McCandlish Phillips--A Calling Higher than Journalism

Here's a WSJ article on one of my great heroes. Phillips helped us set up Washington journalism internships programs for Grace College students in the 1970s and he's stuck faithfully to his vision of recruiting and training young journalists with a Christian worldview to move into positions of authority in publishing.

JUNE 5, 2009

A Calling Higher Than Journalism: Who Knew?

By PETER DUFFY

For two decades beginning in the early 1950s, John McCandlish Phillips composed elegant newspaper stories under grueling deadline pressure for the New York Times, earning a reputation as one of his generation's great reporters. In his 2003 memoirs, Arthur Gelb, a longtime editor at the paper, described him as "the most original stylist I'd ever edited."

"What kind of a day is today?" Mr. Phillips wrote at the beginning of a 1969 article on the closing of a famed Times Square eatery. "It's the kind of a day that if you wanted a slice of cheesecake at Lindy's, you couldn't get it."

He was well known among his colleagues for his lanky stature, which earned him the nickname "Long John"; his sweet temper; and his uncompromising devotion to his Christian faith. "I don't remember anybody quite like him in all my years of being around people who worked for newspapers," said Gay Talese, a fellow Timesman in those days. "Newspaper people tend to be cynical. He's the very opposite of that." In the secular temple of the big-city newsroom, Mr. Phillips conspicuously placed a Bible on his desk, calling it "a statement I made of who I was and where I stood."

Mr. Phillips stunned the staff when he decided to leave full-time employment in 1973 at the age of 46. The New Yorker magazine much later called him "The Man Who Disappeared" and wondered why a figure with so much talent would "walk away from it."

But Mr. Phillips did not disappear. He channeled his imagination into the church he had co-founded with Hannah Lowe a decade or so earlier, the Manhattan-based New Testament Missionary Fellowship, a small Pentecostal congregation. His dream was to spur a massive evangelizing campaign in New York City that would result in waves of born-again Christians.

"What everyone in this city needs, with scarcely anyone knowing of it, is the one salvation that God has provided in His son, Jesus Christ," he told me in a recent interview. "My life was changed in a moment of time, permanently, by an act of evangelism [in 1950]. I know its power. And I have no chiefer desire than to see as many individuals as possible come to that same threshold and cross it."

Last year he stepped down from the church's board of trustees, but he is still at the center of its life. He manages financial investments, answers correspondence and joins regular services, which are held on Tuesday nights and Sunday mornings in three different locations. He is a grandfatherly mentor to the "32 or 33" members, many of whom came to the church through its work on several Ivy League campuses.

The church has always been small. According to Mr. Phillips, its leaders have never been concerned with increasing membership. Rather, they "put an emphasis on growth in evangelical outreach," he said. "People who come to Christ often go in a number of different directions." From the 1960s through the 1980s, members spent much time on the streets of New York. They preached, prayed and sung in areas like Times Square and Columbus Circle. In more recent years, the church has funded evangelizing efforts abroad.

Still, public evangelism in the city remains a "very high" priority, Mr. Phillips stressed. Last Saturday, he was in Central Park, participating in an event at the Bandshell sponsored by his church called "Jesus Saves and Heals." Preaching alternated with musical performances. Bibles and religious literature were offered. A prayer station was set up.

Now 81, Mr. Phillips is still spindly -- "spectral" in his description -- although a slight stoop has brought him closer to eye level. Wisps of gray hair adorn his bald head, and his voice is colored by raspiness. Although Mr. Phillips has sermonized in New York for decades -- he is known for his professorial mien -- he did not take the stage on this day. "I don't think the people are as disposed to listening to an old wizened creature as they are to youthful vibrant persons," he said. Instead, he has placed his hopes for the ministry's public efforts on the day's main speaker, Christopher White, a Yale-educated evangelist who has led the church's efforts in Latin America.

