Covering Religion May Be Harmful to Your Faith
Burnout on the God beat - second top religion writer calls it quits - FaithWorld
November 15th, 2007, filed by Tom Heneghan
Covering religion may be harmful to your faith. Two leading religion journalists — one in Britain, one in the United States — have quit the beat in recent months, saying they had acquired such a close look at such scandalous behaviour by Christians that they lost their faith and had to leave.
Bates article in New Humanist: Stephen Bates, who recently stepped down as religious affairs writer for the London Guardian, has just published an account of his seven years on the beat in an article entitled “Demob Happy” for the New Humanist magazine. Bates followed the crisis in the Anglican Communion for several years and even wrote a book on it, A Church At War: Anglicans and Homosexuality.
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“Writing this story has been too corrosive of what faith I had left: indeed watching the way the gay row has played out in the Anglican Communion has cost me my belief in the essential benignity of too many Christians. For the good of my soul, I need to do something else.” Bates, who says he still regards himself as a Catholic, said he was turned off by the intolerance he saw towards gays and the self-righteousness of Christians who “pick and choose the sins that are acceptable and condemn those – always committed by other, lesser people – that are not.”
One Response to “Covering Religion May Be Harmful to Your Faith”
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Heidi on
November 16, 2007 1:01 am
What, you mean you’re supposed to notice the thing that’s supposedly anti-gay is in the Bible right near the part where you can’t eat meat with cheese because it’s unclean?
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