4 tips for covering the Religious Right

A column intended to help journalists take religion more seriously has suddenly blown up on outgoing editor of the New York Times Bill Keller.  And he earned it.  Our colleagues at GetReligion called the column "terribly embarrassing", while I found it baffling. 

Even more than Keller's text, it is the great responses to the column - sometimes satirical or even unexpectedly charitable  - that are actually far more useful to journalists genuinely committed to improving their handling of religion.   

And topping this list of responses today is Ross Douthat, who, in the NY Times, responded to Keller by laying out four attitudes or postures that journalists should take when covering religious beliefs they don't share.  The key here is that, though Douthat is thinking primarily of conservative Christians, the same postures are essential when covering Islam, the LDS, or any other comparatively rare faith in public life.  

According to Douthat, journalists should:

(1) Recognize that conservative Christianity is a diverse world with various centers and fringes.

Sometimes teasing out these connections tells us something meaningful and interesting.  But it's easy to succumb to a paranoid six-degrees-of-separation game, in which the most radical figure in a particular community is the most important one...

(2) Avoid double standards.

If you roll your eyes when conservatives trumpet Barack Obama's links to Chicago socialists and academic radicals, you probably shouldn't leap to the conclusion that Bachmann's more outré law school influences prove she's a budding Torquemada. 

(3) Avoid conspiracy language when they encounter groups they don't understand.

Republican politicians are often accused of using religious "code words" and "dog whistles," for instance, when all they're doing is employing the everyday language  of an America that's more bibilically literate than the national press corps. 

(4) Remember that religious constituents of the Republican party have never succeeded in taking "dominion" over the national political agenda. 

(Texas Gov. Rick) Perry knows how to stroke the egos of Texas preachers, but he was listening to pharmaceutical lobbyists, not religious concservatives, when he signed an executive order mandating S.T.C. vaccinations for Texas teenagers.