The Monkey Cage

I wrote the following to the NY Times about a month ago. As you can see, my major complaint is that those who are reporting on religion generally don’t know much about it, making some pretty elementary mistakes.

To the editor:

The article on Sen. John McCain’s efforts to court conservative evangelical Protestants showed that his knowledge of religious voters runs somewhat shallow, but it also demonstrated that the Times is similarly shallow in its understanding of these and other sorts of Christians. As McCain’s religious mirror image (an evangelical turned Episcopalian), I may no longer believe as evangelicals do but I believe they deserve better explanation of their beliefs and culture.

Let me offer examples of the problems that plague the article. First, although John McCain attends a Southern Baptist church with his wife, it is not necessarily foregone that he would need to be baptized to join that church officially. Since each Baptist church is autonomous and the Baptist theology of baptism does not always accept other Christian baptisms as valid, it is hard to know what he would have to do to join the church. The article need not include a theological discourse, but it was rather simplistic to use “baptize” as a synonym for “join”.

Second, the photo accompanying the article clearly shows McCain attending an event at a Roman Catholic church—whose baptisms probably would not be accepted by his wife’s church—not an evangelical congregation. Finally, the McCain campaign’s and the press’s continuing focus on Rod Parsley and John Hagee is puzzling: neither minister is part of the evangelical mainstream nor holds much influence over many besides fundamentalists (who are distinct from evangelicals).

This article is certainly not the only example of continued misunderstanding of American religious life. I cannot offer any simple solutions, but your subjects and readers both deserve more nuanced and knowledgeable reporting.

-Nathan A. Paxton