"Terry has been extraordinarily creative in perceiving a real need and doing something smart about it," says Dave Van Biema, who has been writing about religion for Time magazine for years. "His approach was unusual, new and effective, and he deserves his props."
Speaking over burritos at a Mexican chain restaurant - a member of the Eastern Orthodox church, he vets his diet carefully, and the place lets you build your own - he says the media and religion have long been at odds, each viewing the other, at best, with a wary eye.
"Here you have these two powerful forces in American life, each protected by the First Amendment," he says. "They don't talk to each other. They don't respect each other. Sometimes they don't like each other. I live in both. And that has been my life."
He's one of a handful of people to have grown up in both camps, with an equal passion for both. The son of a father who was a Southern Baptist preacher and a mother who taught language arts, Mattingly grew up fascinated by writing, politics and the ways in which faith influences human behavior - including music, sports and the visual arts.
A voracious reader, he always wanted to be a newspaper reporter.
As a student at Baylor University's journalism school, he sensed early on that he might have a niche. In 1976, the same year Mattingly was campaigning for Jimmy Carter, the first openly "born-again" presidential candidate, an editor at the student paper asked him to cover a campus foreign missions conference.
"I went there, and saw all the [recruiting] booths and everything, but to my amazement, almost nobody showed up," he says.
He told the editor, who decided it wasn't a story. Mattingly disagreed. "At the largest Southern Baptist university in the world, a missions conference is a huge event," he says. "When nobody shows, that's a big deal. We were looking at the rise of the materialism that would dominate" the late 1970s and the 1980s.
Over the years, he experienced similar reactions from editors as he pitched stories on matters that to him seemed self-evidently important: the lavish lifestyle and rumored sexual peccadilloes of Rev. Jim Bakker, head of PTL ministries in North Carolina; anti-abortion rallies in Washington that attracted thousands more marchers than their pro-choice counterparts; and the arrival in Colorado of Focus on the Family, the ministry of James Dobson, then the second-most popular radio personality in the U.S.
