John Schmalzbauer’s research while affiliated with College of the Holy Cross and other places

What is the place of personal religious identity in the profession of American journalism? In a professional culture which prizes the qualities of objectivity and detachment, what place if any remains for the public display of religious and moral convictions on the part of the reporter? This article uses in-depth interviews with twenty Catholic and evangelical journalists (employed at major news organizations such as Time, Newsweek, the New York Times, and ABC News) to explore how religious people in American journalism manage the tension between objectivity and religious commitment. It identifies three types of strategies Catholics and evangelicals have used to negotiate the boundary between professional and religious worlds: 1) privatization and selective compart-mentalization; 2) multivocal bridging languages; and 3) the rhetoric of objectivity. While some Catholic and evangelical respondents attempted to confine their religious beliefs to the private sphere, the vast majority were able to translate their religious and normative convictions into the language of professional journalism. At the same time, most qualified the use of religious or normative language with countervailing appeals to the rhetoric of objectivity, restoring the boundary between professional and religious worlds after it had become blurred.

This article analyzes the changing role of campus rules at evangelical colleges. Although much of the literature on religion and higher education asserts that the weakening of campus rules necessarily leads to secularization and the collapse of orthodoxy, we reject this conclusion as overly deterministic. Through a discourse analysis of more than thirty years of campus newspaper articles and other materials from six evangelical colleges, we demonstrate that evangelical opposition to rules has been rhetorically grounded in both secular and religious styles of moral argumentation. While a considerable proportion of the articles employed arguments resembling the rhetoric of secular in loco parentis debates, the majority of the articles marshaled explicitly religious arguments grounded in the central doctrines of Reformation Protestant orthodoxy. We argue that this continued dramatization of orthodox Protestant identity cannot be captured by a simple unilinear secularization model. Rather, both secularizing and sacralizing dynamics have been at work in the discourse of evangelical college students, faculty, and alumni.

Using the culture module of the 1993 General Social Survey, this study proposes a multicausal model to assess the determinants of moral and cultural boundaries in the American population. We find that structural position - education, income, class, and gender - affects the likelihood that individuals draw one type of boundary rather than another. Furthermore, geographic location and participation in lifestyle clusters play an important role in supplying cultural repertoires that affect the drawing of boundaries. While both cultural and moral boundaries are predicted by structural position and geographic location, cultural boundaries are predicted by participation in high culture lifestyle clusters and moral boundaries are predicted by participation in religious lifestyle clusters. Geographic location and participation in lifestyle clusters have a stronger effect on the boundaries of non-college graduates than on those of college graduates, suggesting that local cultural repertoires have a less important impact on the boundaries of individuals who share a homogenizing educational experience.