Local author draws on own journey in writing on religion

PORTSMOUTH

Do you have to be religious to write about religion? Absolutely not, according to Portsmouth author Jeffery Sheler.

But being a former Christian fundamentalist and current Episcopalian didn’t hurt as Sheler wrote “Prophet of Purpose,” a new biography of megachurch pastor Rick Warren. The 325-page book was released last month by Doubleday.

In Sheler’s elegant Olde Towne home, a few steps from St. John’s Episcopal Church, some of his 35 religion cover stories for U.S. News & World Report hang on the walls of his study.

He was a journalist for more than 30 years, much of that time on the religion beat, and being a full-time book author hasn’t changed how he researches and writes.

“I try to subdue my voice and let the story carry the book,” Sheler said. “I see myself more as an observer and, I guess, a guide. That’s what we do as journalists.”

Sheler doesn’t like to talk about his own spirituality when interviewing spiritual figures such as Warren, whose devotional “The Purpose Driven Life” sold more than 30 million copies.

So if he’s mum on his religion views, how can his spirituality be a plus? As Aretha Franklin says, it’s all about r-e-s-p-e-c-t.

“You have to accept the sincerity of the people you’re dealing with, and not assume they’re crackpots,” Sheler said. “You have to have respect for religion if you’re going to cover it seriously and fairly.”

While some writers are in sync with religion without being religious, Sheler’s spiritual streak helped him understand people of faith in a way many journalists didn’t.

He recalled a day years ago when his U.S. News colleagues learned that Jesus Christ would be on the magazine’s cover.

“A lot of my co-workers were saying, 'Why are we doing this?’ There were a lot of eyes rolling,” Sheler said.

But not his. As he noted in his 2006 book “Believers: A Journey Into Evangelical America,” his own spiritual journey gave him an insider’s ear for Christian and particularly evangelical attitudes.

“You have to learn their vocabulary. You’ve got to be able to speak the lingo,” he said.

Sheler’s journey began in Grand Rapids, Mich., where he became born-again and proudly fundamentalist at 14 at a Baptist church. His parents didn’t try to talk the zeal out of him, but neither were they religious.

Sheler’s spiritual ardor (which he considers something of a teenage rebellion) cooled by high school graduation. After a stint at Michigan State, he transferred to a Christian college, following his girlfriend, Doreen. He was 19 when they married.

His gossamer interest in the pastorate fizzled shortly before the riotous Democratic convention in 1968. Sheler was fascinated by the TV reporters who captured the hub-bub. He recalled thinking, “I could see myself doing that. That’s cool!”

Sheler returned to Michigan State to study journalism, then covered the state legislature and autos for United Press International. After eight years, U.S. News recruited him and he eventually moved to Washington, D.C.

With evangelist Pat Roberton’s presidential run and the rise of the Christian Coalition, it was no surprise that religion popped up on U.S News’ radar by the late ’80s.

Sheler willingly took on the topic, reporting the latest buzz in cover stories that included Billy Graham, creation and the debate over the historical Jesus.

In the doing, Sheler found his passion. Religion “has as much importance, if not more, than politics, economics,” he said. “It’s an area people feel strongly about, and there’s such diversity in it.”

By then, he’d traded his Baptist ways for a Nazarene-tradition church. It was still evangelical but, to Sheler’s eye, less rigid, “less arrogant,” than his boyhood congregation.

Yet even the Nazarenes had straight-laced do’s and don’ts that Sheler came to see more as cultural than Christian-based. Moreover, the Shelers came to feel they were missing out on Christianity’s rich traditions of ritual and sacrament.

So they moved to a conservative Presbyterian church in Washington. In 2000, they moved to Portsmouth to be close to one of their two daughters and joined St. John’s Episcopal Church. Sheler now is on the vestry, or governing panel, and in a small parish faith group with his wife.

In 2003, U.S. News dropped its full-time religion beat, a move repeated at many publications, including The Virginian-Pilot.

Sheler opted to do what he knew best – write about religion – but in books. In 1999, he’d written “Is the Bible True?” a historical examination of the Bible.

He took on the Warren biography to scratch what he thought itched the public. Warren is founder of Saddleback Church, a California megachurch; he also gave the invocation at President Barack Obama’s inauguration.

“They know him as a very successful pastor, a guy who hangs out with presidents, who wrote a best-selling book,” Sheler said. “They don’t know him as a human being.”

Warren agreed to 10 hours of interviews. Sheler also interviewed Warren’s wife, Kay; his sister; and many others who knew or worked with him.

Sheler found Warren as mellow as the Hawaiian shirts the preacher used to wear during church.

“There really isn’t a public and private persona,” Sheler said. “He’s just a really kind of laid-back guy.”

Despite Warren’s collaboration, the book is an “unofficial” biography because Sheler would not let Warren review it before publication.

That insistence reflected Sheler’s journalistic distrust of so-called authorized biographies that give the subject editing privileges.

“I assume nothing is in there that the person didn’t want,” Sheler said, “so there’s a cloud of suspicion over it.”

But Sheler dropped one journalistic tenent; he missed the deadline for his manuscript. The gaffe turned out to be providential.

During the one-year delay, Warren publicly interviewed Obama and rival John McCain on national TV during the presidential race, and he gave the inaugural invocation, captured in the book’s cover photo.

“The last of the presidential cycle yielded about three chapters,” Sheler chuckled.

Steven G. Vegh, (757) 446-2417,

steven.vegh@pilotonline.com