A conversation with the most prolific religion journalist in America, Terry Mattingly

Terry Mattingly has probably written more about religion than anyone else alive, heading into year 37 of full-time religion news this coming spring, including writing every day for 20 years at “Get Religion” and a nationally syndicated “On Religion” column for Scripps Howard News Service since 1988.
Even with this long experience, this veteran journalist wept while finalizing a recent retrospective on media. “I cried several times,” he says, recalling waking up at 3 a.m. trying to complete a reflection that was hurting his heart. After so many years of striving for high-quality religion reporting, Mattingly has now concluded that “it no longer makes economic sense, in our splintered digital age, for journalists to report and produce news that will upset their paying customers.”
Mattingly grew up the son of a Southern Baptist pastor in Texas and was ordained as a deacon in his twenties, living as an active churchman. He later came to identify as an “evangelical Anglican,” before converting to the Eastern Orthodox faith.
Graduating in 1976 from Baylor in journalism and history and a master’s in Church-State Studies, Mattingly eventually added a communications graduate degree from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. There, he also worked as a copy-editor at The Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette, where in these early days of the computer era they hardcoded everything.
Mattingly’s interest in religion spilled over in his early rock and roll column, where he conducted the first-known interview in the fall of 1981 with a young 21-year-old singer named Bono.
This new Irish band U2 had avoided speaking openly about their Christian faith to that point, but decided “it’s time to talk about it.” Bono, Larray and Edge told Mattingly about using Bible study and prayer to help them “wind down” after concerts, with Bono expressing disappointment that so many “sweep under the carpet” ultimate questions of faith.
“Deep down, everyone is aware,” the rock-star told him. “When somebody in their family dies … they shock people into a realization of what is going down.”
Between 2005-2015, Mattingly was director of the Washington Journalism Center for The Council for Christian Colleges & Universities. He serves currently as a Senior Fellow on Communications and Culture at Saint Constantine College in Houston.
Mattingly lives with his wife Debra in East Tennessee and is the father of two grown children and five grandchildren. In a conversation with the Deseret News, he shares some of what he has learned in his long career of reporting and writing about faith. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Deseret News: You could have easily followed the trajectory of much of religion journalism, and come out of school reporting on faith from a fairly secular standpoint. Were there any pivotal moments in your life that moved you toward a religion journalism that takes religious practice seriously?
Terry Mattingly: I was working at Baylor’s paper, the Lariat, sometime in 1973 -1974, and it was “missions weekend.” As the largest Southern Baptist institution of education in the world, missions weekend was a big deal. But nobody else in the newsroom wanted to cover it. They wanted to be real journalists, not do “religion stuff.”
So I volunteered to cover missions weekend. I got there and hardly anyone showed up. And the people running the event were stunned. There were just not as many idealistic people that wanted to go be missionaries around the world. I think that’s what we were starting to see. I came back to the student paper, saying, “this is a big story. Hardly anybody showed up for missions week. We should have had medical missionary candidates alone lined up out the door.”
And the other students didn’t understand. “Nobody showed up? Then it’s not a big story.” I was getting frustrated, and looked up to (our faculty mentor) David McHam standing across the newsroom. He calls me over and says, “they did not learn this from me. They learned it from reading the major papers. They’ve already learned that the press doesn’t really cover religion as religion.”
And then he said something that changed my life, “I consider religion to be the worst covered subject in the entire American press. Want to do something about that?”
DN: It was a 1999 comment in the New York Times Magazine that ”absolutes do not exist” and “people who claim to have found them are crazy” that prompted you to create an outlet called “Get Religion” — signaling how often the mainstream press doesn’t ”get” religion. Since then, you’ve suggested that many journalists seem to believe that standards of accuracy, fairness and balance “do not apply to coverage of hot-button subjects linked to religion, morality and culture” — writing, “Why do accurate, fair-minded, balanced coverage of crazy people?”
Were there other experiences in your career that inspired this focus on encouraging religion reporting that is more accurate?
TM: One key date was 1976 and a candidate named Jimmy Carter, who launched religion into the front page of everywhere. The first time Carter used the term “born again,” everybody freaked.
And I remember (broadcast journalist) Howard K. Smith, at the end of his new report, looking at the camera and saying, “ABC News is investigating born-again Christians, and we’ll have a report in a future newscast.”
“Does he know he’s talking about 42% of the population?” I wondered at the time. I mean, they sounded like Martians had landed, right?
All of a sudden, religion writing got much more important and moved out of the ghetto in the back of the paper. And so I jumped into the field at a good moment.
DN: In that recent essay on journalism, you raised serious questions about whether the “old journalism” ethos “that asked reporters and editors to strive to follow professional standards of accuracy, balance and fairness” is still financially viable in the internet age — even suggesting that a business model relying on this kind of classical journalism “no longer works.” Are you overstating for emphasis?
TM: Maybe I’m being slightly hyperbolic, but not at the structural level. The old model is still thriving in some places. But biased journalism is now good business. I love that clip from Pirates of the Caribbean with, you know, the evil British captain, “I’m sorry, Jack, it’s just good business.”
You need papers that are attempting to deal with both halves of their community. But what’s their incentive?
The whole purpose of Get Religion was to defend the American model of the press on the religion beat. If you have no financial incentive for accuracy, balance, fairness, or even a respect for people, what happens to American journalism?
DN: In your recent Rational Sheep articles, you suggest that in the same moment people “complain about the state of journalism,” they “keep clicking and clicking and clicking and clicking” on partisan news. What needs to happen to go back to the American style of journalism?
