In Today's Conversation with Leith Anderson, Adelle Banks takes us inside the world of religion reporting. 

Faith and spirituality are a powerful motivation or undercurrent in many stories of our day. Good religion reporting helps us understand these trends and motivations.

In this podcast, you’ll hear a veteran and well-respected religion reporter share:

The challenges of reporting on religion, particularly evangelicalism;

How America's changing religious landscape impacts reporting trends;

Tips for pastors and others who are interviewed by the media; and

Her insight on the coming top religion stories.

Read a Portion of the Transcript

Leith: So Adelle, let’s just start with you. How did you get into this business and this profession of religion reporting?

Adelle: My whole journalism career, which began right when I finished college, has had a touch of religion — if not a focus on religion — throughout it. I covered religion at every job I have had since I left Mount Holyoke College. My first job was at a paper in Binghamton, New York, and I covered the traditional stuff reporters cover when they start their careers such as different cities and towns and school boards. But I also covered some about religion. I remember writing about clergy couples, and I also wrote about church outreach to singles and stories about various major religious holidays. When I moved on to my next job farther up in upstate New York, I covered towns and schools again, and business stories too. But then I expressed an interest in the religion beat, because I had enjoyed covering that topic previously and am generally fascinated with the topic. And I got the religion beat. And I covered things like the local Catholic bishop and Jews and other faith groups as well. Then I went to my home state of Rhode Island, and at that newspaper, The Providence Journal, my colleague who covered religion had been doing it for a long time and did it for a long time after I left there. And so I knew if I wanted to continue on the religion beat, I would have to do it somewhere else. And I ended up becoming the religion reporter on the Orlando Sentinel for six years before I moved to Religion News Service. So it has sort of been my professional lifeblood for a long time.

Leith: There is a part of me that want to say you must know more religious people and know more about religion than just about anybody in America, but let’s just keep talking about you and other reporters on religion. How does your own faith impact how you report on issues of faith or religion?

Adelle: I think in my role as a church member that it has made me more sensitive to the various trends and issues related to clergy and congregations in particular, as well as to the average person in the pew. But I also think that reporting on this topic is not something that has to be done by a person of faith. There have been very good reporters who had no faith at all who have covered this beat very, very well. And I have sometimes found that just being in a place of faith — not necessarily my own — can trigger story ideas and open up my eyes to things that are going on or things that are coming up. For instance, I sing in local chorale and that chorale happened to have rehearsed at a Catholic church at one time and just going by the bulletin board at the church I got story ideas. So I think that you can be a person of faith, but you don’t have to be. But it helps to be in places where you can see where the stories are.

Leith: So you have an angle or maybe an altitude that is kind of different from everybody else. Most of us live in our small worlds of our church, our parish, people who are like us. And then there are the outsiders, and maybe we don’t even know them personally. So from your view — from this high altitude, as well as close to the ground — how is Americ...