My journalistic days of religious revelations taught me more than I ever dreamed

A lifetime ago—it was 1990—I was summoned one morning to a meeting with the Herald-Leader’s two top editors.

At the time, I was a staff writer on the newspaper’s business desk.

Mine was a lively beat, and involved regular controversies—leveraged buyouts, labor disputes, even federal criminal and civil trials. When I was summoned by the newsroom’s two biggest kahunas, I figured I’d done something to stir up trouble.

Instead, they told me they wanted to expand the paper’s coverage of religion, and asked if I’d be interested in moving to that beat. We discussed the details briefly.

I accepted the new assignment.

Thus my professional life changed. But so did my private understanding of religion. And my understanding of God. And my understanding of human nature.

Over the next seven years, until I left the Herald-Leader’s staff to enter the clergy full-time, I got paid to receive an education I never could have acquired otherwise.

I was already an ordained preacher and served on weekends as the part-time pastor of a tiny independent church.

I’d been raised a Southern Baptist, but in my 20s had converted to Pentecostalism. The only religion I’d ever experienced was low-church, born-again, evangelical Christianity. I thought that was Christianity. Period. As for other faiths, I possessed only the vaguest notion of who they were or what they believed, much less why.

I received a baptism by fire. At roughly the time I started the religion beat, Iraq invaded Kuwait. Pretty soon the whole Middle East was inflamed. The United States became involved. Saddam Hussein threatened to obliterate Israel.

There were multiple religious angles. I found myself standing in Lexington mosques talking to imams. I found myself in Jewish houses of worship talking to rabbis.

I soon realized I was green as a gourd, religion-wise, even after a lifetime in church. My learning curve proved both enormous and intimidating.

I’d assumed going in that all Muslims were alike. I discovered that Sunni Muslims and Shiite were very different from each other.

I observed that the Palestinian Muslims I met generally appeared more mistrustful of the West than, say, Indonesian Muslims or African Muslims.

I met several Muslims who were native-born Americans and former Christians who’d converted to Islam because they found it more egalitarian than Christianity. These Muslims, although they were Black, weren’t to be confused with Black Muslims, as members of the Nation of Islam were commonly called.

I discovered that Reform Jews were different from Conservative Jews—who really weren’t that conservative—and both groups were light years from Orthodox Jews, and that none of those groups bore much resemblance to the much-maligned Jewish scribes and Pharisees I’d read about in my New Testament.

My head spun.

Eventually, I met Buddhist lamas, including the Dalai Lama.

To my astonishment, I learned that my kind of Christians—the born-again, sweat-slinging brand—weren’t the only kind. We weren’t even the majority.

I became friendly with Roman Catholic bishops, nuns and priests. They explained that they didn’t worship the Virgin Mary or statues, which was what I’d always heard.

I talked shop with several varieties of Presbyterians, all of whom believed different things. I hung out with Methodists and Quakers and Mormons and Disciples of Christ. I worshiped with Seventh-Day Adventists.

I spent one afternoon chatting with an itinerant prophet who was dressed in white and traveled in a van covered in hand-painted signboards warning of a coming apocalypse.

I became pals with a tongues-talking Episcopal priest who was so amused by his gift that he’d break out in glossolalia in public, then giggle like a mischievous child.

I interviewed nationally renowned religion scholars. I interviewed a professor who’d set out to write a book about snake handlers, then become a snake handler himself. I interviewed members of the controversial Jesus Seminars, who’d launched a campaign to prove the New Testament gospels weren’t true.

Through it all, I remained solidly a Pentecostal preacher. That’s what I was put on Earth to be.

Yet, as I said, I received this priceless education I’ve never forgotten.

I concluded we humans share a great big God who apparently loves variety. He made many types of people, knowing they would seek for him in the most exotic of ways. Nearly everyone feels an innate need to connect with our creator.

I found that nobody believes anything in a vacuum. All believers have their history and their reasons, which make sense to them. If you’ll listen without judging or interrupting, their reasons begin to make sense to you. Everyone deserves to be heard.

Which is not to imply that all faiths, or all sects within a given faith, or all individuals within a sect, are equal. Yes, some religious people are nuts.

But the great majority aren’t. Mainly, they’re just trying to serve God as best they know how. They long to do good, to transcend our human bonds. They hope to find, and embrace, the transcendent.

None of us understands God entirely. None of us possesses all the answers.

Paul Prather is pastor of Bethesda Church near Mount Sterling. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.