BY GEORGE, GOD-TALKS ARE IN

By Allan R. Andrews

Editor, Pacific Stars and Stripes Tokyo, Japan.

``Life'' magazine has published an edition devoted largely to Mary, the mother of Jesus.

``Time,''``Newsweek,'' and ``U.S. News'' are bound to devote some weekly cover story to a religious topic.

The surprise of the season, however, shows up in the December issue of the magazine published by John F. Kennedy Jr. called ``George.''

Kennedy made headlines this year with what one newspaper in New York hailed as ``the wedding of the century.''

For the first time in 30 years, many realized ``John-John'' had grown up.

In an opening editorial, Kennedy thanks people who mailed best wishes after he took his own ``leap of faith'' and got married.

A different sort of faith, however, dominates ``George: not just politics as usual'' magazine for the month in which American Jews and Christians celebrate major holidays.

Four of the seven articles in the magazine discuss faith, and that's not counting a review of spiritual books, a short on prayer, and another on the influence of the New World Order on the thinking of young Bill Clinton.

By my informal count, about 40 of the 60 or 65 pages given to editorial matter in the magazine are devoted to God and religion, much of it camouflaged by politics, to be sure.

There's an interview with Bill Clinton outlining how his views of God and morality often run counter to the positions taken by his Southern Baptist denomination.

Two articles focus on aging evangelist Billy Graham, one an interview of Graham by the publisher after Kennedy had attended a Graham crusade in Charlotte, N.C. Graham granted the interview, Kennedy tells us, as a wedding present to the young publisher.

Newlywed Kennedy asks Graham the secret of his 53-year marriage to Ruth Bell Graham. Read the interview for Graham's secret; Kennedy makes no comment on what the evangelist suggests.

The interview with Graham contains several fascinating and humorous responses:

He notes that Lyndon Baines Johnson, among all the presidents he knew, went to church more frequently than the others.

Graham distances himself politically from the conservative right and from his friend Pat Robertson specifically. He also remarks that he's known the current president since Clinton was 12 years old ``according to him.''

Asked finally if he had any regrets about his half-century as an evangelist known for massive televised crusades, Graham tells Kennedy, ``I wish I'd watched less television.''

In another vein, actor Woody Harrelson, whose likeness adorns the cover in the guise of an angel, discusses his search for redemption in the rain forest of Costa Rica.

Harrelson speaks of his environmental convictions, his attempt to raise his daughter in the forest hideaway, his life with various women, and his wish he'd never filmed the movie ``Money Train'' with its vulgarity and violence. Harrelson's interview is as much the chronicle of a spiritual journey -- minus perhaps a strain of humility -- as is Graham's or Clinton's.

Former President Jimmy Carter's book, ``Living Faith,'' and another faith pilgrimage book, ``The Making of a Jew,'' by President of the World Jewish Conference Edgar M. Bronfman, are reviewed, two autobiographical writings that confirm a pervading theme of the December issue of ``George'' and perhaps of its Roman Catholic publisher's convictions that political power may have a soul and that faith is alive and growing in American politics.

This theme also is raised in the key story, ``What Does America Believe?''

The magazine outlines the findings of a Luntz Research Co. survey of American beliefs.

I won't steal readers' opportunities to absorb the summary, but among its somewhat startling statistics are:

++10 percent of those polled believe Elvis Presley is still alive.

++ 72 percent of those who believe Presley lives also believe the government is lying about its investigation of TWA Flight 800. Interestingly, 41 percent of all those polled believe a government cover-up exists.

++ 86 percent believe in God or a Supreme being, but only 48 percent attend a religious service once a week or more.

++ a breakdown along the political spectrum shows that liberals are less likely than conservatives to believe in heaven, hell, angels or miracles but are more likely to believe in reincarnation, ghosts and astrology.

I draw few conclusions from this survey and from the emphasis of the December issue except to conclude, with its editors, that faith and religion are much alive in America.

As a journalist, my sure conclusion is that beliefs belong much more in the news on a routine basis than they deserve being relegated to seasonal issues connected to December's religious holidays.

In the arsenal of journalistic investigation stand seven key questions, the so-called five W's and two H's: Who? What? When? Where? Why? How? and How Much?

We in journalism have been good with most of these questions, but we've been pitifully weak in asking and answering the question ``Why?''

I don't buy the argument circulating these days in many quarters that the media, newspapers in particular, are anti-Christian or anti-religion.

Rather, I think we've forgotten to truly pursue the question ``Why?'' and have been too willing to accept answers to ``Who?'' and ``What?'' as providing what's needed for in-depth journalism.

When we begin to seriously pursue the question ``Why?'' we're likely to discover that beliefs, faith and religion play a much more prominent role in the world of politics and commerce than we've reckoned.

Return to

Pacific Sunday Meanderings + Home + National Society of Newspaper Columnists

Allan R. Andrews can be reached at arandrews@aol.com