A REALLY ODD THING once happened to my journalism. And then, equally oddly or more so, it happened again.
I never really had anything like a real specialty as a reporter or as a TV producer – “Generalist!” was my proud boast. But suddenly back in the early 1980s I was unaccountably put in charge of network programs (for Britain’s commercial television service, ITV) that concentrated entirely on religion and ethics.
I say unaccountably because I had no serious background in religion – and, I thought, very little interest in it either.
Ethics were a different matter – they were viscerally fascinating to me (as evidenced nowadays, maybe, by how journalistic ethics have featured in THE MEDIA BEAT throughout its ten-year existence). Matters of faith and denomination, though, left me at that time pretty unmoved. But nevertheless … religion, even organized religion – which I had airily dismissed as irrelevant, in the often typical fashion of my 1960’s generation – unexpectedly grabbed my attention with great power and drama.
It turned out to be a hot time, journalistically. My teams and I got to cover a new Pope who was charismatic, Polish, and shot in the stomach – by a Turkish would-be assassin … a fundamentalist Ayatollah who took over Iran, with all that this came to mean for the rest of the world, especially for the country he called “The Great Satan” … and even in quiet old Britain, we covered the nation’s established church undergoing fresh paroxysms about the role of women and about homosexuality. And there was more, much more … from crazy exorcists to towering human embodiments of compassion and moral leadership.
Thus I came to enjoy one of the most rewarding periods of my working life – surrounded by some of the best journalists I have ever been with.
Life moved on of course, with other realms of interest opening up – not least my work in the developing world, Africa especially. And later (after I moved to the US) came a decade or more spent within the curious universe of the United Nations, both in its New York HQ and its many missions around the globe.
And then, that odd repetition.
I now find myself as a correspondent and producer with American television’s major forum for … guess what? … religion and ethics. Aired by the PBS network every week, it goes by the matter-of-fact (you might say plodding, but I would say definitely accurate) title of Religion and Ethics Newsweekly.
Most of my efforts on this show seem to concentrate on ethics more than formal religion … but even so, the world of churches, mosques and temples does often force its way onto my sometimes world-weary journalistic agenda. And sometimes – as occurs this week – it can even be an occasion for sheer delight.
In this report, broadcast over the weekend (times vary in different areas), we tell a remarkable tale about a historic, in fact 200-year old, wooden Anglican church in Nova Scotia that recently outlived its usefulness and was sold off … to, of all people, a Southern Baptist congregation in Louisiana that needed a new church building.
Even more remarkably, the entire church was dismantled – by an ace team of heritage woodworkers – and then piled onto an enormous Mack tractor-trailer, and driven the 2,000-plus miles to reach the shores of Lake Pontchartrain. There it is now being reassembled by volunteer Baptist labor, under that same timber-expert guidance from Nova Scotia.
The story says much about two very different societal developments – declining religiosity in Canada intersecting with the entirely US phenomenon of surging church membership among southern evangelicals.
But it’s also, quite simply, that journalistic gem – a striking instance of unexpected human endeavor, in this case yoked together with touching respect for history. And it has the extra virtue (for a TV guy) of deeply engaging and contrasting locations. That’s not to mention a telling comparison between styles of music – the somber Anglican hymnal versus rousing jazz-influenced rhythms from the Baptists.
Oh, and in addition – but this is not going to count as any kind of journalistic specialization – my personal appetite for carpentry was greatly fed by learning a huge amount that I would never have known about early nineteenth century mortise-and-tenon joints.
