With this issue, Religion Watch enters its fifth decade of publication. It seems like a short time ago that we celebrated the 25th and 30th anniversaries of the newsletter; the first issue (see photo) rolling off the printing press (if readers can remember those machines) is still fresh in this editor’s mind. In another sense, however, the momentous changes in the worlds of religion, media, and society in the last decade make 1985 seem like ancient history. The outlets and opportunities for covering news and trends in contemporary religion have expanded in the new media environment. Yet the shrinking of the religion beat in newspapers—already well underway in the early 2000s—has not really been replaced by new media forms, such as countless Substack newsletters and podcasts, which are long on commentary (some of it very good and informed) but short on reporting. Related to this change is the sharp polarization and politicization of society during the last decade, where both religious and secular media feature less disinterested and unbiased treatment of religion. Added to this is the growing tendency of academic research to treat religion more as a “dependent variable” shaped by a host of social factors, particularly race and gender, rather than as a cultural force in its own right.
All of this makes the work of RW more challenging, since we depend on the above sources for our content, but also more necessary. Not to end on a down note, we still think religion is worth covering, despite its institutional deficits, and would argue that its unpredictable nature will yield many surprises—both positive and negative—in the next decade. It was during the last decade that the Institute for Studies of Religion (ISR) at Baylor University became the publisher of RW under the initiative of the late Rodney Stark, and we thank ISR’s current director Byron Johnson for the continued support. We are likewise grateful to Jean-Francois Mayer in his long-time and indispensable role as associate editor. We thank Brian Bartholomew for his thorough copyediting work, and Neil Luft and Derek Stephens at Internet Imagineering for their production skills in turning out RW every month. Finally, we appreciate our readers and their enduring fascination with religion and their support for Religion Watch.
