Belief in the News
Religion in The New York Times
I have been eagerly following the launch and development of the New York Times “Believing” Project pioneered by associate editor Lauren Jackson. Jackson, no longer a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, is the same reporter who has recently covered Mormon YA fantasy writers and sister missionaries wearing pants. As her Times Insider headline tantalizingly teases: “She Almost Went on a Mormon Mission. She Became a Journalist Instead.” The result? A surprisingly faith-friendly writer who is deeply familiar with Latter-day Saint culture now works as a primary gatekeeper at the most-visited news site in the United States.
Jackson is not just high profile; she’s open, honest, concise, thoughtful, and sensitive. She combines insatiable curiosity with rigorous research—exactly what one might expect from a Latter-day Saint upbringing with its commitment to education as a spiritual imperative. Best of all, she’s trained her gaze on contemporary religion and spirituality. Her year-long research project is now a subscription column committed to publishing a diversity of voices and expressions of faith. It’s astoundingly refreshing, insightful, and bold.
Jackson’s “Believing” Project is not just another category of content to consume; it’s an experiment that interests me for many reasons. As I see it, Lauren Jackson, McKay Coppins, and others represent a sort of watershed in Latter-day Saint news coverage—the latest edition in a long saga of Latter-day Saints in the public eye. Academics have been monitoring Mormon media coverage for a long time, especially since the “Mormon Moment,” and we certainly appear to be in a new one. The key issues have always been about being in the world but not of it, balancing institutional loyalty with outgroup relations, and translating across different discourse communities. These tensions exemplify what makes something newsworthy. News, after all, is information out of place. News is never news for those who are in the know. (Imagine this Church News headline: “Many People Believe in God, New Study Finds.”) News is illuminating for cultural criticism and historians of journalism precisely because it reveals what an audience deems newsworthy. News reflects what people find surprising.
That’s why the “breaking news” statistic for the “Believing” project launch might fall a little flat for religious readers. The 2024 Pew Religious Landscape Survey reported that 92% of U.S. adults believe in at least one of the following: a soul, God, spiritual reality, or an afterlife. This might be astonishing for New York Times readership, infamously urban, educated, and liberal, but probably shouldn’t be that surprising for anyone who actually belongs to that 92%. News only reveals what some people don’t already know, and it perhaps says more about the reporting community than the reported. Case in point: as soon as you have someone with a significant religious background in the New York Times offices, suddenly there’s a beat for religion.
Even this might be oversimplifying though. God, as Jackson demonstrates in an interview with Krista Tippett, is particularly hard to talk about. People hold core beliefs close to their chests. Faith is personal. Disclosure is risky and has social ramifications. Even two or more open parties who think they’re connecting over divinity may be misfiring in meaning. Jackson, then, isn’t just another Mormon exile leveraging her difference to climb ladders in the great and spacious building. (Though there’s a strong template of this among post-Mormon writers.) She’s really thinking hard about these issues and trying to create space for conversation around a particularly polarizing and vulnerable topic. Her ethics statement is a paragon of what bilingual, study-and-faith, disciple-scholars should do: “I work to understand sharply divergent perspectives and represent them with nuance, humility and empathy.”
Enter the objectivity problem. How does one represent both sides of fraught issues with balance and the notoriously impossible standard of impartiality? How ironic that a so-called post-truth world has become so obsessed with the facts. I’m of the opinion that faith may help us more than facts these days—not because facts aren’t important, but because facts don’t get us out of the capitalized Truth problem any faster than postmodernism does. There’s nothing new under the sun, and religion is the oldest of all news. As Charles Taylor put it in A Secular Age, the major shift in modern consciousness was for religion to become only one option among many epistemological alternatives rather than the default setting for identity, ethics, and collective action. Ninety-two percent belief shouldn’t be news for anyone familiar with the Global South or the long durée of history. The statistic reflects back on who it is newsworthy for: a small slice of an even smaller slice of a particularly unique demographic in a certain place and time.
In short, a critique that one might leverage against the “Believing” Project is that it feels a bit like the secular rediscovering the sacred. Major news outlets from Interfaith America Magazine to Christianity Today to Religion News Service have been covering these sorts of topics for decades, as have other niche faith venues like Image, Plough Quarterly, Commonweal, and Tricycle Magazine. Wayfare, of course, fits in this camp, and should continue to reflect on what its publication priorities and audience say about itself and the contemporary Mormon moment.
Still, I’m not complaining. I’m thrilled to be reading top-notch journalism about belief on a weekly basis. For me, it remains significant for faith to take on a new center-stage role with a national spotlight. It’s another indication of what has been called a postsecular literature and arts movement of which Wayfare is a part. I admire Jackson’s work as affirming, faith-positive, and pluralist. I love that it cuts across a breadth of traditions and appreciate her willingness to do her homework. Jackson is really taking the time to listen to thousands of voices speaking up about faith and spirituality today. One of my favorite pieces so far is “The Moments That Shape Our Belief,” which includes touching blurbs by Orlando Bloom, Mitt Romney, Kristin Chenoweth, and Hannah Neeleman. I hope Jackson’s “Believing” Project becomes one of those brilliantly written books of distilled research and synthesized nonfiction. If it does, I’ll rush to read it.
