Teaching Religious Literacy to Journalism Students

religionandmedia.com
The AEJMC-RMIG Newsletter--Summer 2007

Teaching Religious Literacy to Journalism Students

Paola Banchero
Assistant Professor
Department of Journalism and Public Communications
The University of Alaska--Anchorage

One student said she could not cover the abortion debate fairly. She thinks Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that granted women the constitutional right to abort, should be struck down. Another student recoiled when she heard the term “human rights,” associating it with what liberals want to give Islamic terrorists. Still another student wrote in a class-assigned news report that missionaries in a remote area were saving the souls of residents there. College campuses are full of religious students involved in a multitude of organizations that strengthen their faith. As a New York Times article recently pointed out, “Across the country, on secular campuses as varied as Colgate University, the University of Wisconsin and the University of California, Berkeley, chaplains, professors and administrators say students are drawn to religion and spirituality with more fervor than at any time they can remember.” Having students who are committed to their faith — and verbalize it in the classroom — gives me a starting point for discussions about religion and the media. Religious issues and conflicts are apparent in all kinds of news stories, and more frequently we see how religious literacy strengthens the coverage. For instance: • Defining and responding to radical Islam has permeate news since Sept. 11. But how can students know what radical Islam is or what its followers believe if they don’t know about Islam? How can they understand what Muslims mean when they say it is a religion of peace? • News organizations report on presidential candidates and the influence of faith on their public service and personal lives. (For example, see the July 23, 2007 Time Magazine cover story.) But how can a journalist cover this effectively without knowing the difference between Hillary Clinton’s Methodism and Mitt Romney’s Mormonism? • Some congregations shun homosexuals while others embrace them as part of the flock and ordain them. What accounts for the difference of opinion about what the Bible says concerning homosexuality? Bringing up the R-word Talking about these issues means pushing some students’ buttons. Students of faith react differently depending on the topic and the way it is discussed. But I also encounter resistance from secular students for even suggesting that religion is worthy of news coverage, or bringing up how the news and entertainment media use or approach religion. Just because a student identifies himself with a particular religion does not mean he is well-versed in what that religion teaches. Stephen Prothero, chair of the Department of Religion at Boston University and author of Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, says students lack knowledge about the world’s major faiths, and institutions of higher learning should educate students about what the major religions of the world believe. “Thinkers who argue for greater attention to religion in public life are often assumed to have a theological agenda,” Prothero wrote in the March 16 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education. “Such assumptions are often correct. My goal, however, is civic. I do not want to make American colleges or American undergraduates more religious. My brief for religious literacy proceeds on purely secular grounds, on the theory that Americans are not equipped for citizenship (or, for that matter, cocktail-party conversation) without a basic understanding of Christianity and the world's other religions. The college courses I support would teach about religion, not proselytize for it.” So, how do we teach about religion to journalism students? Here are some strategies that have worked for me: Strategies • Give context to news about religion. Last year, as sectarian violence boiled over in Iraq, the differences between Sunnis and Shiites became a common subject in the news media. Most stories, however, failed to give the context over the conflict between these two Muslim sects. I gave students a fact sheet about the situation and asked them extra credit questions about it on quizzes. I also give editing students a synopsis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — including historical, political, religious and environmental perspectives. It’s a news story that they will come across if they go to work in most American newsrooms, and they should know the background. • Use other media, such as books or videos, to discuss religious issues. Last year the University of Alaska Anchorage collaborated with Alaska Pacific University, a private liberal arts institution, to select a book of the semester in both the fall and spring. I used The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, a book about a Hmong family’s clash with the American medical system over the treatment of an epileptic daughter. The themes about the family’s culture and spirituality and how it conflicted with Western medicine were particularly affecting to the students, who read the book both to see how a magazine writer had engrossed herself in a book project and to talk about topical issues of immigration, assimilation, religion, culture and health care. This year, the two books are Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Yasmina Khadra’s The Swallows of Kabul, both about religious fundamentalism’s destructive force on ordinary humans. Although both are novels, they can be adapted to mass communications and journalism classes to talk about modern instances of religious extremism. I plan to have students read excerpts and then apply it to what is going on now in Afghanistan. • Engage students by encouraging them to look at issues from other perspectives. Invoke the five-minute rule, in which you suspend your beliefs and for five minutes believe the exact thing you most disbelieve. Push students to take the way of thinking most foreign to them to the logical conclusion. It’s only for five minutes, and they can reclaim their original position afterwards. • Remember: being an educator means allowing students to investigate the underpinnings of morality. Morality stems from the human capacity for rationality and introspection, and though it is not always, it is often drawn from religious teachings.
One student, whose e-mail address proclaims him a “Jesus freak,” tells me it’s in the discussions about ethics that he can best hold up Christianity for examination and thereby deepen his faith.
“I never discredit what I learn in the classroom. I try to keep an open mind,” he said. In a recent class he learned about utilitarianism and compared that with Christianity. “What’s the right moral decision? I’ve been told that Christians don’t believe this or believe that. I keep taking notes.”

Test yourself, test your students Take Stephen Prothero’s pop quiz on religious literacy, or have your students do so and talk about the results: http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,660205799,00.html Recommended reading for students The History of God: The 4,000 year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, by Karen Armstrong (Ballantine Books, 1994) World Religions in America: An Introduction, edited by Jacob Neusner (Westminster John Knox Press, 3rd edition, 2003)