Do Small-Town Newspapers Discriminate against Nonbelief?

What’s the chance you’ve ever read a column about agnosticism, humanism or, God forbid, atheism amid the endless weekly clergy musings about faith in your local, small-town newspaper?

Slim to none, I’d wager.

After all, America’s far-flung hamlets, villages and mini-metros, famously “flyover” hubs in the MAGA heartland, are home to, as former President Barack Obama once ruefully opined in a 2008 speech, “bitter” folks who feel abandoned by their rumored liberal, secularizing nation and “cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.”

Surely aware of this, editors of local gazettes in more scattered, isolated, insular, churchy outposts of the American population, must naturally assume their readers in general not only have zero interest in reading about ungodly stuff, but may even be aggressively hostile toward such.

So, quaint, regular “Pastor’s Corner” type columns abound in hometown papers, providing opportunity for the mostly Protestant clergy and, sometimes, priests of the community to proselytize to the faithful and also potential paying converts. There’s a good reason the American “heartland” and other rural enclaves nationwide are known as “God’s country.”

Rural “nones”—those ungodly atheists, agnostics and “nothings in particular”—need subscribe to some open-minded metropolitan daily newspaper or other heathen periodical—e.g., The Humanist, American Atheist, Secular World—if they want access to a healthy dose of freethought prose.

Personally, I have some experience with this small-town wariness of irreligious thinking and immovable resistance to having such blasphemies appear in local newspapers. I live in an otherwise wonderful city of about 15,000 in the mid-Midwestern Great Plains, which in my experience is as Bible-belty in outlook as the American South’s iconic Bible Belt.

Several years ago, I approached the editor of our local newspaper—it used to be daily but is now printed only twice weekly (and is also online)—with a request to write, for free, a regular column on humanism for the paper (I was sure one on atheism wouldn’t fly). Uh, no, he said, without clear explanation, other than he didn’t think it would have many readers among his subscribers.

In subsequent years, I followed up by sending him the same query by email, with an explanation that by now roughly a third of the country had become “nones”—who place religion vanishingly low, if not nonexistent, on their list of priorities. I suggested to the editor, therefore, that more than a few locals might be interested in learning about other life philosophies and that, in fact, many people in this part of the country probably had virtually no understanding of what humanism entailed. So, I stressed, an informative standing column on the subject would be public service, a chance for his esteemed publication to broaden minds.

Still, no response, candid or otherwise.

So, this community paper—the only one (and many towns nowadays don’t even have that)—still chronically publishes its weekly offerings on Christian dogma and spirituality, as if they’re as true as the police blotter item on a guy who stole a case of Bud Light at the local gas station convenience market. But nothing in the local gazette ever suggests there might be another, perhaps better, way of considering human existence and truth. Which is to say critical thinking. For that to happen people need access to diverse information and competing ideas—and, more importantly, they need community permission to seriously consider such information—and accept or reject it, on its merits—rather than just accept wholesale the “received wisdom” of the down-home, right-wing Christian nationalist propaganda they grew up with, tooth and jowl.

Encouragingly, a newspaper in a city of 250,000 about an hour away did publish a couple of op-eds I wrote, but larger metros can be expected to have inhabitants with much more diverse demographics and religious leanings than their tiny, scattered neighboring communities.

A couple of telling incidents a few years ago underscored for me this small-town cultural insularity concerning religion.

One time, I accompanied my wife to lunch with an old high school classmate in their tiny (fewer than 1,000 souls) hometown. Because large families are standard in this centuries-old farming community, we sat down to eat at a vast dining table with every seat filled at her friend’s longtime family home. The matriarch of the very Catholic clan, in a welcoming gesture to me, the new face at the table, offered me the distinct honor of saying grace.

