Forum: Need more than faith in politicians

Religion, at election time, is one of those subjects the news media are all but destined to get wrong.

There are good reasons for that. Religion is both deeply personal and profoundly public. It counsels on timeless matters of personal belief, and it also advises people on responses to contemporary problems affecting the whole society, from same-sex marriage to inequality and war and peace.

So from the get-go, when reporters inquire into a candidate's religious beliefs they are poking into an area that may be genuinely revealing of values, predispositions, worldview - but also may be stepping into matters that are none of their business.

Politicians don't help. Often, they're eager to brandish their piety as evidence of their moral suitability for office, but bridle at questions about just how their faith makes its influence felt. The public is supposed to take comfort that an officeholder relies on prayer for guidance, yet shouldn't ask just how the politician benefits from this personal relationship with the divine. Everybody likes to say they heed the Almighty; nobody is eager to claim God actually speaks to them.

Nor does it help that sacred texts contain plenty of tales the faithful honor for the essential wisdom they convey, not their factual accuracy. Still, that means it's easy to make politicians who claim to be pious look foolish by confronting them with beliefs or practices that are technically part of their tradition, but which actually are embraced by only a tiny fraction of co-religionists.

These reflections were prompted by a thoughtful presentation about the news media's sins in the coverage of politicians' religion. The chief focus of the authors, students from Brigham Young University, was on the media's treatment of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who is a Mormon, deemed a likely 2012 presidential contender.

The students found that one-third of the coverage of Romney's 2008 bid for the Republican presidential nomination concerned his Mormonism. Much of that included questions about such long-repudiated practices as polygamy. Mainstream Christians, they said, were unlikely to face similar questioning about, say, the immaculate conception.

This handling, they argued, reflected wider problems with

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