It’s always been a struggle to persuade news executives that Americans are more interested in religion than, say, sports. Associated Press religion writer George Cornell addressed the issue a few months before he died in 1994. He noted that religious giving in 1992 totaled $56.7 billion—some 14 times the gate receipts for America’s three biggest sports. Cornell also said that attendance at religious events, according to Gallup polls, was 5.6 billion in 1993. That was 55 times the 103 million total attendance reported by the professional baseball, football and basketball leagues. The gap has narrowed in the past 25 years, but religious giving still maintains a multibillion-dollar lead.
Such involvement—no doubt much of it in religiously active flyover country—was not reflected in the average newsroom, even in the relatively cash-flush 1990s. The typical regional paper employed small armies of sports reporters while maybe employing a religion reporter. And Cornell’s pessimistic piece came at only the beginning of a decadeslong decline in daily newspaper circulation. Never-ending layoffs, firings and closings left religion among the most decimated of the specialty beats. Whole regions of the western U.S. and Canada have no staff reporter covering religion. Imagine if no one covered sports in Oregon, Wyoming and Arizona….
It’s a shame so few outlets seem to take religion seriously anymore. Done right, the beat can be quite profitable. Anyone who wants to understand the forces behind much of today’s news needs to understand faith.