Unsecular Media

Unsecular Media is the first comprehensive description and analysis of how the American news media cover religion. A working journalist as well as a historian of religion, Mark Silk explores the inherent tensions between religion and the news media and traces the ups and downs of religious news coverage from Benjamin Franklin to David Koresh. Changing views of Americans' religious commitment have led to an image of the news media as implacably secularist. But Silk examines contemporary news coverage and concludes that, rather than reflecting a secular bias, contemporary media accounts express religion-based values that most Americans share. Those values, Silk shows, are embodied in moral formulas, or topoi, that mark out the territory religion occupies in journalistic discourse. The formulas - good works, tolerance, hypocrisy, false prophecy, inclusion, supernatural belief, and spiritual decline - make the huge variety of American religious life morally comprehensible to a mass audience. In demonstrating their usefulness and shortcomings, Silk points the way toward a less judgmental and more pluralistic approach to the coverage of religion.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.