Losing My Religion

by Lobdell, William

  In 2000, when the Tribune Company bought the Los Angeles Times and a new management team arrived, the community news concept was ripe for reexamination. Though no one told us directly, we knew our days were numbered. We stopped hiring. We tried to slip our most talented people into positions at The Times. We advised our reporters, photographers and editors that it might be a good time to get their résumés together. We were dead journalists walking; we just didn’t know our execution date.

  I had always been an anxious person and still am one. I bite my fingernails until they bleed. My stomach can churn up at a moment’s notice. I have anxiety nightmares more nights than not. But in 2000, I didn’t have the usual crippling apprehension. My situation was nerve-racking and filled with anxious moments, but I wasn’t overwhelmed by it. This feeling—of well-being? I wasn’t even sure what to call it—was odd. I hadn’t felt it in my first four decades of life. The stakes were high. I had hired most of the people who were about to be laid off, and I felt responsible for them. And I didn’t have a pile of money or any job prospects to fall back on for myself. My family—now complete with four boys—lived pretty much paycheck to paycheck. I was a 40-year-old journalist who specialized in low-paying community news at a time when the industry was quickly downsizing.

  Yet I sensed, deep in my soul, none of it mattered. God loved me perfectly. He would take care of my family and me, whatever happened. Perhaps subconsciously preparing for the end, I had written several columns about people who had lost everything yet came back ever stronger because of their belief in God. I was on vacation in Kauai when I got the call.

  “Bill, sorry to wreck your vacation, but I thought you’d want to know,” said an executive with The Times. “We’re closing down most of Times Community News. We’re going to make an announcement next week. I don’t want you to worry personally. Everyone loves your work, and you’ll have a job with The Times. We’ll have to work out the specifics later.”

  Within a week, I stood at the front of a large meeting hall packed with worried young journalists. Someone within The Times had leaked the news of the layoffs to other media organizations. Many of my people found out they didn’t have a job by listening to the radio on the drive to work.

  I confirmed for them the bad news. I told them how proud I was of our effort. We had done great work against long odds, and that’s something no one could take away from us. I also said that as shocking as this day was, I was confident that all of us would go on to much greater things, and this was just a speed bump in our careers. I said this with conviction because I believed that God would take care of them, too. I don’t think many of them believed me.

  I still didn’t know my own future, despite what I had been told. I desperately wanted to be a full-time religion writer, and I didn’t see how that could happen. The Times already had a full complement of religion reporters, including one in Orange County. Yet instead of worrying about it, I tried to look at this turn of events as the start of another adventure with God. Where would He put me next?

  The answer came almost instantly. The editor of the Orange County edition called me soon after the meeting and asked if I could come to her office. There she said she wanted to know if I was interested in a crazy idea she had.

  “What if I told you I was interested in having you write about religion full-time?”

  My heart pounded in my chest. Was she kidding? We had never talked about the possibility before.

  “I’d love the job,” I replied. “But what about the current reporter?”

  “We’d move her to another beat,” she said.

  I hated to bring it up, but I told her it would be difficult for my family if I had to take a pay cut to become a reporter.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of that,” she said. “So, do you want to do this or what?” She smiled broadly. She was excited to have me. She had no idea that I was even more thrilled.

  “I’d be honored.”

  Two weeks later, I walked into The Times as a full-time religion reporter.

  As a college student, aside from sports (and sex and beer), I had a passion for news. I considered myself a news junkie. I adored reading newspapers and magazines. In the pre-Internet days, I often went to the library at the University of California, Irvine, and spent hours just looking through newspapers from around the country and reading magazines. The stories—whether they were breaking news, funny little features or complex narratives—intoxicated me. My favorite novel, by far, was Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream, a story about a journalist’s drug-filled weekend during which he was supposed to cover a motorcycle race. I still have the novel’s first line memorized: “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.”

  At the end of my junior year, I didn’t have any career plans. I was a political science major, and, unlike most of my classmates, I didn’t want to go to law school. I hadn’t met too many happy attorneys. Panicked at my looming graduation, I sought the counsel of a wise family friend. He told me to find something I loved to do and do it for a living. That way, it really wouldn’t be like working and my passion would ensure career success. Maybe, I thought, I could be a journalist like Hunter Thompson or his mainstream counterparts, Woodward and Bernstein.

  I said to the family friend: “Well, I love journalism. Maybe I could be a reporter.”

  “Then get your butt down to the college paper and give it a try.”

  I sat in the courtyard outside the offices of the New University (the name of UC Irvine’s weekly student newspaper) for an hour, trying to get up the courage to go inside. With my heart in my throat, I walked up the stairs to the paper’s second-floor offices and stepped through the open door. It was love at first sight—the relentless ringing of the phones, the clacking of the keyboards, the smell of scraps of old pizza in oily boxes on the floor, the mess of old papers and documents stacked everywhere. This was heaven. I felt at home.

