The passing of actor-director Robert Redford this week touched me in an unexpected way. Redford starred in many memorable films, but the one I’ve thought of most this week is “All the President’s Men.” The film came out in 1976 when I was in high school, but I saw it again a few years later as I was finishing my degree in journalism.
The film tells how Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, reporters at The Washington Post, uncovered details of a burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington, D.C. carried out by Republican party operatives. That led to revelations of an attempted coverup and ultimately the end of Richard Nixon’s presidency.
I know some of my fellow students at the time saw the film as a call to journalistic activism; they were going to change the world and challenge power structures as Woodward and Bernstein had done. I was more interested in the film’s depiction of the processes and work that went into developing a complicated news story, because that’s what we were learning at the time: interview, research, follow leads – verify, verify, verify – and let the facts lead you to the truth, regardless of the outcome.
I don’t believe that’s so true of journalism today – not national journalism with a strong political connection. I believe in too many cases it’s agenda-driven; it’s about developing a thesis and gathering information that supports that thesis. How else is it that we have two sides of the journalism world telling stories that are polar opposites? I know some will disagree with that assessment, but that’s my opinion. And it’s important to remember that opinions are not facts. Too often, what we read, hear or watch is opinion posing as fact.
My first experience as a journalist was working as a reporter, writer and editor at the Lariat, our student newspaper at Baylor. I left school with a bound set of all the newspapers from my senior year, and recently LeAnn has been perusing them, with me sometimes looking over her shoulder. It’s been interesting to read stories about the events and culture of the day but also some editorials I wrote.
One of those editorials, headlined “Christians Still Bickering,” begins with this: “Christians haven’t changed a whole lot in the past 2,000 years. Just as the 12 disciples argued among themselves about the nature of God and the manifestation of the Kingdom of God on earth, Christians today are constantly bickering over what kind of God we have and how his word should be spread on earth.”
From there, I reported on a confrontation I witnessed between three traveling evangelists and some students. An older man accompanied by two young women walked to the center of campus and began preaching to students passing by. He said they were headed to hell and eternal damnation unless they gave up their evil lifestyles including lying, cheating, stealing, drunkenness and sexual promiscuity. As I wrote then, “his shouting and abusive tones cut to the quick and so he was pelted from all sides by laughter, jokes and rebuttals that were equally abusive.” A few of the students answered back that “God is a kind and loving God . . . not a God of fire and punishment who rules his kingdom with threats of better shape up or else.”
I’ve learned in the ensuing years our theology and the Christian witness it prompts – much like our political and journalistic leanings – can be polarizing and agenda-driven. Like journalists misrepresenting facts, Christians can misrepresent scriptures to forward a theology they believe is correct. What’s more, people take sides in the ugliest ways that are neither Christian nor representative of the Christ and God they are trying to advance.
My advice today for anyone studying theology or spiritual matters is the same I would give consumers of news: read as much as you can, seek the truth without filters, and follow it wherever it goes. The daily news can be unsettling, but so can the “good news” of Jesus Christ. It challenges us and provokes us to consider things that aren’t easy or comfortable. But if we’ve done the hard work to seek the real truth and not just a truth that is comfortable, God will help us live with that truth and even be freed by it.