one of the rare religion specialist positions in mainstream news,

noted that she does a fair amount of institutional reporting—but predominantly on a

religious tradition with local roots and with which she has reporting expertise. In general,

religion reporters tended to emphasize institutions in reporting religion given that it

represented the “the public....liberal world we all live in touching that religion world.” The

lifestyle journalism in this specialty comes with more personal questions, that require a

degree of rapport; questions like, “How do you teach your children to pray?” require

journalists to dig deep into communities, into their audience and to be willing to learn. The

lifestyle journalism component of religion reporting is where lived religion would be most

likely to appear.

Many respondents recognized the difﬁculties of incorporating “lived religion” in their

reporting, bu t they nevertheless appreciated the emphasis on looking at religion through

the eyes of their readers. To some degree, respondents divided into age categories by their

interest in lived religion. There were three groups of respondents who showed a strong

interest in reporting lived religion—the youngest journ alists in the ﬁeld, the most ex-

perienced journalists, and those who tended to report on marginalized groups, mar-

ginalized deﬁned as either existing outside of Whiteness and/or outside of Protestant

Christianity. Experienced journalists regarded the lived religion stories as the ones that

required the most work on their part, best represented their audience. That said, there was

a middle range of respondents who were more experienced in the ﬁeld who largely saw

religion reporting as essentially tied to the institution. Institutions, of course, allow

journalists to obtain ﬁnancial documents, press releases, and interviews through press

relations people. To this group, lived religion was not necessarily non-existent, but was it

news? They were not convinced it was, certainly not the same degree as a released papal

statement or institutional press release.

Divide between the secular and religious

Our second research question was, “How do journalis ts who cover religion conceptualize

the difference between working at religious news and secular news organizations?" As

one respondent put it, “I understand there’s been a huge fragmentation in media. Baptist

Press, NCR, dozens of Catholic publications: those people would be doing great religion

reporting in a secular institution, if things [were] not as they are…General public sec-

ularism touches these institutions so that would be so interesting. That’s the public…

liberal world we all live in touching that religion world.”

Participant journalists who write for both secular and relig ious publications expressed

that religious publications could tailor their narratives more closely toward the respective

8 Journalism 0(0)

religions and religious audiences. Religious publications, that is, could provide more in-

depth coverage of the daily experiences of people of a given religion. One participant

remarked was best addres sed through interviewing sources from the “lived religion”

approach, that is, by “trying to understand individual people and see wher e they’re

coming from, because you can’t just listen to what the Catholic hierarchy or the Southern

Baptists, the big-name leaders, say about what they believe, or what they think on a

particular issue.” The participant noted that if the Trump era of politics in the United States

had anything to teach, it is that there is a difference between what leaders say and what the

people believe: “These days, through an organized religion organized religion denom-

inations in particular are frowned upon. So some people … would consider themselves

Christians without ever stepping foot in a church.” Another respondent remarked that they

are:

Not so much interested in institutions and ﬁgures always as I am how people are experience

their religion—how do their faith and their beliefs inform what they do, what they don’t do.

So, for example, right now a story is how are people looking at the vaccine, and a lot of people

have ethical questions about whether this is ethical to be taking this through whatever

religious practice they may belong to, disinformation, and what their religious communities

might be experiencing.

This participant’s response, as such, highlights how stories that circulate in other beats,

such as science or medicine, implicitly draw from lived religion just as much as stories

categorized as religion news. Others noted that they could incorporate lived religion when

reporting on “young Black Christians who are practicing witchcraft,” and “how they hold

it together”: “It was a lot about ﬁnding their indigenous roots” in “white colonized

Christianity.” A fourth participant remarked that lived religion in many ways is at the

center of the kind of religion they report on, Paganism, in which “there is not an organized

kind of overarching structure, as everyone really is sort of decentralized.” It is important to

note that a strong contingency of these respondents who incorporate lived religion in their

reporting are innovative in pushing the boundaries of what kinds of g roups—namely, non-

White and/or non-Protestant—make it to the pages.

Journalists noted that there was far more that united religious and secular publications

than divided them: “It feels very much like a family because there’s not many of us who

are doing religion reporting anymore.”

A second ﬁnding was that both secular and religious publications focused on reporting

on Christian religions , largely dictated by ﬁnancial constraints in funding or limited access

to sources, which, in turn, restricted audiences to those in major cities. In particular, more

than one participant noted the Protestant lens through which many religious and secular

publications continue to cover religion. As one participant reﬂected, “And a lot of I think

both religious press and secular press very much still understand religion in a kind of

Protestant vein about individuals and beliefs right and that kind of skews what we’re

doing here in a lot of different ways.”

