By Kate Hawley

Over the last week, The Revealer undertook an informal comparison of religion coverage in the web editions of The Washington Times and The San Francisco Chronicle (www.sfgate.com). The goal was to get a snapshot of how the Times, the conservative organ of Reverend Sun Myung Moon, compares to a paper published in the land of the Castro and Haight-Ashbury. While the two papers are not exact ideological opposites (after all, both claim to be objective), they have very different spiritual and moral outlooks. With that in mind, I searched for divergences and trends.

The Sermons

The Washington Times went a step beyond covering religion by publishing actual religious lessons, written by men and women of the cloth. In “God Must Be Part of the Family,” published last Monday, the Reverend Robert L. Howard writes, “One of the things that have hurt this country is the way marriages are treated… Just like we depend on our heavenly Father to take care of us, the wife needs to have that same dependence upon her husband.” Is the Times proselytizing, campaigning or simply reflecting the concerns and values of its readers? In any case, Howard’s piece reveals a current in American religious thought that newspapers rarely present in an unfiltered form.

The Times also published a piece by Rabbi Sonya Starr, who writes, “Ultimately, most of us spend most of our life in the wilderness, looking for the clouds and fire that will lead us, praying for enough water and food that will feed us, hoping for safety and security to protect us, and occasionally catching glimpses of the truth, the sacred, the holy — of God.” It’s debatable whether or not the Times has a political agenda in including a Jewish sermon as a possible nod to the pro-Israel Right, as Starr otherwise carries rather liberal credentials, but the passion in his prose is unmistakable.

The Chronicle writes well and fairly extensively about religion, including articles about a Buddhist holiday in Sri Lanka
and a “blue state Christian.” But as far as I saw, religion did not appear in its naked form. Since the election, religion has been on the front burner for many publications. Is it worthwhile for an objective newspaper to include writing by religious people themselves along with the writing of journalists? Or does the mantle of journalistic objectivity create a more civil and thoughtful forum for religious discussion? It might be worth exploring the options through some careful, controlled experiments.