  “Excuse me,” I stammered lamely to the first person I saw behind a desk. “I’d like to be a reporter, maybe covering sports.”

  “Well, I’m the sports editor,” he said. “What are you doing this afternoon?”

  I shrugged my shoulders. He reached inside his desk, pulled out a skinny reporter’s notebook and shoved it in my hand.

  “There’s a men’s tennis match starting in ten minutes. Go cover it and have the story in by tonight.”

  I hustled out the door, stoked at landing my first assignment. A few days later, I opened up the New U and saw my byline over my sports story. My name, my words in print. I was a writer. I was a journalist. Eighteen years later, I walked into The Times’s Orange County newsroom for the first time as a reporter—and as a full-time religion writer, to boot. It lacked some of the characteristic shabbiness of my previous newsrooms. This was, after all, The Show, the major leagues of American newspapers. Expensive signage pointed visitors to the Metro, Calendar and Sports departments. A news rack outside the editor’s office held neatly placed copies of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today and Orange County Register. Off in the corner was a library, equipped with computers linked to special databases, bookshelves full of reference materials, a morgue of newspaper clips going back decades and a counter full of current magazines. Still, at heart, my new newsroom wasn’t that much different from those at smaller papers. The phones rang, the keyboards clacked and the desks were covered with stacks of reports and newspapers. The most important difference was The Times’s newsroom was home to some of the world’s best journalists.

  I had made it. I credited my faith and constant prayers. God had answered my prayers more completely than I could have ever imagined. Now I would be paid to learn everything I could about religion, and I would be able to help shape religion coverage at one of the nation’s largest media outlets.

  It seemed too good to be true.

  FIVE

  Shot Out of a Canno
n

  Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart.

  —PSALMS 37:4

  A FEW WEEKS into the job at The Times, in November 2000, a colleague stopped by my cubicle with a story tip.

  “Hey, Bill,” said Jean Pasco, one of the most respected reporters in the newsroom. “You ever hear of Father Michael Harris?”

  I shook my head. Jean, a top political reporter in her 40s who spent her free time running sub-four-hour marathons, was the dean of Orange County journalists. Her list of sources was roughly the thickness of a small city phone book.

  “He was principal at Mater Dei and Santa Margarita high schools,” she said in a voice that was famous for booming throughout the newsroom. “Raised something like $26 million to build Santa Margarita. Anyway, he’s named in a clergy sexual abuse lawsuit, and someone leaked me these documents.” She dropped a stack of legal papers on my desk. “They look interesting. Maybe we can team up for a story when the case goes to trial or gets settled.”

  I thumbed through a few of them—depositions, reports and motions. They formed a big pile. I promised myself I’d look at them by end of the week at the latest. But I never got around to it. At the time, it was an isolated, sordid story that didn’t set off any journalism alarms in me. I didn’t see that right in front of me was a tale that would cause upheaval and historic reforms within the Roman Catholic dioceses of Orange and Los Angeles, generate the first of more than $1 billion in payouts to hundreds of victims of sexual abuse by priests and foreshadow by almost two years the church’s national sex scandal. Fourteen months later, when the Catholic sex scandal broke from Boston to Hawaii, it would be searingly clear that Father Harris’s case was a bellwether of news to come.

  I was distracted by some much more inspiring stories I was attending to. In my first year of full-time religion, I felt like I had been shot out of a cannon. I wrote 145 stories for the paper. Each article led to something better, more inspiring, more engaging. I saw it as the subtle hand of the Lord at work. Another God thing.

  I was fascinated by people who seemed holy—the Madge Roddas of the world who instantly forgave their rapists and would-be murderers. There were many of them, living on the edges of each major faith. This was nothing new. The roster of saints in Catholic history is filled with people who were thought to be lunatics at the time, and I met a lot of modern equivalents.

  One of the most beloved saints, Francis of Assisi, was initially mocked and scorned by his wealthy family and friends when he changed his life. A hard-drinking son of a prosperous businessman, he was inspired, in part, by a sermon based on this passage in the Gospel of Matthew:

  As you go, preach this message: “The kingdom of heaven is near.” Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse those who have leprosy, drive out demons. Freely you have received, freely give. Do not take along any gold or silver or copper in your belts; take no bag for the journey, or extra tunic, or sandals or a staff; for the worker is worth his keep.

  —MATTHEW 10:7–20

  Francis stripped away his possessions, right down to his shoes. He put on a rough tunic and belted it with a rope. He went barefoot. He began to treat lepers in that simple outfit that would become standard dress for the Franciscans, the order founded on Francis’s principles.

  When I found Christians on the religion beat who radiated holiness, they intrigued and frightened me in equal measure. They were true believers who simply couldn’t live out their faith in a moderate fashion. God required more from them. They had been radicalized by Scripture to follow the words of Jesus. That often meant living among the poor and serving food and providing various services to them. It also could translate into politics, in battles to stop abortion, to allow Christianity in the public square or to save the environment—God’s creation.

