For the past ten plus years, I was on the masthead of a magazine as a contributing writer. Initially, that meant a paid retainer to write a couple of features a year, but when money got tight, it went down to one feature a year and then none. I was still writing regular short things for them up until I got cancer last September, but something wasn’t sitting well with me about the direction things were going in at this magazine.
This requires a little digression, so skip this paragraph and if you’re already informed about some of the ups and downs of writing for religious-run publications. This magazine I wrote for was run by a Catholic religious order, The Jesuits, and they had once gotten into deep shit with the Vatican for challenging some aspects of Catholic dogma which led to their then editor being forced to resign.
By the time I showed up, they had promoted a woman editor who was looking to expand the perspectives in the magazine, so she invited me to become a regular contributor. Generally, it was a pretty good gig and I had a fair amount of liberty to take on lefty social justice and feminist issues (except for abortion), but sometimes in editing I found that the edge was sanded off some of my pieces, and I got a lot of hate mail.
I’ve written here before about how I was never really able to talk about being pro choice in my writing for religious publications, but then this happened.
To be fair, they later rescinded this endorsement after Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony, and rescinding that got them the attention of secular media. But then this happened.
And many other incidents of takes that I really could not even bring myself to read. Friend of this Substack Tony Ginocchio has written about some of these editorial flops in his newsletter, which I highly recommend. But as long as my name was on the masthead, I had to bite my tongue and not say what I was really thinking about the way things were headed editorially, which was, in essence, “what the actual fuck.”
I want to be clear here that I really like all of my editors at this magazine, including the current editor in chief, and almost every writer who contributes to it who I’ve gotten to know, including my recently deceased friend Greg Hillis. But just because a magazine has some writers you like and respect and editors you like and respect doesn’t stop it from also including some really toxic contributors who have written some downright dangerous stuff. I also understand that because the magazine got into so much trouble in the past, they have to tread very carefully about what they do and don’t include or they risk losing funding.
This is a problem that’s unique to religion media, and it’s also why secular run religion publications like The Revealer (where I had a column before I got cancer), Religion News Service, Sojourners, ARC (formerly Religion and Politics) and Religion Dispatches are so important. For Catholic publications, National Catholic Reporter and Commonweal are run by lay people and have more editorial freedom, but they both operate on a shoestring budget. So they can’t fund as much deeply reported stuff as I was able to do for my former gig.
It’s a real conundrum for contributing writers at any publication. Do I disagree with the editorial board or the editor’s decisions about writers they work with, and if so, should I quit? When Tom Cotton wrote an op/ed for the New York Times endorsing a military response to Black Lives Matter protests, the op/ed editor resigned due to the backlash. More recently, two Times writers resigned after signing a letter condemning Israel’s actions in Gaza. I’m not high profile enough to write for the New York Times (and honestly they have rejected every pitch I’ve ever sent), but sometimes quitting is the only form of protest we have as writers.
So in the same week when I quit my Instagram author page partly due to Meta’s callous attitude toward child abuse on the platform but mostly due to how shitty Instagram is for my mental health, I quit my gig as a contributing writer at America Magazine. As I told my editors, cancer has been very clarifying about what I want to write and how forthright I want to be in whatever time I have left. To their credit, they were very gracious about this, and I want to say thanks to them for the space they made for my work over the years.
It’s a financial hit, and a hit in terms of the fact that I am now down to zero places where my work is going to appear on a regular basis. But I’m still not turning on paid subscriptions here because I don’t know what this newsletter is “about” any more other than what its title promises: drafts, notes and scraps, some of which are about breast cancer, others about teaching, but not as much about religion as they once were. Which is not to say that I’ve lost interest in writing about religion, but that I want to do it in less confined and restricted ways. God knows if any editors will be interested (see what I did there?), but it was time to follow my conscience.
Ironically, the way I learned to understand how to follow my conscience out of a job in Catholic media was through one of the documents of Vatican II, Gaudium et Spes. I’ll end with a quote from that, and because I’m not writing this for a religious magazine, I’m going to change the pronouns. Because “men” doesn’t really mean all of us after all. It means the men who run things. And maybe it’s time to stop looking to them to decide how to think.
In the depths of their conscience, a person detects a law which they do not impose upon themself, but which holds them to obedience. Always summoning them to love good and avoid evil, the voice of conscience when necessary speaks to their heart: do this, shun that. For a person has in their heart a law written by God; to obey it is the very dignity of humanity; according to it they will be judged. Conscience is the most secret core and sanctuary of a person. There they are alone with God, Whose voice echoes in rheir depths.