{"id":323,"date":"2004-12-05T18:54:00","date_gmt":"2004-12-05T18:54:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=323"},"modified":"2004-12-05T18:54:00","modified_gmt":"2004-12-05T18:54:00","slug":"323","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=323","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Journalists and new religions<\/strong><\/p>\n

Being a former newspaper reporter and someone whose religion by academic standards is “new,” The Revealer’s review<\/a> of Sean McCloud’s Making the American Religious Fringe: Exotics, Subversives, and Journalists, 1955-1993<\/em>(University of North Carolina Press, 2004)went right through me.
\n<\/p>\n

McCloud contends that since the 1950s, mainstream magazines like Time, Newsweek<\/span>, and U.S. News and World Report<\/span> have tarred and feathered any group that displayed high levels of zeal, dogma or emotion. Whatever cultural stereotypes would make these groups look most peripheral and abnormal were thrown at them. Sometimes this meant lightly mocking them, at other times representing them as simply offering brain candy for poor people, and very often giving the impression that all \u201ccults\u201d were lead by charismatic serial killers and rapists who had turned their followers into zombies.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’ve been on both sides of this one: I have agonized over poor reportage on contemporary Paganism, yet in my early-1980s pieces on such groups as The Way International<\/a> and the Church Universal and Triumphant<\/a> (a\/k\/a Summit Lighthouse), was I guilty of what McCloud calls “push[ing] these groups to the periphery as a way of reinforcing their own position in the center”? But which “center” was that? Certainly not a mainstream Protestant center. A secularist center disguising my Pagan identity? <\/p>\n

Reviewer Gal Berckerman does not totally buy into McCloud’s use of certain social theorists; I will have to read this book to see if I do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Journalists and new religions Being a former newspaper reporter and someone whose religion by academic standards is “new,” The Revealer’s review of Sean McCloud’s Making the American Religious Fringe: Exotics, Subversives, and Journalists, 1955-1993(University of North Carolina Press, 2004)went right through me. McCloud contends that since the 1950s, mainstream magazines like Time, Newsweek, and U.S. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-323","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s6xQTg-323","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1231,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1231","url_meta":{"origin":323,"position":0},"title":"It’s That Time of Year!","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"October 21, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Are you ready for the cameras and notepads? It's the time of year when journalists notice the Pagans! ReligionLink is on the job with story ideas. At least they admit that they are recycling their resource list from 2004. (No, that's not my telephone number anymore, sorry.)\"Oh, my\" indeed.","rel":"","context":"In \"American religion\"","block_context":{"text":"American religion","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=american-religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":287,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=287","url_meta":{"origin":323,"position":1},"title":"It's that time of year\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"October 21, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"It's that time of year again The Religion Newswriters Association primes journalists everywhere with story ideas on Wicca. Meanwhile, a school district in Washington state bans Halloween as \"offensive to witches.\" (Thanks to Joanne Jacobs.) Let's see, if \"Everyone's Irish on St. Patrick's Day,\" as the common saying has it,\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":297,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=297","url_meta":{"origin":323,"position":2},"title":"More on the 'Episcopagans' The\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"October 30, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"More on the 'Episcopagans' The Druid-Episcopal Church controversy has now moved from the blogosphere to the serious religion journalists at GetReligion, who summarize the whole scandal here. I do see some bloggers gleefully tossing out the term \"Episcopagan\" as though they cleverly just invented it. Within the Pagan community, the\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":104,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=104","url_meta":{"origin":323,"position":3},"title":"The Rosvellov Incident","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"January 27, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"Now the story can be told . . . in Pravda, apparently taking its journalistic lead from the supermarket tabloids, which, as we all know, are staffed Florida-loving expatriate British journalists fired from their UK jobs for excessive-even-by-Fleet-Street-standards drunkeness: In the beginning of August 1987 five soldiers of Leningrad Military\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Russia\"","block_context":{"text":"Russia","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=russia"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10594,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=10594","url_meta":{"origin":323,"position":4},"title":"“Out of the Broom Closet” \u2014 American Wicca in the late 1980s","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"June 7, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"? Valdosta State University in Georgia has digitized and posted two videos by Wiccan journalists Malcolm Brenner and Lezlie Kinyon. (That is Brenner's voice-over narration.) This one,\u00a0Out of the Broom Closet, was released in 1991 from video shot in the preceding years. This documentary begins with a protest of Z.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"American religion\"","block_context":{"text":"American religion","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=american-religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":228,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=228","url_meta":{"origin":323,"position":5},"title":"Is Starhawk (still) Jewish? Terry\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"July 25, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"Is Starhawk (still) Jewish? Terry Mattingly of the religion-and-journalism blog GetReligion has posted recently on the difficulties of determining Jewish identity, both for Jews and for journalists. His post is based on the National Jewish Population Survey of 2000-2001; the link is to a longer article that he wrote. What\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/323","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=323"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/323\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=323"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=323"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=323"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}