  It wasn’t until after that first year, when the ether of unbounded optimism wore off, that I began to see in many of my stories a wide chasm between the lives of the average believer (this group included myself and most pastors I encountered) and those of true believers—people who lived their lives as if the Scriptures were true.

  This gap first struck me during an interview with one of the richest couples in the world, Susan and Henry Samueli. A former UCLA engineering professor, Henry Samueli co-founded Broadcom Corporation in 1991, which went public seven years later. When I talked with the Samuelis in July 2000, their wealth was estimated at $5.1 billion and they had spent the past year giving away $27 million to the University of California, Irvine, $25 million to UCLA, $5 million to Opera Pacific and lesser sums to a variety of nonprofits. I wanted to talk to them about their latest donation, $3 million to help build a permanent home for a Reform synagogue in South Orange County that had operated for years in a series of trailers.

  I arrived at the Samuelis’ oceanfront home perched on a cliff in Corona del Mar with Times photographer Mark Boster. After being questioned by one of the compound’s bodyguards, we were escorted inside the house. I was nervous—it wasn’t every day I interacted with billionaires—but the Samuelis, especially Susan, made us feel at home in the multimillion-dollar mansion with sweeping views of the Pacific Ocean and California coast. Henry, a trim man with a dark mustache and full head of short-cropped brown hair, had the demeanor of the engineer that he was: quiet, reflective, intelligent and precise. He carried himself ramrod straight. Susan, a stylish woman, was the extrovert of the pair, with an easy laugh and an enthusiasm that was quickly fired up. She grew up in a Jewish neighborhood in Los Angeles and said her strong faith, a constant since childhood, had made instant wealth easier to handle.

  The Samuelis said they were brought up in the Jewish tradition, which teaches tzedakah, the Hebrew word for justice. It can also be translated to mean charity. Henry, whose parents were Holocaust survivors, said he had been troubled that his synagogue, Temple Beth El in Aliso Viejo, existed in a series of trailers that “had the implication of nonpermanent.”

  The couple also disclosed for the first time that they were trying to give permanence to the emerging liberal Reform movement in Israel, a country dominated by Orthodox synagogues. At the time, of the estimated 20 Reform temples in Israel, only four had their own buildings. The Samuelis had already given $2.5 million to a Reform temple near Tel Aviv.

  Henry Samueli, then 45, described himself as “very much a moderate in all aspects of my life.” When he spoke of his religion, his voice rose in passion only on the subject of fundamentalism.

  “Broadcom is probably the most multicultural company on the planet Earth,” he told me. “We have every race, creed, color, religion, which is great. I love that.

  “One of the things I like most about Reform Judaism is that it promotes tolerance of various religions and cultures. I’m very much against orthodox religions of all kinds, including Judaism. They don’t have their heads on straight.”

  Henry Samueli’s only harsh words of the morning stayed with me. He inadvertently had hit on a religious paradox that would become one of my preoccupations. Are true believers crazy and misguided or do they just take their religion more seriously than others? Evangelicals ask each other an interesting question: If you were arrested for being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you? For many people, the answer would be no. I loved to write about people who put their faith above all else—not in words, but in deeds. They were just so different. Down the road, when my faith faltered, I held onto these stories of pure belief like a life preserver. They reminded me that holiness could be achieved.

  For instance, there was Pastor Ed Salas. If you want to see whether your pastor’s faith is real, watch how he reacts after a tumor is found inside the brain of his ten-year-old son. Study whether his faith wavers after the doctors remove a quarter-sized mass from his child, after a biopsy reveals an aggressive cancer, and after his son is left dizzy and so nauseated that he drops from 84 pounds to 67.

  On a Sunday service that was supposed to celebrate his church’s move into a lar
ger facility, Salas told the congregation about his son Timothy’s cancer. He delivered a sermon about how to stand firm in faith. He chose Daniel 3:17–18:

  If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God we serve is able to save us from it, and he will rescue us…. But even if he does not, we want you to know, O king, that we will not serve your gods….

  “Faith doesn’t depend on circumstances,” he told his congregation. “It depends on who God is.”

  Then there were Leia and Dwight Smith. The couple had carved out successful careers in sales. She sold textbooks; he worked for 3M. But as middle age approached, they determined that they weren’t following Christ’s admonitions to live a selfless life and help the poor.

  “You just can’t say Jesus is your Savior,” Dwight says, “you have to act like it.”

  They quit their jobs for a life in the Catholic Worker, an independent poverty-relief group with a branch in Santa Ana, California. Living in a donated two-story Craftsman home in a hardscrabble section of the city, the couple began to take in homeless people, especially women and children. Soon, bodies of every shape and size filled their house and then their backyard each evening. At the end of each month—long after the government checks had run out—the crowds swelled to almost 200 people. The lines for the three bathrooms were constant. Feeding the visitors each night out of one kitchen turned into a Herculean task. Still, the Smiths didn’t turn anyone away.