As the column unfolds, I hope to see continued attention to mystery, epistemic humility, the unknowable, and faith as the foundation for functional language—all reasons why I continue to believe. Staying out of a post-Enlightenment credo-type belief seems important here, which is being done nicely so far by including a diversity of religious and mystical traditions. I’d also like to see the column take miracles and paranormal experiences seriously, as does Ross Douthat’s recent book Believe. Everyone draws the line somewhere between true and not true. I’m even wishing for some rumination on what it looks like to take what many call “fundamentalism” seriously as a valid (and often wholesome) way of life in a pluralist, postsecular society.
What is the obligation of the educated toward the religious? Certainly not to fault them for living a life of simplicity. One can, as Thomas McConkie keeps teaching us, live out a rich life from many different developmental stages, epistemological perspectives, or ethical and metaphysical worldviews. It’s unfair for me to fault my relativist graduate student peers for not taking truth seriously and then turn around and fault my local ward for not taking history or contingency seriously. In many respects, belonging is a choice; one opts into a community by accepting its norms and practices. There’s always elbow room, to be sure. I espouse a let-a-thousand-flowers-bloom vision of community except for intentional efforts to undermine or unfairly change a group’s core essence. To whom more is given more is required. The burden of the intellectual is to be sympathetic to viewpoints that one can understand even while knowing that the Other cannot inhabit your own perspective in the same way. I put myself in your shoes even if you can’t put yourself in mine. The “Believing” Project models this beautifully.
Last but not least, Jackson’s editorial persona is endearing. When justifying why she can’t go back to the faith of her childhood she writes, “I enjoy the small vices (tea, wine, buying flowers on the sabbath).” There’s obviously a world of intrigue behind such a carefully cultivated voice, but I’m willing to be charmed by my columnist. Jackson models the kind of risky self-revelation that talking about God always entails: “I can no longer access the propulsive, uncritical belief I once felt. . . . I recognize, though, that my spiritual longing persists.” This is the both/and gospel of the twenty-first century—or perhaps just what happens to certain types of inquisitive people in early adulthood.
For me, the best writing about religion will have to be willing to really go there—to say this: what if something is true? What if, in all our confidence about what is right and wrong, we are the ones who are wrong? Heaven forbid that the prophets be found right, but that’s what faith asks of us. “I still want it all to be true,” writes Jackson, “miracles, souls, some sort of cosmic alchemy that makes sense of the chaos.” I’m tempted to offer Alma’s reply; let this desire work in you. Jackson’s got a good story, but couldn’t the headline have been even more shocking? “She Almost Became a Journalist. She Went on a Mormon Mission Instead.” Sometimes it’s harder and more interesting to stay.
Perhaps the rhetorical and social constraints of being a New York Times editor don’t allow that, though, even if McKay Coppins seems to be pulling it off at The Atlantic. Here’s another difference in method between the two: one went biography (the very dirt of private fact, as William James called it) and the other is opting for an extra layer of abstraction and remove. This allows for a wider view and more generalization, but also seems to over-emphasize the social needs that religion fulfills—belonging, behavioral guides, meaning-making—rather than the sheer existential possibility of it all. Here’s a question not at all unrelated from this essay’s meditations on the news: Would The Secret Lives of [TikTok Influencer] Wives even sell without the “Mormon” in it? Assimilators who can carry and play their card labeled “The Other” have a gambling advantage.
Let me conclude, then, by making a personal confession myself. Even though I’m in zero position to pass judgment on the next to nothing I know about Jackson’s life, I can still admit in the first person that part of me wishes I knew she was a diligent and committed member of the Manhattan Fifth Ward. I don’t wish this because I think everyone should live their religion or their Mormonism in the same way. I genuinely wonder if Jackson could have accomplished what she has if she had gone on a mission. God works in mysterious ways. I think that I feel this way, though, because none of this is actually about Lauren Jackson specifically—it’s about what’s at stake when someone writes about a faith community that they are no longer completely a part of.
In short, the Believing Project can be a metaphor for what’s lost in translation between sacred and secular. I am devastated when Latter-day Saints feel forced to suppress or trade their glorious tradition in order to try out for the world’s big league. I understand and have felt this impulse firsthand. In fact, that’s precisely why I wish people like Jackson didn’t feel like they had to leave, so there could be more word-heads like me in the Church. What I long for is a template of radical heterodoxy with near-perfect orthopraxis—a voice that glorifies and improves the tradition by remaining squarely in it.
Jackson’s story touched a nerve for me; like news reflects its audience, my reading reflects my own anxieties. I fear a future where there are only two options: a child-like faith that stays in the Church and an adult-like faith that leaves it. Moreover, I fear a version of American culture with a similar binary: secular conformity versus religious isolationism. Both religion and secular American culture will have to expand if we are to achieve true pluralism. Longing for faith is a perfectly acceptable reason to continue to choose membership over disfellowship, just as religious affiliation shouldn’t hamper opportunities in the wider public sphere. The choice between missionary and reporter turns out to be a false one from the outset. Jackson’s column clearly demonstrates a deep sense of personal mission, and a desire to help secular readers understand sacred things. What’s more evangelical than that? Still, Wayfare will never have as many subscribers as the New York Times, so we’ll have to hope that Lauren Jackson also writes a memoir one day. Until then, in a news cycle that is so insane and unwieldy these days, I confess that I’m on the whole pleased. Jackson has helped me start to find my belief in the news again.
Isaac James Richards received a B.A. in Communications and an M.A. in English from Brigham Young University, where he taught courses in the English Department, the School of Communications, and the Honors Program. He is an award-winning author of several poems, essays, and peer-reviewed publications in venues such as LIT, Oxford Magazine, and The Journal of American Culture. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Communication Arts and Sciences at Penn State.
Art by Robert Delaunay.