Religion is Always in the Room

“Religion is always in the room” is the unofficial motto of the Religion News Association (RNA), comprised of journalists working the religion beat.

The past, present, and future were on the agenda as 150 journalists attended RNA’s recent annual conference, held in a downtown Decatur hotel.

RNA’s membership ranges from some of the nation’s largest news organizations to individual freelancers. RNA members, who themselves range from the religiously observant to the secular, share a desire to shine a light on the role religion plays in society.

[Full disclosure: your columnist has been a member of RNA for a dozen years and serves on the committee that plans the subjects to be addressed and recruits panelists.]

Despite the impact of religion on most every realm of American life, many news organizations — including in Atlanta — have sacrificed reporting positions on the altar of reducing expenses.

Drawing on the depth of expertise in Atlanta, local voices — including from the Jewish community — were prominent on such panels as “Religion and Midterm Politics in Battleground Georgia,” “Religion, Protest, and the Press: Covering Racial Justice Across Generations,” “Faith on the Frontlines of Health Policy,” and “Ethics & AI.”

[Further disclosure: With a nod to the upcoming men’s World Cup, your columnist scratched a favorite itch by organizing and moderating a panel on “The Religion of Futbol/Soccer.”]

The religious history of the civil rights movement was a natural topic for a meeting in Atlanta.

The Rev. Dr. Robert Franklin, a highly respected theologian, educator, and author, told the assembled, “It’s a privilege to live among the tall trees of the civil rights movement, those redwoods who lived on for many decades.”

Rabbi Peter Berg, senior rabbi of The Temple, a congregation whose ties to the movement date to the civil rights advocacy of Rabbi Jacob Rothschild and his friendship with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., joined Franklin and other prominent African American clergy to discuss the past and present.

Berg related the story of how Atlanta honored King after he received the Nobel Peace Prize in December 1964.

Religious leaders, including Rothschild, planned a dinner honoring King, but ticket sales lagged, as the white business community appeared less than enthusiastic about attending a dinner feting the African American leader.

Enter a Coca-Cola company executive, who informed the reluctant that the soft drink giant did not want to be headquartered in a city where such an event could not be held — telling them, in effect, that you need Coca-Cola in Atlanta more than we need to be here.

The business community fell in line and the Jan. 27, 1965, dinner at the Dinkler Plaza Hotel honoring King was the first major occasion in the city where blacks and whites sat together.

There has been no shortage of reporting on tensions in the relationship between Jews and Blacks since the high-water mark of the mid-1960s, but when panelists were asked about present-day stories meriting attention, Berg recommended “the resurgence of the Black-Jewish alliance across the country.”

Citing programs in Atlanta, Berg told the journalists, “Ask the questions about what are the civil rights issues of our day that we can be working on together.”

One such issue is immigration, including concerns about federal agents entering houses of worship in pursuit of people suspected of being in the country illegally.

Berg acknowledged “how much time and energy those of us in pulpit positions spend dealing with this issue in a practical sense . . . an inordinate amount of time.”

Another session featured Greg Bluestein, political reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, offering insights on Peach State politics, less than a month before the May 19 primary.

Bluestein reviewed the state’s leanings over time. Once controlled by Democrats, in the early 2000s Georgia became a Republican stronghold. While some claim that the state’s political palette has shifted from red to purple, Bluestein would not go that far, suggesting rather a less-pronounced tilt toward periwinkle.

He noted the frequency of issues related to Israel making news in Georgia politics, from the legislature inserting a definition of antisemitism in the state legal code to controversial votes by the state’s U.S. senators, one Jewish and the other an African American minister, on weapons sales to Israel.

Casting a wary eye on the future, Emory University professor Jonathan Crane brought his expertise as a rabbi and ethicist to a discussion on artificial intelligence and questions that should be asked as this revolutionary technology moves forward.

“Think carefully, slowly about where to rely on AI tools in scholarship and the deployment of health care,” Crane said, adding that “just because we can use these tools in a particular way” does not mean that they should be employed without studying the “downstream impacts” of their use.

Religious institutions, including seminaries, “need to up their game” in teaching about these technologies, Crane said. “The market is going to develop the tools faster than the religious community can evaluate” the impact of their use.

The exceptional work honored at the conference’s closing dinner demonstrated yet again that religion is always in the room, in the United States and around the world, and that telling these stories with context, nuance, and depth is a critical mission for journalists.