It was the kind of story that cried out to be told. Or so Terry Mattingly thought.
It was 1982, and a little-known punk band from Ireland was touring U.S. colleges for the first time, rattling from town to town in an old panel truck.
Mattingly, then a music writer for a small Illinois paper, was intrigued by the chorus from a song on their new album. The lyrics were, of all things, in Latin - gloria in te domine, gloria exultate - and appeared to have been taken from an ancient Mass.
In two days he spent with the band, Mattingly, a journalist who now lives in Glen Burnie, persuaded the lead singer to speak about his faith. It was the first time Paul David Hewson, better known today as Bono, went on the record about religion and the rise of U2.
The experience was telling, and not just because Mattingly learned Bono wrote "Gloria" in a "charismatic Pentecostalist frenzy," or that the band met frequently to discuss the Bible - the sort of nuggets that have made Mattingly, a columnist and blogger, one of America's most widely read religion writers.
No, when he pitched the article to Rolling Stone, the editors decided he must be making it up and took a pass. The piece ran only in the Champaign, Ill., News-Gazette and, later, in a Christian music magazine.
Religion, Mattingly says, "is the worst-covered major subject in American journalism," and he has built a uniquely robust career addressing that belief.
A former religion editor and writer at the Charlotte Observer and Rocky Mountain News, Mattingly writes a weekly column, "On Religion," that deals with religious issues, including pop culture, and that Scripps and the Newspaper Enterprise Association make available to more than 900 newspapers.
His blog, "Get Religion," which critiques the media's coverage of the subject, gets 40,000 hits a week from readers around the world, and he recently got back from a trip to Asia in support of Blind Spot: When Journalists Don't Get Religion, a book released last spring for which he wrote a chapter.
"Around the world in seven days," he says with a weary shrug.
Mattingly lives with his wife, Debra, a librarian, in a bungalow in Glen Burnie's leafy Ferndale section. He commutes daily by MARC train to Washington, where he directs the Journalism Center at the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities in Washington, a program in which students from Christian schools around the country learn the business in the classroom and through internships.
