A reporter for the University of Tennessee student newspaper interviewed me for a special issue on religion. In this resulting article I am a key source alongside some local ministers—mashed together in an effort to capture religious trends in Tennessee under a tight word limit.
The reporter took this half-decent picture of me, holding my book on Religion, Culture, and Politics in the Twentieth Century United States.
But the article itself was bumped from the print issue—exiled to an online-only version—by apparently more resonant topics including neo-pagan and Muslim issues on campus, plus an article about the difficulty of defining religion. Did our effort seem too long? Too complex or convoluted? Admittedly it didn’t have one clear through-line of argument—although neither did the “defining religion” piece.
Should our article have been cut and dried, if religion is hard to define in the first place and our mandate was sketching complex trends related to it?
I gained the impression that the reporter was commissioned to generalize about “normal” Tennessee religion (presumed overwhelmingly white and conservative), “normally” organized by denomination. My push-back was stressing that to classify religions along denominational lines creates distortions from the outset, and that most denominations are deeply divided internally with significant minorities (sometimes majorities!) of non-conservatives.
I also stressed that if we wish to see straight we must use race (not denominations or an implicit white norm) as a major category—both to sort out conflicts internal to denominations and simply to understand that denominations are often structured racially at their roots, for example in the case of white vs. black Baptists.
The reporter got a solid amount of this right—one wonders whether this contributed to her article being exiled—although some became scrambled or lost in the mash-up.
The experience reminds me of Noam Chomsky’s argument, made memorably in the film Manufacturing Consent—that if we solely wish to reproduce and reinforce aspects of common wisdom, it is easy do that using sound bites.
However, if we hope to unsettle and rethink common wisdom, attempting this with sound bites is to set ourselves up to fail—perhaps to come off crazy, or stupid, or at best pedantic and off the point.
Still I found it interesting to get my talking points in order for this project. It had been hard for me to compress my above-mentioned book to 230 pages, and it is harder still to cover all the issues in the book even over the course of a full semester. More pointedly, much of what I attempt in my book and class is to push back against oversimplified common wisdom circulating in our culture. Here a slide that jokes about one aspect of this pushback.
How could I boil all this down to a couple hundred words? I show this slide in a classroom where I have quite a bit of time and control over the flow of information. Even so, I cannot always tell if I succeed. Obviously I risked failure in a short newspaper article where it is only one theme among others.
In any case, I felt pretty good about my notes for the reporter. I didn’t crunch them all the way down to a sound bite, but at least I stayed under 1000 words. That's good by my standards.
I’ll save the 1000 for the next post. Stay tuned.
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