TM: I don’t think it’s possible. “The Free Press” will be an interesting test. Is there a business model to offer anything resembling the American model, even as a separate niche for the 5 to 15% of the American public that might want it?
News is expensive, and commentary is cheap, which is why so many publications now are over half commentary, and you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins. I mean, MSNBC has no hard news shows. Fox has one. And yet people say, “Oh, I saw that on the news last night.” And they’re not talking about news. They’re talking about a commentary show that they saw.
DN: You led a national level program in Washington for 20 years trying to get more diversity into newsrooms. What’s the difference between a newsroom with or without religious people in it?
TM: Intellectual diversity. Nobody wants born again reporters who can’t write their way out of a paper bag. Journalism skills have to be there, and the willingness to go after the stories have to be there.
It’s the exact logic of saying you need African Americans in newsrooms. You need intellectual and cultural diversity.
DN: How did religious liberty become such a central focus of your writing?
TM: One of my professors in a Church State seminar in 1977-1978 warned about an upcoming supreme court decision, predicting they were “going to decide that the government has the ability to tell people what is good doctrine and bad doctrine,” other than the classic tests of fraud, profit and clear threat to life and health.
In 1980 the evangelical magazine Sojourners approached the right to life completely from a liberal political perspective — with Jesse Jackson writing on abortion as a form of institutionalized racism … noting that Planned Parenthood was building most of its clinics on the edge of black and Latino neighborhoods. And for the first time, I saw abortion and right to life issues from a liberal, progressive side.
And at this point, I would say, I turned into an old school liberal. Never affected my doctrine. I remained a very conservative person doctrinally, but all of a sudden I was obsessed with First Amendment issues.
And I began to realize that what I was seeing in the American press was a blind spot with two sides — that basically, the two halves of the First Amendment didn’t respect each other. The press didn’t respect the constitutionally protected role that religion plays in American life, and the world of institutionalized religion didn’t respect the constitutionally protected role that journalism plays in American public life.
Two of the most powerful forces in American life were not talking to each other and did not understand each other, and most importantly, did not respect each other.
DN: You’ve participated in BYU’s religious freedom conferences over the years. Talk more about the changes in public attitudes you’ve witnessed toward religious freedom in America over your career.
TM: Religious liberty is the old liberalism. The 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act passed in the US Senate with only three votes against it, with the Coalition for that bill spanning the Assemblies of God to the Unitarians. Everybody supported religious liberty.
That’s why you see in my writing this constant reference to old liberalism and old school liberalism, which is a major theme of a new book by The Free Press co-founder Nelly Bowles. In a recent interview, she kept stressing that this is not a battle between left and right. This is a battle between the old left and something else.
And trying to label that something else — the press doesn’t know what to do with it. I was interviewing a Muslim human rights activist, and asked him, “what do you call someone who is soft in their defense of religious liberty, soft in their defense of free speech and soft in their defense of freedom of association.”
“Well, we can’t call them liberal,” he said, “because defensive First Amendment freedom is the heart of American liberalism.” I could hear him pause, before saying, “I’m beginning to call them Jacobins.”
He went to the French Revolution. I think that’s the essence of illiberalism — hostility to the First Amendment applying equally to everyone. It’s why disinformation is such a huge issue now (”We’ve got to stop certain forms of information from even entering public debate.”)
DN: “Waves of technology are altering young hearts and minds,” you wrote after your recent interview with Jonathan Haidt — a conversation that focused on whether churches and parents will dare to do more about smartphones. Can you say more about why this has become a priority focus for you?
TM: Yes, but first of all: why does it take an atheist social scientist to get us talking about this more as people of faith?
Here’s a sobering thought. Popular culture is way more important in worldview formation than the news in American life. That’s tragic, but that was even true in the 90s. Way more powerful. TikTok matters way more than National Public Radio.
Now you’ve got a form of technology that, if they click one wrong box, networks of people can find them, follow them right to their home and make direct contact with them. To quote the secular Jewish writer Marie Winn’s famous book, “The Plug-In Drug,” we’re allowing our children to be “raised by people that if they showed up at our door we would call 911.”
I think every congregation in America should, once a year, have an entire weekend dedicated to the role of technology in the home, and they should have providers of dumb phones and light phones come by. Local stores should have a table with all their models and explain how they work and that you’ll still be able to contact your kid in an emergency, but you’re not going to put the internet in the pocket of a young person.
Let us make people very nervous about this.
DN: So your grandkids have heard this from grandpa, I’m sure.
TM: Yes, they have.
This is all about parents and grandparents. When I do lectures on this at churches, I encourage them to look at their young children and say, “Our home is not like everyone else’s home.”
If you allow your child to have a television (or other screen) in his or her room, Marie Wynn said, you will get the family life that you deserve.
DN: Out of curiosity, does your beard have any religious significance?
TM: No, the beard just happened. I had built up a massive amount of comp time under the union contract in Denver at the Rocky Mountain News. And my wife and I and our newborn were way down in what locals call the Colorado outback. And the hotel phone rings, and it’s the newsroom. The Roman Catholic Archbishop of Denver has had a heart attack. And I’ve got to come back.
We get in the car and drive eight hours. And I worked pretty much round the clock until he was out of danger, like four or five days. And as a sign of protest that there was nobody else in the newsroom who covered it, I stopped shaving.
Abraham Lincoln said that he had a beard so that it would look like he had one chin. And, you know, that worked for me too as an overweight baby boomer. I’ve just had the beard ever since. So it’s not for any religious significance.