Abstract
Ronald Rodgers offers a careful historical study in a field that has been overlooked in media and journalism history: the role of religious authority. Rodgers’s work covers a formative time, bracketing both the Civil War and the tremendous social upheavals of the turn of the Twentieth Century. For religion, this period spans two of the “Great Awakenings” where American religion evolved along two contradictory paths, a turn toward intense personal faith, and a reassertion in public life. For journalism, this was the dawn of the “mass press” era, where newspapers became an increasingly independent force in society.
It was thus a period of negotiation of power, and Rodgers, associate professor of Journalism at the University of Florida, chooses to focus on religion and specifically on the prodigious religious commentary about the moral and social implications of the new emergence of journalism. In the language of the times, Rodgers frames the discourse around the “mission” of journalism. Religious leaders, journalists, and public intellectuals alike thought about this question. Rodgers does not address how the religious and secular ideas of “mission” might differ and whether it might make sense to disentangle them. Most on all sides apparently agreed that the “mission” should be understood pedagogically. The “teaching” function of the newspaper was taken for granted. Other roles for journalism, such as its role in immigrant communities identified late in the same period by Chicago School sociology, do not appear here. The journalistic and religious voices in Rodgers’s account assume a central common culture in need of normative values. The only question is who is most qualified to do this.
This is obvious in the book’s thorough and helpful account of the central and critical “social gospel” era in Protestantism, which roughly coincided with the progressive era in politics. The leaders of the social gospel had a grand, rationalist and almost secularized view of the place of religion. It was to focus on the critical social issues of the day, and for its leaders, journalism and newspapers should be central. This complicates the easy notion of hermetic “religion” and its impact on hermetic “journalism.” At one and the same time, religious leaders and journalistic leaders saw a normative role for the newspaper.
Rodgers presents an account of religious and journalistic commentary across historical incidents, including struggles over “reform” of newspapers, over whether there should be Sunday editions, struggles between pulpit and press over control of public opinion, and whether there should be “Christian” newspapers. As all good histories do, it provides insights into the conditions of the times. The book’s strength is in its mastery of the history. We can see here that religious institutions and authorities clearly felt that they were the moral establishment of the emerging nation, positioned to be the guarantors of the broad truths that could and would bind American society together. And, consistent with America’s Protestant cultural norms, they argued for a focus on serious facts and information and against the frivolity and entertainment they saw creeping into news.
There are strong echoes of these struggles in the contemporary moment. The current debates over “religious liberty” seem to be all about whether—all other things being equal—contemporary moral and values questions must be explicitly “marked” by religion. Likewise, religiously grounded controversies over media content carry within them the implicit question of whether there needs to be a central, normative authority. And there remains today—as was explicitly argued by journalistic voices in the period Rodgers covers—the question of whether it is possible to be normative without being religious. Rodgers’s work confirms that there is nothing new about these questions. Unfortunately, there are not definitive answers.
In the end, Rodgers resorts to a conventional argument about journalistic responsibility. He locates the answers in familiar professional standards and the responsibilities of news practice. He assumes—and indeed this is clear from this history—that there is no such thing as “objective” news. One is left with the disquieting sense that a deep and complex set of social forces have roiled relations between religion and journalism across most of the past two Centuries, and yet a deep dive into the history of these relations tells us little beyond that.
It is possible to look at the history in a slightly different way. There are clues that make more sense if we make explicit something implicit in Rodgers’s approach. These religious leaders did not represent religion in general as much as they represented the still-dominant Protestant moral project. Yes, they claimed to speak for the central “broad truths.” How do the values of the journalism leaders with whom they dialogue differ from those? Is this in fact an argument about the articulation of Protestantism, not of religion? It is not just that other voices—such as emergent Catholic and Jewish ones (and there were even a few Muslims around)—might be left out. It is that the project of religious authority over media assumed both that there were things journalism should do and that these leaders had the right to assert hegemony. That remains the critical question today.
The current debates over “religious liberty” are in fact about this hegemony and are remarkably tone-deaf about the interweaving of Protestant social and cultural power and the meaning of religious change. Nostalgic proponents of “liberty” today attempt to recreate a past that was in fact every bit as complex and indefinite as the world we live in today. Likewise, journalism assumes that this kind of religious influence is a thing of the past, when in fact the normative values of journalistic professionalism are deeply religious in their provenance. That this is not known means that we are ill prepared to face some of the most important challenges of the day.