Journalists argued that both secular and religious publications tended to frame religion

as two extremes, either “as somehow inherently progressive right that religion is about

Perreault and Montalbano 9

love or it’s about the betterment of people, improvement, these sorts of things, or it’s about

extremism and exclusion and intolerance.” This participant added that religious publi-

cations tend to employ journalists who themselves are “believers” and will identify with

those traditions, resulting in tradition-based reporting that reﬂects those identit ies and

emphases. Secular publications, in turn, tend to identify religion as that which occurs

within institutions, ﬂawed in its approach by not “pushing the boundaries of how we

understand this category.”

A participant from a religiously-oriented publication recounted that they could in fact

cover religion outside of institutions, in particular in ways that incorporate more diverse

sources: “If I am doing a round-up of people’s reactions to somebody famous who died or

something like that, then I might not just include denominational leaders, but the atheist or

secular organizations that had a comment. So sometimes it’s a matter of being inclusive of

people who are not as necessarily tied to institutions of religion.”

One participant lamented that although there were robust Christian and Jewish outlets,

Muslim reporting did not beneﬁt from the same Islamic press in the United States, in part

due to the more fragmented landscape of the religion itself: “[T ]here’s just not the same

level of institutio nalization of these communities, so you don’t have one sort of umbrella.

Publications that cater to them are a lot more PR-ish, if you will, as opposed to doing any

sort of critical reporting.” The participant added that as a reporter who covers Muslims in

the United States, “the Jewish press is one I look to for inspiration” to help foster more

growth in the Muslim press: “I mean for the past hundred years or so, there have been

plenty of attempts to put on magazines and some of them are still ongoing, but they really

don’t have a very strong readership.”

Journalists primari ly identiﬁed a difference between secular and religious news as one

of motivations. One participant noted that reporters writing stories for religious publi-

cations utilize “an additional layer of values” or “[t]hings that are fact for you,” such as the

idea that “the divinity of Jesus might be centr al to your truth as a journ alist for a Christian

institution.” Another participant who works for a Christian publication corroborated this

claim, reﬂecting: “We are a Christian publication and my beliefs do tend to line up pretty

nicely with the publications.” This participant also noted the growing space in the culture

section of their publication for less overtly religious but nonetheless spiritual coverage.

One participant bluntly recounted that even within reporting from religious publi-

cations, there is a range of news—stretching from public relations campaigns that mere ly

masqueraded as journ alism—to real journalism, “done by people of faith, but they’re

independent and more

able to do what I would call consider real journalism.”

Another participant shared this sentiment, distinguishing between independent religious

publications and those that are “house organs,” while ultimately concluding that both are

“interested in advancing its own particular view of religion and how it should be practiced

and evaluating how people practice it in light of how they should practice it.” Still another

participant noted that “[t]here’s a huge difference between the ones that are trying to

independently look at the Catholic Church and critique it and those that are just sort of like

a PR arm for the Church.” This participant further critiqued religious publications with

speciﬁc religions in their names for focusing on that group (or former members of that

10 Journalism 0(0)

group) as their target audience, one that does not “have the same interest, probably in

making some larger point or addressing the public as a whole.”

Participants further argued that the most telling difference in reporting was that be-

tween specialists in religion and non-specialists reporting for the general news beat.

Specialists tend to be “ more schooled in religion. They’re part of all our annual con-

ferences; they’re learning stuff. They’re listening to speakers there. The problem comes

with people, mainly political reporters, who write for the secular publications, who just

jump in and think they can get Southern Baptists. Or evangelicals, or…charismatics.”

Another participant did not disagree, but noted that increasing the number of specialists

was not necessarily the solution:

I do think that there could be better ways to educate journalists in general about religious

literacy, because I do think it’s important for religion reporting to not just be done by religion

beat reporters [...] that might contribute falsely to the idea that religion is separate from the

other parts of our life. I think that is really dangerous and harmful.

Discussion

All of this together represents a rather distinct problem for a country’s journalistic ﬁeld

(Casanova, 2017). In the case of the United States, even the development of non-afﬁliated

religions may be more of a respon se to the growth of the Religious Right (Reiss, 2021,

March) than a representat ion of a genuine change of heart. And while the decision to take

what has ostensibly been predominantly lifestyle journalism specialty and move it largely

within general news may seem to be a perplexing one—but what are newsroom managers

to do when a specialty is unable to gather economic capital? Newsroom managers know

that their audience is interested in religion news, but the likelihood is that advertisers like

IKEA, Aldi and Toyota would prefer their advertisements to appear in any other beat

(Mason, 2010). It would, after all, put IKEA in an odd position to place their adver-

tisement on a news page opposite an explanatory piece about polygamist Mormons

(Mason, 2010). Coverage such as that undertaken by Th e Washington Post becomes the

next best solution—it is worth considering that such reporting may do as much harm as

good.

