Is Episcopalian Troubles Driving NewsWeeks Religion Coverage?

I talked about the horrid Newsweek article on gay marriage yesterday at Newsweek's Horrible Article On Gay Marriage (Sola Scriptora without the Scripture)

Get Religion asks a sensible question today at another fine piece. Where the hell was her editor? See What’s the standard?

He starts out really as to what is one of main objections about this propaganda:

Well, Lisa Miller certainly made a splash with her Newsweek cover story advocating for same-sex marriage on religious grounds. It was probably not the splash she intended.

It is no exaggeration to say the piece was an embarrassment. My analysis of the belly flop is here. On a radio show yesterday, the host asked me whether the piece was more offensive to my sensibilities as a journalist or a Christian. I went with “journalist” since the piece wasn’t anywhere legitimate enough, theologically speaking, to be considered seriously. As a journalist, it violated almost every rule in the book. It failed to accurately represent the viewpoint being scrutinized. It was riddled with errors. It was driven by emotion. More than a few journalists — one at a competing weekly news magazine — wrote to me yesterday asking, “Where was her editor?”.....

It appears the Editor is perhaps violating rules of Journalism left and right byu letting his personal feelings get in the way.

He continues

Newsweek editor Jon Meacham is no dummy. He has written extensively on religion, everything from magazine cover stories to a book on civil religion that sits on my bookshelf. He co-edits the Washington Post/Newsweek religion site “On Faith.” He is a liberal Episcopalian and tends to advocate that approach in his journalism and essays.

He then post Meacham horrible piece and defense of this article.

No matter what one thinks about gay rights — for, against or somewhere in between — this conservative resort to biblical authority is the worst kind of fundamentalism. Given the history of the making of the Scriptures and the millennia of critical attention scholars and others have given to the stories and injunctions that come to us in the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament, to argue that something is so because it is in the Bible is more than intellectually bankrupt—it is unserious, and unworthy of the great Judeo-Christian tradition.

Yes, that’s right. The editor of Newsweek thinks that argument from the Bible is “the worst kind of fundamentalism.” Can you believe that? Can that be serious? Proper exegesis is difficult and requires a great deal of understanding of languages, types of writing styles, history and tradition — but determining what the Bible teaches is very serious work. Lutherans such as myself believe that Scripture is the only divine source and the norm for our teachings. That may be shocking to a liberal Episcopalian but to call such exegesis intellectually bankrupt is ignorant. And Biblical exegesis sort of defines the “great Judeo-Christian tradition.” Perhaps Meacham’s focus on civil religion and American history has made him blind to this fact.

We’ve noticed the tendency of the media to use the term “fundamentalist” to describe any conservative Christian. There was a particularly bad example of this in the Los Angeles Times earlier this year when I think the author was using “fundamentalist” to mean “people whose politics I disagree with.”
But if the worst kind of fundamentalist is someone who quotes Scripture in a policy discussion, the word fundamentalist has no meaning. I also question whether, say, Meacham considers religious liberals who use, say, the Sermon on the Mount to argue for domestic policy to be the worst kind of fundamentalists. Based on past coverage, I’m going to say no. In fact, this piece — and Miller’s — basically skirt the fact that the vast, vast majority of religious groups share a support of heterosexual marriage.

He goes on and has other good observations.

So is the fact that the Episcopalian Church USA coming apart at the seams over this issue at play? Should the editor of a major U.S. News magazine have asked himself if he was a tad too close to this issue and as a service to his readers put in an editor to oversee this work?

Good questions to ask.