What is NON-religion news?

It is Martin Marty's custom to rise at 4:44 a.m. for coffee and prayer, while awaiting the familiar thump of four newspapers on his porch.

A week ago, America's most famous church historian prepared for a lecture in Nebraska by ripping up enough newsprint to bury his table in headlines and copy slashed with a yellow pen.

A former WorldCom CEO kept teaching his Sunday school class. A researcher sought the lost tribe of Israel. Believers clashed in Sudan. Mormon and evangelical statistics were up – again. A Zambian bishop said he got married to shock the Vatican. U.S. bishops kept wrestling with clergy sexual abuse. Pakistani police continued to study the death of journalist Daniel Pearl.

Marty tore out more pages, connecting the dots. Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey feared an Anglican schism. Public-school students prayed at flagpoles. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia explored the border between church and state. And there were dozens of stories linked to Sept. 11, 2001.

"When I read newspapers, I see religion all over the place," said Marty, whose University of Chicago Divinity School career has led to 50-plus books and countless media appearances. "This has always been the case. I simply think it has been easier for others to see this reality during the past year."

For decades, Marty has been America's most quoted expert on the question: "What is religion news?" But the University of Nebraska's journalism school challenged him to answer a new question: "Is There Any Non-Religious News After 9/11?"

It is certainly harder for journalists to avoid religion now, said Marty. This is true from Washington to Islamabad, from Wall Street to Hollywood. But the deeper reality is that Sept. 11 didn't change anything. It only made the power of faith – as a healing force, as well as a deadly force – more obvious.

Truth is, most Western leaders have long believed that religion would inevitably fade, he said. Thus, the West has been dominated by two big ideas.

"One idea was that every time you looked out your window, there was going to be less religion around than there was before," said Marty, in a forum for journalism students, ministers and media professionals. "The other idea was that whatever leftover religion you find, it was going to be tolerant, concessive, mushy and so on.

"Instead, there has been an increase in religion and the prospering religions are all extremely intense. The versions of Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism that are prospering tend to be among people who care very much about what their faith is about."

Countless despots have learned that faith cannot be killed with force. This is especially true outside what Marty called the "spiritual ice belt" that extends across Western Europe and North America. Soon, Africa and Asia will be sending waves of missionaries to the West.

Meanwhile, most of the world's hot spots are occurring where Islamic expansion is colliding with the growth of traditional Christianity in the Third World. While the world watches Afghanistan and Iraq, the insiders are watching Nigeria and Indonesia.

It's all part of the same story.

In the mid-1990s, Marty directed a massive project to study the "militant religious fundamentalisms" on the rise worldwide. It concluded that the leaders of many such groups would resort to military action, when they failed to achieve victory through constitutional means. And if military might was not enough, Marty noted that the study warned that "they may very well take no prisoners, allow no compromises, have no borders and they might resort to terrorism."

How should networks and newspapers respond? It would help, said Marty, if they hired more journalists who are trained to cover the complex and emotional world of religion. But that response is no longer adequate, after Sept. 11.

"What I am talking about today is not a call for a huge flood of religion reporters. We need some. We need more," he said. "We need space in which they can write. ...

"But we are past that, right now. We are now dealing with issues that all journalists are going to have to try to understand. ... The horizons of religion and the news have touched and we all have to realize that, now."

My Big, Fat, Greek Mystery

To the faithful, there was nothing new about hearing an ancient litany in Greek.

But it wasn't business as usual for Gregory Waynick, who was planning to be a Southern Baptist pastor until his studies in history and theology led him into Eastern Orthodoxy. As a young deacon in Nashville, he was terrified the first time he tried to sing a few lines of Greek chant.

"I'm sure my pronunciation was pretty sad," he said. "But when I looked up, I saw that all of the little old Greek ladies had tears in their eyes. They were so moved that I was even trying to speak a little bit of their language. They responded so warmly to all of my attempts to understand their language and lives."

As a convert, Waynick flashed back to that scene in his life and many others after seeing the movie "My, Big, Fat Greek Wedding." Most of the memories were good, but not all. An older Greek priest bluntly once told him that Bible-Belt Americans didn't belong in the Orthodox faith.

It was faith, not marriage that brought Waynick into the Eastern church. Still, he said the hit romantic comedy is surprisingly accurate in its portrayal of a proud, protective community in which the lines between culture and faith are constantly blurred.

