Reader advocateThere’s a reason most folks do not discuss religion and politics at the dinner table: Such conversations can lead to indigestion.
And so it is that news articles concerning the running battle over the public easement through the Main Street Plaza — land purchased from Salt Lake City by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and turned into a park — have bred a certain dyspepsia among The Tribune’s readers.
For instance, one woman sent an e-mail stating in part:
“Since it seems to be of great concern to your paper every time you print an article to state if the person you are referring to is Mormon or non-Mormon, I will tell you I am Mormon and was raised ‘inactive’ and have only become ‘active’ as an adult. . . . Concerning Holly Mullen’s article . . . She states the city is barely half Mormon and outsiders have drifted in because of the natural beauty and low cost of living. Come on, could she never admit it might also be because of the high standards, family atmosphere and community friendliness and values supported by the Mormon church that could have nothing to do with it.
” . . . I believe your paper is really trying to make this a non-Mormon vs. Mormon issue instead of just [Mayor] Rocky [Anderson] being stupid.”
Hers was typical of the letters, e-mails and phone conversations tossed my way over the past few days. Inquiring minds want to know: What’s with this Mormon/non-Mormon thing? (In the interests of disclosure, I was born Catholic and Irish; what I learned from the nuns and the priests still triggers synapses in my brain, but I do not belong to Our Lady of Perpetual Pain parish. I consider myself a laissez-fair Catholic and hate corned beef and cabbage.)
With a great deal of trepidation, I make the following statement: Utah is unique among the 50 states in the fact that nearly 70 percent of the population is nominally of the same religion: Mormon. This occasionally becomes germane to news reporting when public policy might result from actions taken by people who have either a religious or cultural attachment to one entity in the community.
Admittedly, the discourse in Salt Lake City has become heated — and sometimes bitter — over this relatively small piece of land. Opinion on the fate of the public easement through the Main Street Plaza has become polarized on both sides. But the fact that all comment on Tribune articles dealing with this subject that has come my way somehow identifies the author or speaker as Mormon or non-Mormon indicates that either religion or culture is a notable issue in this dispute.
I note that letters to the Public Forum section of this paper also tend to reveal spiritual persuasions.
Tribune Communities Editor Dave Noyce notes: “The religion of the principals is important. It’s just as if a big insurance company bought a piece of downtown Salt Lake City and wanted to shut off public access. If the mayor or members of the council were insurance agents or owned stock in the insurance company that would matter.”
Reporting news is a craft of stringing together words into sentences and an art of knowing what to include and what to leave out. In this case, knowing the players’ religious affiliations
or lack thereof would seem to help the public understand the heated nature of the issue.
Personally, I find the religion of a person involved in a public debate is important when it has become obvious the debate is polarized by such beliefs. I would use the same kind of
measuring stick in determining if a person’s race is germane to a story.
I would identify a person in a news story as black only if his or her race were important to the story, i.e., in a story discussing diversity in the community, I would want to know all sides of the issue were covered; one way of determining that would be identifying the number of races or religions represented in the story. But in a story discussing the overall business climate in Utah, I would not identify people by race — or religion — because it would not make the story fairer or more diverse. It is not relevant.
One practice that does bother me is referring to individuals belonging to religions other than the LDS Church as non-Mormons. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is not a standard against which others are measured. There are Mormons and there are Lutherans, atheists, agnostics, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Hindi, Episcopalians and myriad others. They should be identified as such on an individual basis. If the subject of religious affiliation is germane, but people refuse to identify their belief system to reporters, then that
should be noted.
Troubling, of course, is the instance in which a large group of people identifies itself as Mormon. The others, usually a smaller group, who might be of varied belief systems, have no common identity. In this narrow category, it might be acceptable to define the second group as not Mormon. Somehow, the term “non-Mormon” ends up being pejorative as does the term “Jack Mormon,” which probably should be used only in historical contexts.
A secondary question on this issue is how reporters describe whether a person is active in his or her religion. The answer is simple: Reporters and editors at The Tribune generally describe subject’s religious affiliation as the individual subjects do, unless such a description would be offensive to others or its construction so long as to be a burden in shorter news stories.
