Current is grateful for P&R Publishing’s permission to serialize Marvin Olasky’s memoir, Pivot Points: Adventures on the Road to Christian Contentment.
Act Four
Journalism and Teaching, 2001-2014
Chapter 15: Seeing the World and Enjoying World
Early on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, I’m at home working on the issue of World scheduled to go to press in two days. The phone rings. Our national editor tells me an airplane has crashed into one of the World Trade Center’s skyscrapers. Millions of people are getting such phone calls and turning on televisions. We all watch as another airplane appears on-screen. Then comes an explosion. We all know that America is under attack.
It’s immediately clear that the World staff must tear up the almost-finished issue and start over. Our reporters write about the attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. We cover cockpit security, views from abroad, Osama Bin Laden’s terror network, and responses from churches.
All of us grapple with the horror of the attack and the pressure to do our jobs despite our feelings. My oldest son is living in New York. For several hours we are unable to reach him because the phone lines are down. We finally get word that he’s okay.
We agree to make the issue photo-heavy. We decide not to show corpses, but we do include one picture showing from a distance several bodies plummeting toward the ground. In two days we produce a completely rewritten and redesigned issue, trying all the while to keep in our heads the teaching by Jesus reported in the gospels of Matthew and Luke: “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. But even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows” (Matt. 10:29–31).
Knowing that God is in charge, although his ways are sometimes mysterious, we try to report with resolution but not panic. For a moment after 9/11, Americans come together, united by grief and shock. Churches fill up in a mini-revival. Its effects are short lived, and an anti-Christian reaction arises. Christopher Hitchens and other “new atheists” churn out bestsellers. Some journalists lump together Christian and Muslim believers and throw around terms like Islamic Calvinist.
Coverage of 9/11 reveals the ignorance of the national press regarding religion. It also reveals that most Americans—World reporters included—are ignorant about Islam. I am too.
Theological illiteracy hands me the idea for a new course to teach at the University of Texas. Faculty colleagues have created a requirement that journalism students take a course in non-Western culture. No one, though, wants to take the time to create and teach it, so I pivot to developing a course, alongside my standard offering in journalism history, in which students read scriptures of Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. My hope is that future journalists will know the basics.
I enjoy having practitioners of the various religions come to class to talk about their beliefs and give students a chance to interview them. The principle of nonattachment in Hinduism and Buddhism fascinates my students, who think it’s cool not to be attached to material possessions—but they’re surprised about extending nonattachment to relationships as a way of freeing ourselves from suffering. They (and I) tend to agree with Alfred Lord Tennyson that it’s “better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all”—but a Hindu or Buddhist would not come up with such a line.
I also learn a lot, especially when travel stipends allow me to visit countries where these major religions are dominant. What’s striking is that Japanese Buddhists, Indian Hindus, and Turkish Muslims all work hard in an attempt to earn their salvation—or at least their deliverance from earthly pressures.
For example, many Americans know of Buddhism only from pithy Zen sayings, but on Mount Hiei in Japan, Susan and I visit Tendai Buddhists whose practice requires endurance: walk constantly for nine days, or sit, fast, and stay awake for the same length of time while taking in only small sips of water. As one monk explains to me, “If we can remove the desire for food or sleep, we can get closer to the goal of leaving behind all desire.” The leader of that group sports a Rolex watch.
At one Shingon Buddhist temple, the priest adherents are up at 6 a.m. to chant sutras in a dark temple filled with the smell of incense. Wearing robes, they walk in sneakers six miles to a work project in the mountains. Adherents also sit in ice cold water or walk on coals. Shingon practitioners, like most other Buddhists, do a lot of chanting. One Shingon practice is to recite a favorite sutra “twenty-thousand times each day for fifty days.”
Over the years, seeing life in seventy-eight countries and writing stories based in forty of them helps me realize that religion isn’t going away—but the type of religion many people prefer is one where we purportedly control our own future by engaging in particular rituals for which we’ll be rewarded. Christianity’s teaching that we cannot save ourselves is different from that of all the other major religions. In debates I have with atheists Peter Singer and Christopher Hitchens in 2004 and 2007, I see they view all religions as attempts to climb up to God. They don’t see Christianity’s distinctiveness as the faith where God comes down.