"Their faith is something they don't think about. It's at the subconscious level," said Waynick, who is now a priest in the thriving St. Mark's Greek Orthodox Church in Boca Raton, Fla. "The problem is that when that culture begins to fade in their children – the language, the traditions – they may have little to hang on to in terms of their faith."

"My Big, Fat, Greek Wedding" is about a young Greek woman named Toula Portokalos who falls for a white-bread vegetarian Anglo man. The movie cost only $5 million and debuted April 21 on 108 screens. Now it's on 1,764 screens and BoxOfficeGuru.com is asking if Nia Vardalos and her wacky family movie will gross $175 million in American ticket sales.

Studio executives tried to convince the actress to go with the demographic flow and turn her screenplay into a big, fat Italian or big, fat Hispanic wedding.

But Vardalos had a secret weapon named Margarita Ibrahimoff, the daughter of a Greek-born father and a mother who grew up in a Greek village on the Albanian border. This particular Greek girl turned Hollywood player is best known by another name – Rita Wilson. It helps that Wilson married a non-Greek man named Tom Hanks.

Obviously, the team that produced "My Big, Fat, Greek Wedding" understood this emotional terrain, said Dean Popps, a national leader in networks of Greek Orthodox laypeople. The cliches were dead-on target and most Greeks will laugh and be thankful that mainstream America has acknowledged their existence. But the movie treats the church as a mere visual prop.

"It's good that someone is saying, 'It's OK to be Greek. It's OK to be Orthodox,' " said Popps. "But at the same time, it's a bit awkward. I mean, take Hanks. He's a great actor, but does he know anything about Orthodoxy? When it comes to issues like abortion and sexuality, he opposes everything the church has taught for centuries. ...

"I mean it's one thing to like our culture. But this faith is something you're supposed to live out in your daily life."

This tension is symbolized in one of the movie's few serious moments, when Toula's fiance is baptized in a rite that is a complete mystery to him. Afterwards, he shows her his new cross and says, "I'm Greek now."

The crucial question, said Waynick, is whether those whose lives are rooted in Greek culture and traditions will be able to pass on a living faith to their children. It will not be enough to simply go through the motions.

"Times have changed and their children will not remain Orthodox just because their parents are Greek," he said. "It's not enough to sing a few Greek hymns, when your kids are sticking Eminem into the CD players in their sports cars and moving in with their American girlfriends. ...

"They will have to claim the faith as their own and their churches will have to help them do that."

Spirituality up, doctrine down

During the 1990s, pollster George Barna released many reports showing that Americans were growing less traditional on issues of sin, salvation and the scriptures.

Church leaders found his data disturbing. On many occasions they asked: Could anything reverse these trends? What would it take to inspire significant numbers of Americans to repent and return to their roots?

"I told people that I thought it was going to take something big, some kind of genuinely shocking event that would show that there is right and wrong and good and evil," said Barna. "I sincerely thought that if something like that happened, many people would turn to God and that we would see lives changed."

Apparently not, he said.

The Barna Research Group's latest data indicate that nearly half of the Americans polled say faith has played a vital role in helping them cope with the horrors of Sept. 11, 2001. In poll after poll, Americans claim their interest in spirituality is rising.

But Barna said there is no evidence Sept. 11 that had any lasting impact on how ordinary people practice their faith or live their daily lives. Worship attendance quickly returned to normal – 43 percent. Bible reading is par for the course – 41 percent. It is especially interesting that the "unchurched," the percentage of Americans with few or no ties to organized religion, is precisely the same as before the attacks – 33 percent.

Barna said it didn't help that 41 percent of churchgoers said their congregation did nothing at all during the past 12 months to address issues raised by the attacks. Only 16 percent said they had heard sermons or other teachings focusing on Sept. 11.

"It's clear that our churches did little to try to crack the spiritual complacency of the American public," said Barna.

Researchers at the Gallup Organization have been looking at similar numbers.

"People are talking about how they are more spiritual now," said Frank Newport, editor of the Gallup Poll. "But this just isn't showing up in any way that we can measure. Maybe they are more spiritual. Maybe that statement is true. But this new interest in spirituality is showing up in what people are feeling, not what they are doing."

The bottom line: ask Americans questions about how Sept. 11 affected their religious feelings and the poll numbers will soar. Ask them questions about specific religious beliefs and practices and the numbers will plateau or even decline. The emerging consensus seems to be that vague, comforting spirituality is healthy, but that doctrinal, authoritative religion may even be dangerous.

