The 2024 Religion News Association Conference

A 75th Anniversary Celebration

I spent the latter part of last week in Pittsburgh attending the Religion News Association annual conference. It was my third time attending.

Back in 2018, on then-Twitter I was following Bob Smietana, then-editor of the Religion News Service.¹ He had tweeted that there was a membership discount for new members and he was encouraged me to join, even though I was not a journalist. Since I was on sabbatical in the Fall of 2018², and the conference in Columbus, OH wasn’t too long of a drive from Michigan, I decided to go.

I found the RNA group incredibly welcoming. So many people engaged in conversation. Several had background in Christian colleges. Others had divinity degrees. Still others were part of less representative groups and added a richness to conversations. Somehow all that welcome resulted in my becoming the academic representative to the RNA membership committee, a role I continued until late 2022. So I went also attended the 2019 conference in Las Vegas. After Covid disruptions, the move to Denver, and a couple of scheduling conflicts, I made my way back to this year’s conference in Pittsburgh. (It also seemed like a good opportunity to talk about my book!)

People were just as welcoming as I remembered. I saw most of my old friends³, met some interesting young journalists, and met some folks from nonprofits (many of whom were meal sponsors). I participated in the Late Night Provocations and laid out the argument present in the first half of my book.

As I told many people, the RNA conference is always an interesting contrast to my professional meeting, the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. Where SSSR has panels of more narrowly focused researchers diving deep on a particular topic, the RNA panels look to find some generalizable lessons across diverse situations within a broad topic.⁴

Here are a couple of examples of those diverse panels. The first panel was “Covering the Impact of the Israel-Hamas Conflict in Your Community”. I included a Detroit Free Press reporter discussing Arab and Palestinian concerns in Dearborn, the editor of a small Jewish paper in Pittsburgh, and the editor of the Pitt student newspaper. All of them discussed the need to really hear the stories people have to tell rather than imposing others’ narratives. The Pitt student was particularly astute in describing how they managed the diversity of opinion on campus.⁵

This was followed by a panel addressing religious scandals (which could probably be a conference in itself!). More than simply explaining the scandals, the panelists discussed how they found themselves with information about a particular scandal, how they corroborated claims made, what documentation they gathered, and how they cared for the pain in the victims. It raised some interesting sociological questions, one of which I tried to address in the Q&A.

Other panels were sharing information that religion journalists should know. One looked at the growth of the Nones from a global perspective as opposed to a narrow American Christian view. Another looked at methods of democracy reporting. Yet another presented data on Jehovah’s Witness opinions in Rwanda 30 years after the genocide. The Pew Religion folks provided absolutely current data about religion and the 2024 election.

Friday morning we got on yellow school buses and traveled to the site of the 2018 Tree of Life Synagogue shooting. The buildings (which housed three congregations) were demolished and an anti-semitism educational facility will be built on the site. Then we traveled to the Jewish Community Center and heard from family members and friends of the victims. It was a solemn time but also had insights for media figures (or sociologists) studying tragedy.

There was another potential field trip on Saturday afternoon but I went to the Heinz History Museum instead. I saw displays on Mr. Rogers (including the set, King Friday’s castle, and X the Owl’s tree) and a wax figure of Franco Harris’ 1972 “immaculate reception”. So I was still getting exposed to religion.

In one of the Thursday Night Provocations, I learned that the Religion News Association was founded by 12 white guys at a Presbyterian meeting in 1949. Today’s group is remarkably diverse in terms of gender, race, religion, and nationality. I learned early on that this is not the “religious” news association. The noun is important. Religion is the topic of interest, not a characteristic of all journalists there.

I interacted with liberal Catholics and very conservative Catholics, with people from Christianity Today or Lifeway and with people from Sojourners, with people from Interfaith America and from the Freedom from Religion Foundation, with people from Jewish publications to those connected with the Orthodox Church, or with people from outlets like NPR or AP and from small papers in Wisconsin or Arkansas.

Saturday night closed the conference with the annual awards banquet. It was held at the Andy Warhol museum (he grew up in Pittsburgh). His nephew opened the banquet describing how Warhol’s Byzantine Catholic upbringing shaped his art. Most of us didn’t know Warhol was religious.

The awards were given for best practice in a variety of media. It was a joy to see many of my friends recognized. Adelle Banks of the Religion News Service received the lifetime achievement award. Her acceptance speech was excellent and I wish I could have recorded it.

They haven’t announced when or where next year’s conference will be. I haven’t decided if I’ll be there; I’m a retired guy without an institutional budget to draw on. But if I don’t go, I’m sure I’ll have a huge case of FOMO. I strongly encourage other religion scholars to consider joining RNA and trying out the annual conference.

1. Their morning update was a big part of my daily news review even back then.

2. Post-Covid, they’ve been meeting in the spring but would like to return to fall meetings.

3. One was on my plane.

4. In fact, one of the less interesting panels involved academics diving deep in their research area with illegible PowerPoints and long monologues.

5. I’m going to try delving into the campus protests in Wednesday’s SubStack.