For reporter, abuse scandal prompted a crisis of faith

(UNDATED) What if you felt God called you to a task — and then you lost your faith while carrying out that very task? That’s what happened to William Lobdell, a former evangelical Christian and aspiring Catholic, while he covered religion as a journalist for the Los Angeles Times. His new memoir, “Losing My Religion: […]

(RNS2-FEB25) Author William Lobdell lost his faith in the Catholic Church while covering the church's sexual abuse scandal for the Los Angeles Times. For use with RNS-LOSING-FAITH, transmitted Feb. 25, 2009. Religion News Service photo courtesy of William Lobdell.

(RNS2-FEB25) Author William Lobdell lost his faith in the Catholic Church while covering the church’s sexual abuse scandal for the Los Angeles Times. For use with RNS-LOSING-FAITH, transmitted Feb. 25, 2009. Religion News Service photo courtesy of William Lobdell.

(UNDATED) What if you felt God called you to a task — and then you lost your faith while carrying out that very task?

That’s what happened to William Lobdell, a former evangelical Christian and aspiring Catholic, while he covered religion as a journalist for the Los Angeles Times. His new memoir, “Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America — and Found Unexpected Peace,” tells the tale.


Lobdell, now 48, became an evangelical in his late twenties, after reaching a personal crisis point. “I had married a volatile woman whom I was divorcing, my career was going terribly, and I had gotten my girlfriend pregnant,” he said in an interview. “At age 27, I thought, `I could not have screwed up my life more.”‘ Lobdell said a friend told him he needed God in his life — a bit of advice that led him to an Irvine, Calif., megachurch and a conversion experience during an evangelical men’s retreat.

Working in journalism at the time, Lobdell wrote that he began to see all around him amazing stories of faith at work in people’s lives — and he prayed that God would allow him to become a religion reporter to tell those stories. By the time that dream came true in 2000, Lobdell was a married father of four, but spiritually restless, and he began the process of joining the Catholic Church in search of a deeper, more authentic faith life.

Soon those two forces were on a collision course. On the religion beat, Lobdell was covering the story of an Orange County priest and Catholic school principal, the Rev. Michael Harris, accused of molesting young boys. After Harris’ diocese settled with an alleged victim for $5.2 million in August, 2001, Lobdell attended a meeting of survivors of clergy sexual abuse.

Up until that time, Lobdell wrote, he didn’t feel the bad actions of one priest affected his own faith: “I saw exposing what Harris did as cleaning up, not hurting, Catholicism.” But sitting in the room with seven abuse survivors, he wrote, was a “spiritual body blow.”

“I had written so much about the redemptive power of faith, but I had never seen, in a real and personal way, the opposite: the damage religion could do in the hands of bad people,” he wrote.

Only a few months later, in early 2002, the abuse scandal broke in earnest, driven by reporting in the Boston Globe, and Lobdell eventually told his “sponsor” in his Catholic conversion process that he couldn’t go through with it. “My long honeymoon with Christianity had ended,” he wrote.


Lobdell is not the only journalist to admit publicly that covering the abuse scandal critically damaged his faith. Dallas Morning News religion columnist Rod Dreher announced in October, 2006, in a widely read blog post at Beliefnet.com, that he had left his Catholic faith, in part because he had allowed the abuse scandal to “destroy” his belief. (He is now a member of the Orthodox Church in America.)

“I think many reporters experienced something like PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) because of hearing first-hand from people whose lives had been changed in a tragic way by people wearing a clerical collar,” said Debra Mason, executive director of the Religion Newswriters Association, a professional group for religion reporters. “Anecdotally, some reporters left the [religion] beat after covering the scandal because they were just burned out.”

Michael Paulson, the Boston Globe religion reporter who received, along with a team of co-workers, the Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2003 for reporting on the scandal, noted that while newsrooms sometimes provide debriefing for reporters who cover wars and natural disasters, he and his team members did not have any “formal preparation” for dealing with “heart wrenching and angry-making” stories they heard. “The emotion was much more raw than what we encountered on other stories,” Paulson said.

But Terry Mattingly, a syndicated religion columnist and director of a Washington D.C.-based journalism center for Christian universities and colleges, rebutted the idea that religion reporting necessarily leads to a traumatic loss of faith.

“I have only known one or two professionals who felt their faith was threatened by covering religion news,” he wrote at the website GetReligion.org after Lobdell’s first account of his loss of faith was published on Page One of the L.A. Times in July, 2007.

Lobdell not only decided to forgo his Catholic conversion, but he also resigned from his post as religion reporter in 2006 and now embraces a non-dogmatic atheism, he said in an interview. “If I were a postal worker who did his job everyday and went to church on Sunday, I like to think I would still have gotten where I am today, but it would have taken decades,” he said. Being a religion reporter, “I went through it in warp speed.


“The truth can be very uncomfortable sometimes, and for me that’s what my journey has been about,” said Lobdell, noting that while some readers have applauded his decisions, others have chastised him or invited him to a new faith. “Have I come to the truth? I guess we’ll find out.”

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