Meet the press (what’s left of it)

“It’s 3 a.m., and your children are safe and asleep. But there’s a phone in the White House, and it’s ringing… Who do you want answering the phone?”

Thus began a Hillary Clinton ad during the primary season for the 2008 presidential campaign. (The ad’s stock footage, embarrassingly enough, included a young girl who’d grown up to be a Barack Obama supporter. … Mistakes were made.)

For those readers who are or aim to be in leadership of a community built around religious or humanist values, the phone will ring for thee one morning. Only it’s not likely to be the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; it’s going to be a reporter from a local newspaper if you still have one of those, or a web site, radio station, or TV news desk.

What you say next is going to have consequences for you, for the community of choice you lead, and possibly for people in the broader community in which you reside. Your county government has voted to declare secession from the United States to build an independent state based on the Pastafarian religion, and it’s up to you to say how your Lutheran church, your Reform synagogue, your mosque or sangha will fit into this new world order encompassing 37 square miles.

(If of course you’re the president of the local freethought society, you’ve already issued your press release welcoming your new Flying Spaghetti Monster overlord, because you were there in full pirate regalia when the coup was planned. Go back to sleep. You’ll need your rest before the FBI gets here.)

OK, odds are your interactions with the news media are going to be slightly more mundane. But as a recovering journalist, I was very interested in the recent spring convocation at Andover Newton Theological School. The keynote speaker was Rev. J. Brent Walker, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, who focused largely on the dangerous intersection of government and religion; two subsequent panels discussed interactions between religion and the news media, one from the pastor’s perspective and the other from the news gatherer’s side of the camera.

The message was pointed at a largely Christian and Unitarian Universalist audience, but the principles apply to leaders of a variety of religious and nonreligious intentional communities:

Cultivate relationships with the news media before a crisis erupts. That reporter whose slow news day led her to attend your congregant’s speech about her HIV prevention clinic in Africa will think of you when the Arab Spring spirit spreads to that country, but you might also come to mind when your state’s lawmakers slash programs for the poor. But if the reporter only has your church office number and can’t reach you at home or on your cell phone, he’ll call the leader of the other group down the road who disagrees with you fully on this issue and never returned your lawnmower.

Know what you want to say and stick to it. The Rev. Barry Lynn (UCC minister, president of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, radio host and probable workaholic) has said on his program Culture Shocks that on the rare occasion he’s invited onto Fox News, he walks in knowing what point he wants to make, and he repeats it every time the hosts let him speak, even if the interviewer goes on a tangent. Your interaction with the press may not be fraught with tension is being a top liberal on a conservative news channel, but you should know that the media has as its agenda not telling the truth but selling advertising, and controversy is key to making that happen. Don’t get played.

Don’t be afraid to say “I don’t know,” but don’t end things there. Even if the reporter says she has to have your quote right now about this incredibly complex and nuanced issue you’ve never thought about, chances are that you can arrange to call back in an hour after doing some serious Internet searching, or the next day at the latest. There’s no shame in admitting you don’t know the answer, especially if you can point the reporter toward someone who will give much better quotes than you could muster: If the supreme ruler of Absurdistan has declared he will destroy America with a horde of flying monkey-hippo hybrid creatures, you might want to direct the reporter toward a member of your community who’s a retired biologist and could discuss the aerodynamics of such a creature. The worst thing you can do is not comment or point the reporter toward a good source of information, because the words “declined comment” (or, if the news outlet doesn’t even pretend to be objective, “refused to comment”) carry with them an unstated message of guilt.

Our convocation theme was “Politics, Pulpit, and the Press,” and it could not have been timelier. As a recovering journalist, this election season has seen God mentioned more often and with less insight than any I’ve watched since I started paying attention to politics in the 1980s. Sure, there were the rumors that a Southern Baptist preacher in my college town used his pulpit to inform parishioners that a toasty seat in perdition awaited anyone who voted for Bill Clinton back in 1992, and the Internet Infidels types snickered when the Texas governor declared Jesus Christ to be his favorite philosopher, but today we have the first Mormon major-party candidate running against an incumbent whose religious identity has been the subject of lies for years now.

We leave in interesting times, and you who are or aspire to be religious leaders will, eventually, get a phone call for comment. Will you be prepared?

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Thanks to Josh Stanton for the invitation to join the State of Formation team. I could not be more honored to be in such company. And, need I say it, views expressed here do not necessarily represent the views of Andover Newton.

This image by Orin Zebest on Flickr Commons.