Can a Christian Be a Journalist?
Catherine McMullen
No. 11 · Spring 2001
McMullen recounts how Ernie Mancini’s alumni-program invitation forced her to articulate what a print-journalism major at Concordia might be, then surveys the annus horribilus of 1998—Chiquita and the Cincinnati Enquirer, CNN/Time’s retracted Tailwind story, Patricia Smith and Mike Barnicle fired at the Boston Globe, Stephen Glass at The New Republic, and Matt Drudge and the White House scandal—before contrasting Concordia’s liberal-arts approach with Pat Robertson’s Regent University, whose “Christian journalism” produces one-sided vampire-cult stories and graduates who conclude journalism is no place for a Christian. Drawing on Richard Baker’s The Christian as a Journalist, Tom Christenson on the “law of niceness,” Ernie Simmons, Harmon Smith and Louis Hodges on Christian ethics, Robert Benne’s Lutheran four orders and his “Christian cobbler makes good shoes, not poor shoes with little crosses on them,” Mel Mencher, Robert Bugeja, Walter Cronkite, Pete Hamill, Jeremy Iggers, David Remnick, the Northwestern Death Row exoneration of Dennis Williams, Verneal Jimerson, and William Rainge, and Pulitzer citations for Katherine Boo, Eric Newhouse, George Dohrman, and Mark Schoofs, she argues that journalism is a Lutheran vocation and that Christian cobblers—and Christian journalists—make good shoes.
