People of Faith: Religious Conviction in American Journalism and Higher Education (review)

As a sociologist educated at Wheaton and Princeton and now teaching at Holy Cross, John Schmalzbauer understands the secularizing power of his and related disciplines but also recognizes and honors the efforts of believers who have not bowed the knee to the Baal of unbelief. In People of Faith, he draws on interviews and major writings of forty well-known Catholics and evangelicals in journalism and social sciences, which he characterizes as "the quintessential Enlightenment professions," and examines the strategies they use in their efforts to accommodate the demands of their competing commitments.

Some potential respondents declined to be interviewed, fearing that being identified as practicing Christians might undermine their standing among colleagues and their ability to address secular audiences. Schmalzbauer does not dismiss their apprehension, noting that even such well-established figures as Fred Barnes, Cal Thomas, and E.J. Dionne acknowledge the risk of being upfront about one's faith, particularly in Washington. Similarly, Christian social scientists — John DiIulio, Andrew Greeley, John Green, George Marsden, Nathan Hatch, Mark Noll, and others — observe that, having demonstrated their ability to play by "the rules of the academic game," they might use their academic credentials to confer legitimacy on religious approaches to public policy but would scarcely consider offering a religiously based opinion or social criticism in their professional writing without having first established a strong record of credible empirical research.

In the heart of the book, Schmalzbauer delineates significant differences between the ways Catholics and evangelicals bring their faith to bear in their professional life. He notes that Catholic journalists such as E.J. Dionne, Peter Steinfels, and Kenneth Woodward give greater attention to cultural consensus and communitarian themes, argue against false polarization and inflammatory language in the public square, and call for nuanced perspectives on the complexities of modern society. Catholic journalists, he found, are also likely to echo their church's teachings on social justice, concern for the poor, and peace (as seen in frequent appeals to just-war theory, a largely Catholic product, prior to the invasion of Iraq). In contrast, evangelicals such as Fred Barnes and Cal Thomas give greater attention to the Culture Wars, emphasizing the boundaries between Christ and culture, placing more stress on personal morality and individual responsibility than on the influence of supraindividual structures and collective processes and expending considerable energy in defining the enemy-liberals, the mass media, secular humanists. Other evangelicals, with Jeffery Sheler of U.S. News and World Report as a prime example, find opportunity to draw attention to the scriptures, reporting on contemporary biblical scholarship and including the views of conservative scholars. Among historians, evangelicals such as Marsden, Hatch, and Noll tend to take an ironic, Niebuhrian view, finding good and evil intermixed in society and debunking the notion that America was ever a Christian nation. Catholic social scientists, Schmalzbauer observes, are apt to take a more "comedic" line, celebrating the increasing affinities between American Catholicism and American democratic culture.

Both the Catholic and the evangelical respondents resist efforts by their secular colleagues to reduce religion to economic, social, or political factors, insisting that religion and religious beliefs are themselves integral aspects of human culture and must be taken seriously, whether or not one believes they are ontologically valid. In addition, practicing a bit of intellectual jiu-jitsu, some borrow the claims and rhetoric of postmodernism, postpositivism, and multiculturalism to argue that perspectives of believing Christians deserve a place at the table as much as any other system of beliefs or values.

Despite evidence that Catholic and evangelical scholars can fit religious conviction into their professional roles, Schmalzbauer acknowledges that their faith-related influence has been modest and their scholarship not significantly different from that of their secular colleagues. They have, for the most part, he concedes, "confined explicitly religious discourse to the prefaces, notes, epilogues...