The religion reporters in this sample would seem to perceive themselves as holding

weak agency—this would be unsurprising given that the lack of economic capital for the

subﬁeld has remained consistent for several decades. This weak agency, from the

viewpoint of ﬁeld, would seem to reﬂect that lack of capital (Sterne, 2003). Yet it is worth

noting that the mainstream journalists largely did not challenge the perceived hard news

turn in religion reporting given that it reﬂected an increased cultural capital for religion

reporting (Benson, 2004). That said, they also demonstrated no willingness to exclude the

work of reporters from religion publications from the fold given that they provided an

avenue for lifestyle journalism on religion.

The present study sought to addres s two research questions. In regards to the ﬁrst

research question, journalists largely conceptualized themselves to be in an extensively

diminished position within the ﬁeld. As interview participants argued, religion reporting

Perreault and Montalbano 11

spurs some strong reactions from their newsroom—with editors arguing that its audience

only consists of “fanatics” and that overall “nobody reads it.” Journalists found them-

selves, with a few notable exceptions, in a weak position within the ﬁeld in order to

combat such perceptions or to at least address them. As a result of a lack of resources,

journalists were critical of the comprehensiveness of their reporting—in particular, ar-

guing that much of their reporting was focused on institutions and that they, hence,

underreported on “lived religion,” a type of religion they perceived as most likely to

emerge from lifestyle journalism.

In regards to the second research question, participants largely conceptualized the

difference as one of motivations: mainstream journalists were motivated by a pursuit of

truth, and religious news journalists were motivated by a desire to represent their religious

traditions, and, by extension, the religious traditions of their audience. That said, jour-

nalists also observed that for information targeted toward speciﬁc religious groups,

religious publications were more likely to be able to minutely examine the inner-workings

of the tradition.

From the perspective of ﬁeld theory, religion reporting clearly sees itself as in di-

minished place in ﬁeld—certainly in the years since the 1990s emphasis on the topic.

While religion reporting has always suffered from weakened economic and cultural

capital (Buddenbaum, 1988; Ranly, 1979), to some degree the ﬁndings evidence its

debiliatory results. As mai nstream newsroom religion desks have closed, journalists said

they were told it was a result of an increased, not decreased, commitment to the beat.

Journalists were divided on the degree to which that was true and has proven true, but the

result is certainly the same regardless: journalists said that over time they found

themselves conducting more mainstream religion reporting through general news and

without the experienced eye of specialists. For example, religion reporters certainly

acknowledged the prominence of religion and politics stories in news; however, they

argued, these were stories conducted by political journalists and the stories reﬂected it.

The politics ﬁrst nature of these stories was reﬂected in the use of political labels to

describe religion (e.g., “conservative Catholic” and “liberal evangelical”). Hence,

journalists present a picture of a weakened mainstream religion journalism and a growing,

religiously motivated, insurgency of news from religious groups, denoting a perceived

decline in cultural capital. Journalists from mainstream news publications said that their

reporting was often the most read works within the publication. And indeed, as they

indicate, many of the most popular stories any given year tend to be religion stories—an

indication that religion reporting maintains strong social capital. The concern regarding

the motivations of work appears to be a reﬂection of the journalistic doxa—reporters from

religious publications may be approaching a story with expertise, but would they be

approaching it as a journalist? Participants from religious publications identiﬁed very

strongly as journalists; nevertheless, they all noted that they wrote for a particular au-

dience, and hence, their coverage reﬂected it. It is this change, the welcoming of religion

reporters from religious publications, which would seem to represent the most change

within the ﬁeld given that much of what religion reporters described. Indeed, these

ﬁndings prove consistent with prior research on the journalistic ﬁeld: that it proves to be

remarkably stable in terms of its norms (

Christensen, 2003).

Religion reporters percei

ving

12 Journalism 0(0)

themselves to be in a weaker position relative to the rest of the ﬁeld has been consistent in

prior research on religion reporting (Ranly, 1979; Buddenbaum, 1988; Mason, 2010 ).

That mainstream religion reporters have welcomed the religious publications into the fold

may actually reﬂect a desire for continued stability more than chan ge—if more of the

lifestyle reporting is happening, as journalists argued, in religious news, than the loss of it

would seem to be an even more substantial change than the venue by which it was

reported.

