One Man Loses Another Gains Religion through Reporting, Louis Medina, Bakersfield Express, January 16, 2010

One Man Loses, Another Gains Religion through Reporting

By Louis Medina
Bakersfield Express
January 16, 2010

http://bakersfieldexpress.org/2010/01/15/one-man-loses-another-gains-religion-through-reporting/

William Lobdell, author of “Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America -- and Found Unexpected Peace,” spoke at CSUB. Photo by Louis Medina

Consider this scenario: A reporter who is a committed born-again Christian takes on the religion beat at his newspaper because he feels a calling from God to tell the positive stories about Christians that are being ignored by his editors. But he ends up finding story after story—Catholic priest sex scandals, Christian televangelist sex and money scandals, Mormon excommunication scandals—that shake his Christian convictions, and in a matter of just a few years he ends up walking away from both his beat and his faith.

Now consider this scenario: A reporter who once was a born-again Christian but now sees himself as more spiritual than religious takes on the faith beat at a newspaper because he thinks it will be a stimulating and enriching experience. He is fascinated as he discovers untold story after untold story—local Muslim communities thriving despite post-9/11 distrust and prejudice; exhaustive Mormon genealogical resources that enable people to feel close to ancestors several centuries removed; Philippine girls who dress up as prom queens in an effort to represent the beauty and grace of the holy women of the Bible. He finds God again and again in places he wouldn’t have thought to look for him before, and his faith and curiosity in spiritual things continue to grow even after he leaves his full-time job as a journalist because of economic uncertainties in the industry.

The first scenario concerns William Lobdell, former Los Angeles Times reporter and author of “Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America—and Found Unexpected Peace.” Lobdell visited Bakersfield this week and spoke to a crowd of about 150 on Thursday, Jan. 14, at a free evening lecture at the CSUB Student Union.

The second scenario is about me, a former faith reporter for The Bakersfield Californian and now a volunteer writer and board member for BakersfieldExpress.org.

I went to Lobdell’s lecture because ever since he “came out” to his readers as an atheist in a July 21, 2007 L.A. Times article (see also williamlobdell.com/bio) his spiritual journey has both intrigued and bothered me.

“As a serious Christian, I had cringed at some of the coverage in the mainstream media. Faith frequently was treated like a circus, even a freak show,” he wrote then.

He continued, “I wanted to report objectively and respectfully about how belief shapes people’s lives. Along the way, I believed, my own faith would grow deeper and sturdier.”

As a journalist, I couldn’t help but think he went into the faith beat for the wrong reasons: To defend his own faith before others and to deepen his relationship with God. As a reporter, I thought that would be a sure way to compromise one’s objectivity.

When I raised that concern to him at the book table after his lecture, he assured me that wasn’t the case. “I was always a better journalist than I was a Christian,” he said, adding that he never felt like he wanted to proselytize, but admitting that his religious convictions had affected his story selection process.

“I thought I was helping to cleanse the Catholic Church by exposing the (sex) scandal (that began about a decade ago) and helping to heal the church,” he had said during his lecture. This was a church he was seriously thinking of joining at the time: He went to conversion classes for a year at night, he said, while continuing to cover sex scandal stories during the day.

Lobdell started his faith beat around 1998, began to lose his faith in 2000 and rejected Christianity altogether in 2002. But it took him until 2006 to come to grips with this reality and decide to change jobs. Although there is still much doubt in my mind that Lobdell’s faith reporting was unbiased during the eight years that he worked as a religion writer, there are several other things about him that bother me even more.

There is a black-and-whiteness about Lobdell’s belief system that I find hard to accept—and believe. Why couldn’t he see beyond the scandals of sexual predators and money-hungry con artists disguised as preachers and find God in the resiliency of their victims? Why did it have to be Christianity or nothing for him? Why did he not give other non-Christian religions a proper chance rather than dismiss them as also having their own “silliness” to deal with? And, most importantly, why did he, after becoming an atheist, pray for God to heal him when he was suffering from a severe bout of stomach flu? (There were chuckles from the audience at CSUB following that admission.)

That last statement from him makes me think his spiritual journey is over even though he says, “I admitted to myself that I didn’t believe in God,” and proclaims that “gratitude” for what he has is what has taken the place of faith in his life.

I believe CSUB religious studies professor Stafford Betty, who was also in the audience, said it best: “What I can’t relate to is your complacency.” It is easy enough to call oneself an atheist, said Betty, who himself experienced a crisis of faith at one time, but “will you think that six months before you die?

Probably what bothers me the most about Lobdell is that, as another member of the audience at his lecture said, he seems to have “thrown the baby out with the bath water.”

There are a lot of things about traditional, institutionalized, American-style Christianity that I don’t agree with: anti-choice (my term for “pro-life”) issues; bigotry against people of other faiths and alternative lifestyles; the excesses—from gluttony to drinking to overspending—of Christmas; the hypocrisy of church authority figures who abuse their power when they should be acting as “the least of their brethren” to set the proper example of biblically-inspired leaders. But, as a 12-step spiritual program in which I participate reminds me to do, I take what I like and leave the rest. And I do that not just with Christianity but with other religions or belief systems as well.

Confession time:

I like to have someone read the tarot cards for me once or twice a year—it helps me keep my life in balance. I also read my horoscope from time to time and, although I don’t believe everything it says, I identify thoroughly with my most existentialist of signs, Scorpio.

I am very proud of my family name, Medina, which means “city” in Arabic and is the place where the Prophet Mohammed was buried. I don’t agree with all the practices of Islam, but I feel an affinity with that religion because of that personal cultural connection. I have read parts of the Quran and hope to someday observe a Ramadan fast, albeit modified because I don’t think it’s right to go without drinking water from sunup to sundown.

I don’t pray to saints, but I still find the most peace for prayer and meditation within a Catholic sanctuary. Maybe it’s because that was the faith I was first introduced to as a child in my native El Salvador. Many of us seem to go back full circle to our beginnings in matters of faith and culture, don’t we?

Although I am not Hindu, I find some passages of the Bhagavad Gita (“Song of God”) to be as inspirational and relevant to living a good, moral life as the New Testament’s Sermon on the Mount. I have practiced meditation. I am fascinated with the elephant-headed, four-armed Hindu deity Ganesh, the remover of obstacles, the lord of wisdom and beginnings. When I shared my passion for Ganesh with my meditation teacher, Dr. Anil Mehta, he was quick to remark, “Maybe it’s because you were a devotee of Ganesh in a past life.” I don’t believe in reincarnation—at least not at this point of my spiritual journey—but I celebrate Dr. Mehta’s candid and pure faith in Hinduism as much as I celebrate the unwavering faith of any Christian who believes in Christ’s redemptive death and resurrection.

Last year, I took my dog to an evangelical service to receive healing prayer with the laying on of hands after he was diagnosed with congestive heart failure. He is doing well still, and I have not stopped giving him the meds his vet prescribed.

At the end of his lecture, Lobdell said, “I don’t have that sense of anguish that I had as a Christian.” Well, I don’t either. I stopped playing church week after week years ago because I felt suffocated and constrained. But I haven’t given up on God or my Higher Power or whatever anyone might want to call him: He is too big and wonderful and life-affirming for me to want to turn away from him. Instead, I choose to continue to seek after him, in Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, mysticism, my spiritual 12-step group and other ways in which he chooses to manifest himself to me.

I didn’t lose my religion as a result of having been a faith reporter: I simply found more of God.