Clark Morphew's Farewell Column At The Pioneer Press
"A farewell after two decades of telling profound stories"
This is the last column I will write for the Pioneer Press and the Knight Ridder Tribune news service.
Economic pressures at the newspaper have claimed my column as one of its victims.
Check me out at my Web site and let me know about the religious happenings in your area. I'm still interested, and I'll do my best to get the word to other interested people.
But what a wonderful time I've had reporting the news and commenting on the profound changes that have taken place over the past 20 years.
When I became a reporter and columnist at the Pioneer Press in 1981, fundamentalist preachers were taking over religion in America. The powers at the Pioneer Press wanted someone who could make sense of the nation's shift to fundamentalist Christianity. I was the newspaper's first full-time religion writer.
It was a frightening time, because believers were leaving historic churches in droves. Some were hooking up with fundamentalist and evangelical churches that wanted to control their lifestyles as well as their hearts. Other seekers, particularly the young, were throwing themselves into cults and new religions as if they had just discovered religion. I can see now that the rise of fundamentalism was also the death warning for mainline Christianity.
One week I would write about Jerry Falwell and his many visits to President Reagan at the White House, and the next week I would be wondering about the mind-snapping tactics of the Moonies or the Way International. Both religions, by the way, had branches established in the Twin Cities.
One night I awakened at 3 a.m. and drove through the early-morning hours to interview a young man who had been dragged from his parents' home by his cultic buddies and taken to a refuge in Wisconsin. It was a grubby little religion that never had more than a handful of devotees.
Another day I would be in Washington, D.C., watching the Catholic bishops draft a letter against nuclear war and weapons or in favor of a new economic structure in America. Those meetings were grand and elegant and presided over by our own Archbishop John Roach.
I covered Pope John Paul II on three occasions, once in Winnipeg, another in Detroit and, the last time, in Denver for the World's Youth Congress. I was a correspondent at every major religious convention in the United States, including the religious broadcasters convention in Washington, D.C., where George Bush told the fundamentalists their theology was too brutal and the surgeon general, C. Everett Koop, told the television preachers their opposition to the use of condoms was basically stupid.
But the most interesting religion stories were at home, in St. Paul and Minneapolis, where the machinery of religion was always grinding away. Most of the movers and shakers who were in place when I began as a religion writer are now retired or deceased. I have watched those leaders change as new names and faces took the mantle of authority.
I remember a man who backed me against a wall and vowed to gravely injure me if I didn't stop gathering information about his religious commune. He's still alive, intimidating more than 300 followers in St. Paul.
I remember the turmoil created by the merger of three Lutheran denominations into the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. That was 13 years ago, and now the giant church body (5.2 million members) is still struggling to find unity.
All the faces that have slipped by me over the years come tumbling back into my mind: the great church leaders I was privileged to know, the small-time frauds ripping off vulnerable people, the mystics who taught me about prayer and meditation, the visionaries who thought they had discovered something new about God, and all the ordinary believers who were grateful for a little attention in my column.
Now I am pressed to sign off, but I hope you will check out my Web site and remember me in your prayers. Thanks for reading and for memories of the best two decades of my life.
Clark D. Morphew
Posted 9-29-01