This emphasis on the audience, of course, re ﬂects the nature of lifestyle journalism. As

journalists articulated it, the presence of reporters working for religious publications

certainly constitutes an insurgency in the ﬁeld, given that such reporters were not

necessarily perceived to operate with a traditional journalistic doxa. However, as was the

case with sports journalism confro nted with the presence of team media (English, 2017;

Mirer, 2019; Perreault and Bell, 2020), the subﬁeld has welcomed such insurgency. As

was the case in sports reporting, with team media made eligible for awards—key in-

dicators of cultural capital (Mirer, 2019)—new entrants in the shape of religious news

reporters have also been made eligible for awards through the Religion Newswriters

Association. While research question two was developed in order to explore the dif-

ferences between religion journalists at mainstream news organizations and religious

publications, it is then noteworthy how extensively participants discussed the similarities

between their ﬁelds. This is further supported by the number of participants who had

worked, or currently worked, at both secular and religious news organizations. This again

supports the notion that such insurgency was welcomed, not imposed.

Finally, one of the similarities noted across the participants was the emphasis on

Christianity in religion reporting—no matter the source. This supports arguments made

from content analyses of religion journalism that have argued for a Protestant normativity

in the United States press (Ferrucci and Perreault, 2018; Perreault, 2021; Underwood,

2002) and re ﬂects ﬁndings from prior studies of the religion reporting ﬁeld (Buddenbaum,

1988). What the participants in this sample argue was precisely this—that Christianity

was privileged religion in reporting and in particula r Protestant sects received the most

treatment. This would seem natural given the overall religious landscape of the United

States, where Protestantism would be the most familiar religion, even if people do not

identify as Protestant themselves.

Limitations

All studies have limitations and the present study has a few. As with all qualitative

research, the present study is reﬂective of its sample. The authors made efforts to reach out

and speak to a range of religion reporters from both elite media and local, religious and

secular, specialized and general. Nevertheless, this did still mean that self-identifying

Protestants and evangelicals Christians made up nearly half of the sample. An alternative

sample could have resulted in adjusted ﬁndings. Furthermore, examining a United State s-

based sample, we argue, is pertinent, particularly given the levels of religiosity in the

country. But it could also be that examining a sample with European, Latin American or

African religion reporters could have produced given results—particularly in relation to

Perreault and Montalbano 13

the ﬁnal note in the discussion given that religious normativity seems to be related to the

majority religion of the country (Perreault, 2014; Thomson et al., 2018). In addition, while

journalists discussed the changes in the mainstream niche over time—with their per-

ception of a decline in lifestyle journalism and rise of hard news, the present study can

only argue this from the perception of the participants. Future research should consider

assessing the content of religion news in order to assess the degree to which this per-

ception matches the reality of the content produced. Finally, it is worth considering this

study in context—for exactly the reasons laid out in this article, religion news is a vital

issue in society. That said, its historic attachment to legacy media and inability to

meaningfully enhance its economic capital would seem to put it in line with other historic

legacy media specialties, such the gardening section, or reporting on local issues of

democratic governance, such as the planning and zoning commission (Christensen,

2003).

Mainstream religion reporting looks quite different since it left the religion section.

Journalists celebrated the hard news turn for cementing the signiﬁcance of religion in

public life, even as they bemoaned what was lost: religion specialists—increasingly cut

from newsrooms—and lifestyle journalism—increasingly the terrain of religious

publications.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Fulbright Austria and the Botstiber Commission on Austrian-American

Studies for supporting the sabbatical research at University of Vienna, where much of this work was

able to be written. We would also like to thank Sydney Kidd, who was essential in assisting on this

project.

Declaration of conﬂicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conﬂicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/

or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no ﬁnancial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this

article.

ORCID iDs

Gregory Perreault



https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6645-1117

Kathryn Montalbano



https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9795-0851

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Author Biographies

Gregory Perreault (PhD, University of Missouri) is an associate professor of multimedia

journalism at Appalachian State University. He is a media sociologist whose research is

motivated by a concern for societal justice and a value for scholarly collaboration; his

work primarily examines phenomena associated with journalism and gaming. His recent

work examines news coverage of hate, lifestyle journalism, and gamiﬁcation. His research

has been widely discussed in publications including VICE, Le Monde, Kotaku, and

Yahoo! News.

Kathryn Montalbano (PhD, Columbia University) is an assistant professor of journalism/

media law at Appalachian State University. She is a historian of communications who

specializes in communication law, religion and media, and surveillance studi es. Her

research examines the history and impact of communication law and policy on speech,

assembly, and religious expression in the United States since the nineteenth century. Her

ﬁrst book, Government Surveillance of Religious Expression: Mormons, Quakers, and

Muslims in the United States (Routledge, 2018), compa res how United States government

agencies in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-ﬁrst centuries monitored and negotiated

the identities of three distinctive religious groups within cultural and legal frameworks

deeply rooted in Protestant hegemony.

18 Journalism 0(0)