That may be a hard news story to report and write, but it is still a major story, according to Steven Waldman, editor and chief at Beliefnet.com. When probing the impact of Sept. 11 on religious life in America and abroad, it is fairly easy to note what did happen. Yes, Americans responded with character and compassion. American attitudes toward Islam have seemed to change on a daily basis. There has been shocking evidence of brutal anti-Semitism.

But Waldman believes the big news is "what didn't happen. The fact that people initially went to houses of worship – and then stopped – should be viewed as a huge story, not a non-event." The bottom line, he said, is that "Americans didn't view organized religion as much help. ... While the pews were emptying out, psychologists' offices were filling up."

And as the 12 months passed, Barna's staff kept asking a series of tough questions about right and wrong and about good and evil.

Barna was stunned to find that, soon after Sept. 11, the percentage of Americans affirming that they believe in "moral truths or principles" that are eternal and unchanging actually declined – from 38 to 22 percent. Only 32 percent of born-again Christians still believe in the existence of absolute moral truth.

"Those numbers have not risen" in recent months, said Barna. "Why is that? ... Perhaps many Americans have simply decided that it's just too much work to claim very specific and detailed beliefs and then to try to follow them in daily life. It's just too hard. It's too limiting on their behavior.

"I think most Americans want to keep their options open."

High Holy Days, one year later

The ritual could not have been more familiar, but Rabbi Howard Shapiro found it almost impossible to say the usual prayers for the infant.

It was only a few days after Sept. 11th. Suddenly, it was hard to talk about blessings, peace, goodness, faith and hope.

"I remember what I said to the family that day," said Shapiro, the leader of Temple Israel in West Palm Beach, Fla. "I said that we must force ourselves to say these words. We must say these words, because if we do not say them, then we will never believe them. And if we never believe them, then we will never act on them."

Now rabbis across from coast to coast are facing the High Holy Days, with the first anniversary of 9/11 falling in the middle of the season this year on the ancient Jewish calendar. The Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, begins at sundown Friday (Sept. 6) and the season ends 10 days later with Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.

There will be many pages of familiar prayers to say and none of them will sound the same. Rabbis who have prepared scores of services and sermons for the High Holy Days all know that, this year, their words will carry a special weight.

What should be said? What should be left unsaid?

In his Rosh Hashanah sermon text, Shapiro listed the familiar questions: "When people reflect back they ask: What did we do? Why did this happen? What do they have against us?"

In the public square, he noted, many are trying to blame Islam, insisting that it "does not honor life as Judaism and Christianity do." Others are blaming God, insisting that Sept. 11th proved that "religion is the root of all evil." Some blame Israel. Some people, as always, blame the Jews.

"Some blame our very way of life – from McDonalds to Hollywood to Wall Street to Washington," wrote Shapiro. "This much I know. It is none of the above and all of the above. It is all about the way we see the future and ourselves. It is all about whether we are going to enter this new century as free, independent people or we are going to walk back into the Middle Ages."

After the sermon, the choir will sing Psalm 61: "Hear my cry, O God. From the end of the earth I cry unto Thee. My heart is overwhelmed. Lead me to the rock that is higher than I. For You are a Shelter; You are a Strong Tower."

Many will flinch when hearing the words "Strong Tower." It also will be hard to pray for the day when, "Violence shall rage no more, and evil shall vanish like smoke; the rule of tyranny shall pass away from the earth, and You alone shall reign over all Your works." It will be hard to praise God, saying, "Your power is in the help that comes to the falling, ... in the faith You keep with those who sleep in the dust."

At Temple Israel, here in heavily Jewish South Florida, the faithful said they did not need a special Sept. 11 service. The High Holy Days rites will be enough.

A rabbi does not need to make many additions to a rite that already states: "On Rosh Hashanah it is written, on Yom Kippur it is sealed: How many shall pass on, how many shall come to be; who shall live and who shall die; who shall see ripe age and who shall not; who shall perish by fire and who by water. ..."

The events of Sept. 11 were shocking, horrifying and unique for believers in this generation. But the prayers of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur have been recited for centuries. They have been prayed just as often in times of terror and tragedy as in times of peace and security.

These prayers unite worshippers today with those through the ages. These prayers transcend time.

"To say these prayers is to know that we are not the first generation to deal with the precariousness of life," said Shapiro. "That is what a religious tradition offers to us. It helps us deal with the fact that life is often scary."