For a nano-second I hope no one noticed, I froze. Raised Catholic, I knew the Catholic pre-meal prayer (“Bless us o’ Lord for these thy gifts …”), but only dimly after decades of atheism because I had never prayed before eating in my own home, or in others’. In addition, even if I could remember it all, saying grace would be a stark betrayal of what I believed, and a public acknowledgement of a deity I was long convinced didn’t actually exist. What to do? I quickly decided to lateral the offer to my wife, also brought up Catholic but not an atheist, saying she would certainly do a better job of it. Her eyes revealed she didn’t appreciate the surprise nomination but, out of love (she long knew my religious aversions) and, I suspect, a desire to avoid more awkwardness, she acceded. Whew! Cultural crisis averted.

Another time, my wife and I were visiting with a group of her old schoolmates at one of their homes, and the conversation was liberally sprinkled if not inundated with references to “praise Jesus,” the “Lord” and “God willing,” even though the topics being discussed had nothing to do with religion. Those present, except for me and perhaps my wife, seemed to wholeheartedly assume we all had the exact same devotion to the Christian God. That assumption had been continuously reaffirmed during their lives of undisturbed communal homogeneity. Out of counterproductive politeness and the knowledge that revealing what I really thought would vaporize the upbeat communal vibe of the moment, I smiled fraudulently and stayed mostly silent, talking only about real things.

It reminded me of another time when I was working in Saudi Arabia and one of my American-university educated Saudi co-workers asked me about Christianity. That time I was more forthcoming: I told him I wasn’t a Christian, and I’ll never forget the almost fearful look on his face when he then asked me, “But, you believe in God, right?”

“No, I’m an atheist,” I told him honestly (hoping it wouldn’t get my head chopped off in that uber-Muslim country if word got out.) It didn’t, but I could tell it changed our relationship. Afterward, my co-worker seemed a little more wary, a little less trusting. I could have been imagining that, but I don’t think so. We never got more collegial after that, though things had seemed headed that way at first.

My wife’s hometown newspaper, as my own, today publishes regular weekly clichéd pastor columns extolling Christianity but nothing of other religions or alternative life philosophies. Likewise, Saudi Arabian periodicals—all aspects of existence actually—are awash only in the tenets of that Mideast region’s majority religion, Islam. In some Muslim states in the region, apostates—folks who stop believing—can still be “put to the sword,” as they say.

The rigid mandates of religion long culturally embedded in communities and societies run deep. Other spiritual traditions, therefore, are viewed in native villages as unfathomably different, and nonspiritual philosophies as mortal and moral threats.

The net result in America’s fly-over country is an insularity that keeps its citizens intellectually cocooned and largely ignorant of humanistic concepts because they rarely—if ever—encounter them day-to-day in their newspapers, schools, churches and, thus, in communal conversations. Such ideas largely don’t exist in these segregated outposts of U.S. cultural insularity. So traditional habits of mind and local practice trump (pun intended) cultural uevolution, innovation and verifiable reality. you

Even if rural folk regularly watch news on cable, statistically it’s Fox News, whose female anchors chronically wear virtue-signaling Christian-cross necklaces, which the New York Times says is now “a hot accessory at the intersection of faith and culture. In fact, all Fox anchors routinely and casually invoke the absolute primacy of Jesus, unlike other mainstream news shows that generally keep religion out of their reporting. Note also that U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt are daily cross wearers who routinely appear on Fox News broadcasts, so even if citizens reach for information outside their rural bubbles, chances are good they will just find ideas that reconfirm their traditional biases.

Imagine if local columns on humanistic ideas were regular features of small-town newspapers all over the country as a counterweight to historically ubiquitous “Pastor’s Corner”-type ruminations. It would indirectly give readers permission to think for themselves, to notice that there is never just one way of thinking. That acknowledging empirical realities may be just as compelling a mandate—if not, as “nones” believe, more—than continually reinforcing the heretofore ancient, unyielding grip of humankind’s irrational, supernatural fears.

“Heathens’ Corner” columns, anyone?

But don’t be surprised if local editors show zero to no interest in publishing them.