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58 Media and religion in transition

Constitution that holds religion, government, and the press at arm’s length
from one another. This has had two kinds of effects. First, the separation of
religion from government has been assumed to be a removal of religion
from politics as well, and this has meant that the press could cover govern-
ment and politics without giving undue attention to religion. Second, the
separation has been “read” by many in the press and the media as a separa-
tion of religion from the press as well. This has all changed quite
dramatically, of course, something I will return to in greater detail in
Chapter 9.
In spite of some significant historical examples of religion entering into
press coverage, the mid-twentieth-century situation was one of relatively
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little journalistic treatment of religion beyond a kind of ritualistic attention
to the activities of the major religious bodies. Meanwhile, change in the
nature and scope of religion both domestically and internationally was
beginning to challenge the easy compartmentalization of religion at the
margins of press coverage. The singular event was the Islamic Revolution
in Iran in 1979, which at the same time revealed that religion could still be
central to unfolding global events and that religion needed to be seen in a
much broader context than had been typical before that time. The events
of 1979 unleashed a period of self-criticism in the media not seen again
until after the September 11 attacks of 2001. In both cases, the message
was that journalism and the press had been sleeping while important
stories were developing under the heading “religion.” 43
Between 1979 and 2001, a number of developments on the domestic
front also influenced the priority given to religion by the press. These are
seen by some as all falling under the heading of the so-called “culture
wars” based in religion or religious values. The signal event on “the right”
was the emergence, demonstrated strikingly in the US General Election of
2004, but rooted in trends dating to the 1960s, of a vibrant new politically
oriented type of religious conservatism, based on longstanding principles
of American Fundamentalism and Pentecostalism, but with new face and
new name – Evangelicalism – devoted to having a larger presence in public
discourse. A thorough analysis is beyond the scope of our project here. 44
However, two very significant dimensions of this development are the role
played in it by the contemporaneous emergence of the phenomenon of
televangelism, and the more general sense among the leaders of this new
movement that in order to have its desired outcomes it needed to be some-
thing that took the public sphere – and particularly the media – seriously. 45
Perhaps as a result, but more probably as a consequence of some charac-
teristics of Evangelicalism and its relationship to culture, this movement
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has, over the past twenty-five years, moved to the center of American
public discourse, eschewing the political quietude that had typified
Fundamentalism earlier in the century, and doing so largely in and through
the media.