“In the South, we call it preaching to the choir,” he said. “Well, the internet set up a business model in which preaching to the choir was good business.”
Another concern: those religion ghosts, the stories that newspapers and other outlets miss because they don’t take religion seriously. He pointed to the role that charismatic Christians — in particular, Hispanic Protestants — played in Donald Trump’s 2016 electoral success.
Mattingly recalled looking at a map of Florida on election night that year and thinking that some of the areas Trump won had a lot of Hispanic megachurches. If more Florida papers valued religion reporting, they would have recognized that story sooner.
“That is the classic case of the religion ghost,” he said.
Mattingly said the GetReligion site will remain online. He hopes that eventually a university will take it over and preserve it as an archive of conversation about the religion beat at an important time in its history. He plans to also keep writing his “On Religion” column for the foreseeable future — and to promote the importance of religion reporting.
“Opinion is cheap,” he said. “Reporting is expensive. If you really believe that religion is just all opinion anyway, it’s easy to say, ‘We’ll just run a bunch of opinion pieces, and that’ll be the religion coverage.’
“I disagree.”
This article originally appeared here.