Mr. Phillips says he is at work on a "longstanding but quite uncompleted" religious work and never particularly missed journalism. In recent years three opinion pieces of his have been published in the Washington Post. The topics included media ethics and the excessive complexity of our tax system. In 2005 he took on columnists like Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich for heaping "fear and loathing" on evangelicals and traditional Catholics. "I have been looking at myself, and millions of my brethren, . . . in a ghastly arcade mirror lately," he wrote.

Mr. Phillips admits disappointment that his great hopes for the evangelization of New York City have not come to fruition. He characterized the response at Central Park as "fairly remote." But who knows what the future holds? When it is pointed out to him that some of his best stories placed their greatest weight on the final line, he chuckles. A 1966 masterpiece about a U.S. Marine killed in Vietnam concluded with the wrenching words, "He was 19 years old."

"I don't anticipate being a prime mover of a spiritual awakening," he said. "But I greatly desire to see it, and whatever its origins is thoroughly fine with me. It will come at a time chosen by God."

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In a May 4 Washington Post op-ed, "When Columnists Cry 'Jihad,'" former New York Times reporter John McCandlish Phillips, who recalled that "I was the only evangelical Christian among some 275 news and editorial employees," charged that "in more than 50 years of direct engagement in and observation of the major news media I have never encountered anything remotely like the fear and loathing lavished on us by opinion mongers in these world-class newspapers [Times and Washington Post] in the past 40 days." Asked about the allegation that night on MSNBC's Hardball, New York Times veteran R.W. "Johnny" Apple conceded to Chris Matthews: "I think both papers tend to be secular in their approach. Yes, I do. They serve largely secular audiences" and "like it or not, religious people, particularly in the Midwest, the mountain states, and the south, think that the Democratic Party is anti-religious. And, of course, they consider the New York Times and the Washington Post as arms of the Democratic Party."

Back in late March on CNN's Reliable Sources, Steve Roberts, who noted how he "worked for the New York Times for 25 years," revealed: "I could probably count on one hand, in the Washington bureau of the New York Times, people who would describe themselves as people of faith." That disconnect hurt the media, Roberts suggested, in how "there was so much attention...on the rockers and the sports celebrities who were registering voters." Roberts asked: "And how many stories did we see about that compared to the pastors and churches in Ohio who were registered ten times as many voters?" For more, go to: www.mediaresearch.org

An excerpt from "When Columnists Cry 'Jihad,'" an op-ed in the May 4 Washington Post by John McCandlish Phillips, a New York Times reporter from 1955 to 1973:

I have been looking at myself, and millions of my brethren, fellow evangelicals along with traditional Catholics, in a ghastly arcade mirror lately -- courtesy of this newspaper and the New York Times. Readers have been assured, among other dreadful things, that we are living in "a theocracy" and that this theocratic federal state has reached the dire level of -- hold your breath -- a "jihad."

In more than 50 years of direct engagement in and observation of the major news media I have never encountered anything remotely like the fear and loathing lavished on us by opinion mongers in these world-class newspapers in the past 40 days. If I had a $5 bill for every time the word "frightening" and its close lexicographical kin have appeared in the Times and The Post, with an accusatory finger pointed at the Christian right, I could take my stack to the stock market.

I come at this with an insider/outsider vantage and with real affection for many of those engaged in this enterprise. When the Times put me on its reporting staff, I was the only evangelical Christian among some 275 news and editorial employees, and certainly the only one who kept a leather-bound Bible on his desk....

The opening salvo of the heavy rhetorical artillery to which I object came in on March 24, when Maureen Dowd started her column in the Times with the declaration "Oh my God, we really are in a theocracy." While satiric, as always with the ever-so-readable columnist, it was not designed to be taken lightly....

Three days later Frank Rich, an often acute, broadly knowledgeable and witty cultural observer, sweepingly informed us that, under the effects of "the God racket" as now pursued in Washington, "government, culture, science, medicine and the rule of law are all under threat from an emboldened religious minority out to remake America according to its dogma." He went on to tell Times readers that GOP zealots in Congress and the White House have edged our country over into "a full-scale jihad." If Rich were to have the misfortune to live for one week in a genuine jihad, and the unlikely fortune to survive it, he would temper his categorization of the perceived President Bush-driven jihad by a minimum of 77 percent. If any "emboldened minority" is aiming to "remake America according to its dogma," it seems to many evangelicals and Catholics that it is the vanguard wanting, say, the compact of marriage to be stretched in its historic definition to include men cohabiting with men and women with women. That is, in terms of the history of this nation, a most pronounced and revolutionary novelty.