One of my favorite travel-based stories concerns a modern Isaac almost sacrificed to the forces of a culture ravaged by AIDS and famine. I report the article during an African trip and show how Isaac and other children now have a home and hope at the Village of Hope orphanage forty-five miles north of Zambia’s capital, Lusaka.
My article, “Saving Isaac,” ends with a challenging quotation from software CEO Benedict Schwartz, who has moved with his family from Maryland to Zambia to develop the orphanage along with a school and economic development project. He says, “Don’t think of what kind of home entertainment system or which set of gold clubs to buy. Think of lives that could be changed for the better.” One letter to the editor observes, “Your coverage of the hope and turmoil in southern Africa was alternately heart-warming and gut-wrenching.”
That’s what we want to show about life. The more I learn, the more committed I am to biblical journalism and compassionate conservatism. I tell Journalism and Religion students that I’m a Christian committed to accurate reporting and they won’t be graded down if they challenge what I say. I try to bring that emphasis to World as well, but accurate reporting leads to battles.
During my first two decades at World, our biggest battles concern our exposure of behind-the-scenes changes or manipulations. One conflict is with Zondervan Publishing House and the International Bible Society over a series of stories about changes they plan to make to the New International
Version, which at that time dominates the evangelical Bible market. World shows they are deciding for ideological reasons to do some retranslation in a new NIV edition—and are doing it secretly.
The Zondervan and IBS public relations teams go on offense almost immediately. They blast a rebuttal, claiming that World’s reporting is inaccurate. Negative letters pour into our Asheville business office.
It’s exhilarating to know we have a huge story on our hook. It’s also dangerous. We’re taking on two pillars of the evangelical business establishment. If our story has mistakes, our credibility is cooked. It won’t matter that in the five years of my editing we’ve grown to seventy thousand subscribers. We could lose them just as fast.
The early letters are against us. Joel Belz has concerns. He’s a decade older than me and grew up in a Christian home. He’s had a lifetime to grow in spiritual maturity. Plus, he’s a peacemaker by temperament, not naturally feisty like me. This is the first time we’re testing our wall of separation between editorial and business. Joel listens as we lay out our reporting. He then backs us all the way.
Zondervan and IBS complain that World seems to be “unconscious of its duty to protect the good names and reputations” of these two evangelical giants. Our reporting is purportedly unethical because it will make readers think less of them. That complaint shows a complete misunderstanding of the role of journalism. That public relations function is at odds with the journalist’s calling to investigate and tell the truth.
World is able to back up the charges. Some early supporters of Zondervan admit their error. World gains a lot of credibility, and a particularly happy development for me is that, facing the initial negative feedback and financial losses, Joel Belz and the board of directors have stood behind the story.
World also gains influential friends, such as Jim Dobson (Focus on the Family) and Jerry Falwell (Liberty University). That brings new pressures, but World’s board and our editorial team agree that World is not and should not seek to be part of the conservative movement or the evangelical establishment.
I write a policy guide that goes not only to World’s editors and writers but to board members and the business side. The guide says World does not “place ideology above theology. World articles have presented understandings different from those of many Republicans and conservatives on poverty-fighting, immigration, financial secrecy, the death penalty, and other issues.” Our goal is not to make readers feel cozy but to introduce them to different people, places, and ideas.
World’s non-partisanship is nonnegotiable: “We look for leaders with integrity and try to have one standard for all, not a double standard with different reactions to Democrats and Republicans. We do not see politics as ultimate, so we don’t sacrifice evangelical witness to election desires.” World, in keeping with the Bible’s emphasis on the poor, including widows, orphans, prisoners, and sojourners, focuses attention on “uns”—the unborn, the uneducated, the unemployed, the unhoused, the unhealthy, and the undocumented.
World is unusual in the evangelical world in its attempt to be “salt, not sugar. We like to report good news, but we don’t make it sticky-sweet. We also report bad news because Christ’s grace becomes most meaningful when we’re most aware of sin.”