From March 24 through April 23 (when The Post twinned Colbert I. King's "Hijacking Christianity" with Paul Gaston's "Smearing Christian Judges"), I counted 13 opinion columns of similarly alarmist tone aimed at us on the Christian right: two more in The Post by the generally amiable and highly communicative Richard Cohen headlined "Backward Evolution" and "Faith-Based Pandering"; one by his colleague, the urbane Eugene Robinson, "Art vs. the Church Lady" (lamenting that "the pall of religiosity hanging over the city was reaching gas-mask stage"); and three by Dowd, two by Paul Krugman and three by Rich in the Times.

In "What's Going On" [March 29], Krugman darkly implied that some committed religious believers in our nation bear a menacing resemblance to Islamic extremists, by which he did not mean a few crazed crackpots but a quite broad swath of red-staters. In "An Academic Question" [April 5], Krugman, conceding the wide majority of secular liberals over conservatives on the faculties of our major universities, had the supreme chutzpah to tell us why: The former, unfettered by presuppositions of faith, are free to commit genuine investigative work and to reach valid scholarly conclusions, while the latter are disabled in that critical respect by their unprovable prior assumptions. So they are disqualified as a class from the university enterprise by their unfortunate susceptibility to the God hypothesis.

Yet most of what became the great East Coast universities (Harvard, Dartmouth, Princeton, Columbia and Yale among them) were, in cold fact, founded by men of faith and prayer for purposes that were informed and motivated by explicitly biblical principles....

In the long journey from the matchless moment when I became "born again" and encountered the risen and living Christ, I have met hundreds of evangelicals and a good many practicing Catholics and have found them to be of reasonable temperament, often enough of impressive accomplishment, certainly not a menace to the republic, unless, of course, the very fact of faith seriously held is thought to make them just that....

END of Excerpt

For the op-ed in full: www.washingtonpost.com

Romenesko ( www.poynter.org ) highlighted a mid-1990s profile of Phillips by the New Yorker's Ken Auletta. The slug line: "At one time, a whole generation of Times reporters wished they could write like McCandlish Phillips. Then he left them all for God." See: www.kenauletta.com

For a picture of Phillips: www.worldji.com

R.W. "Johnny" Apple, a veteran of the paper's Washington bureau where he served as bureau chief, came aboard MSNBC's Hardball on Wednesday night to plug his new book, Apple's America: The Discriminating Traveler's Guide to 40 Great Cities in the United States and Canada.

Host Chris Matthews raised with him the Phillips op-ed and the MRC's Geoff Dickens took down the exchange:

Matthews: "Let me talk about your newspaper. Today, in the Washington Post, somebody unloaded on the New York Times, said, his name is John McCandlish Phillips. He said your paper, and he used to work there, is anti-Christian, anti-evangelical, anti-conservative Catholic, the paper itself is."
R.W. Apple: "Well, he's talking, in fact, about, as I read the piece, about both us and the Washington Post."
Matthews: "Right."
Apple: "In terms of their columnists being anti-evangelical, anti-Catholic, anti-religious, because they claim that there's a jihad under way by the religious forces in this country. I do not believe that there's a jihad under way."
Matthews: "You believe the Times and the Post have that bias of secular bi-coastalism against the heartland of America and its religious beliefs?"
Apple: "I think, I think both papers tend to be secular in their approach. Yes, I do. They serve largely secular audiences. And I've been out around the country promoting my book. And before that, I was out on the campaign. And I have to say that, like it or not, religious people, particularly in the Midwest, the mountain states, and the south, think that the Democratic Party is anti-religious. And, of course, they consider the New York Times and the Washington Post as arms of the Democratic Party."