Finding God among the stars
The Thunderstruck interview with Cathleen Falsani

By Angela Pancella

Thunderstruck readers probably know Cathleen Falsani’s name. Her byline has appeared in the articles linked here many a time. Falsani is the religion writer for the Chicago Sun-Times, and she “has always been interested in discovering God in the places some people say God isn’t supposed to be”—in her own way, putting the pop back in culture. That description shows up in the dust jacket of her new book The God Factor: Inside the Spiritual Lives of Public People (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)—a collection of conversations on spiritual matters with everyone from Bono to Elie Wiesel, Russell Simmons to David Lynch, Billy Corgan to Hugh Hefner, Annie Lennox to Anne Rice.

Now that she’s written a book, it’s time to put “God Girl”—a term of endearment—on the other side of the interview desk.

Thunderstruck: Each of the interviews in the book starts with a quick fact sheet on the subject, including what faith the person was raised in and what he or she follows now. Sometimes it’s traditional—Baptist, Muslim—and sometimes it isn’t—Buddh-ish, Buddhalupist.
Cathleen Falsani: The point being that even if that is the label, if you peel it back and look at what’s underneath, it’s far more complicated and complex. Even for someone who very much embraces a traditional label, there’s always some way they’re finding their own path and defining their own place within that tradition. That’s true to every person in the book.

My favorite quote from you is in your Introduction: “In our mainstream media, little of what we learn about the beliefs of public figures goes beyond labels—this actor’s Catholic, that one’s a Buddhist. But labels don’t mean a damn thing.”
They don’t. They’re conversation-enders. Melissa Etheridge says to me at one point, “Thank you so much for asking about this because normally people—if they do, which is rare—will say, ‘Are you religious?’ and I’ll say, ‘No, I’m spiritual’ and that’s the end of the conversation.” And she really likes to talk about this stuff. If I hadn’t reminded her that she had another appointment I think we would have sat there all afternoon.

Why do you think mainstream media has had difficulties delving into faith issues?
Many journalists are not trained to talk about faith. It was, until quite recently, considered impolite to talk about it publicly unless you were a clergyperson. And so they wouldn’t ask for any number of reasons. Or if they did ask and they got an answer, they didn’t know what to do with it or wouldn’t know what to follow up with.

I find this problem with the coverage of President Bush. Now, he keeps religion reporters at arm’s length. I don’t think any of us—and there are several hundred full-time religion reporters for all the major media outlets in the United States and Canada—I don’t think any of us ever actually had a conversation with President Bush about what he believes.

Wow. Why is that?
There are people in the political press corps who wouldn’t know what to do with a religious question just because it’s not their frame of reference and they don’t have any training. Happily, increasingly—I’ve been doing this for ten years—in the last five years in particular I’ve watched my particular niche of secular journalism change. Most of us are specialists, we didn’t just get assigned the religion beat because nobody else wanted it or because we were about to retire and they were putting us out to pasture or because, you know, somebody heard we sang in the choir. And that’s how it used to be not that long ago. Nobody wanted it; it was like the hot potato in the newsroom. Now it’s a very hot beat in the other direction. People have seen what can be done with it and how important it is if you just define it beyond the constructs of institutional religion.

So the changes have mostly taken place in the last decade?
Oh, definitely. I started in ‘96 and here we are in 2006. The cultural dialogue in the public square in the United States is dramatically different than it was in 1998, 1999. It started to change a bit right around the millennium because people get nervous about the end of the world. Then we had 9/11 and that traumatized us. That changed it yet again. Then we had George W. Bush and his speechwriter, Michael Gerson—who’s a wonderful fellow and a faithful man who reintroduced some very historical language of faith back into the presidential rhetoric in a different way than we’d seen it in a bit. [Gerson is one of the subjects interviewed in The God Factor.] Even though folks like Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter and others had talked about their faith, it’s been presented differently and reacted to differently. The whole culture, that particular little tiny part about how we speak of faith in culture has changed dramatically.

And now there are scholarships for journalists who want to study theology.
Oh, gosh, yeah, there are a number of things out there available. I think of my probably eight or ten closest friends who do what I do for a living around the country, most of us have graduate degrees in something related to this, whether it’s divinity or theology or philosophy or comparative religion, or have had some sort of further training. I have a master’s degree in theological studies and the woman who is one of my competitors across the street at the Tribune has something like that. I know she studied it in graduate school purposely to train herself to do what she’s doing now, which is exactly what I did.

We know what we’re doing more than we did before. I think everybody [in the newsroom] does. Because we’re writing about it more, we’re learning from our popular culture, we’re learning from our media, from what we read and absorb. The coverage is just a lot better than it was five years ago. There’s a working vocabulary in this newsroom that wasn’t there when I started six years ago.

In the time you’ve been writing, how has the country changed spiritually?
I think we’re expressing ourselves differently. I don’t think there’s any more or less faith than there’s ever been, I just think that we’re less shy to let it be where it naturally would be for us—which for some of us is in every part of our lives and in others is very compartmentalized. I went to Wheaton College and every once in a while I’ll talk to somebody there who’ll say, “Oh, it must be really hard for you in the media, they must be really judgmental.” I’m like, “No, actually, it’s you people who have no idea that I went to Wheaton that write hate mail who give me a hard time!” I’ve never had a hard time from a colleague in the newsroom at all, and there are quite a number of people of faith in this business, so it’s a complete wives’ tale that the media are a bunch of godless ink stained wretches. That’s not true at all.

Some of the people who scream about faith being in jeopardy, I think, perhaps have a different kind of agenda that isn’t necessarily about faith. But I’m an optimist. I see God all over the place, and other people who have ostensibly the same lens as I do (theologically speaking) just don’t see it the same way. And I don’t know why that is exactly, but fear is a fairly determinative force in a lot of people’s lives; it makes us do a lot of funny things.

I noticed you didn’t censor your interviewees’ use of swear words.
I’m not exactly the most delicate speaker myself. I’m not saying that that’s a good thing. It’s lazy talk, but I’m not afraid of the well-placed profanities. I wasn’t going to be trying to censor someone like Billy Corgan if people do express themselves that way.

So you started writing for the Sun-Times in ‘96?
No, I started writing for the Sun-Times in 2000, I started covering religion in Chicago in ‘96. At the time it was as an intern at the Tribune.

And you went into journalism specifically to cover religion?
Yeah, I earned both Masters [in theological studies and journalism] at the same time, specifically designed to be a religion reporter for a secular news outlet.

Was your style, which is often more of a mix of religion and pop culture, a hard sell for the paper?
I’ve always been in the Chicago market. Both the Sun-Times and the Tribune have always had religion reporters, going back years and years and years. The suburban papers have had them, too. I started at a suburban paper after I left the Tribune as an intern, as the lowest form of life, and I was at a suburban paper for a few years before I came here. Blessedly, they let me do religion coverage the way I always thought it should be done, ‘cause it’s really not a boring topic and bone-dry. It shouldn’t just be about some sort of general conventions twice a year; it’s much broader than how it had been covered before. It involves every area of life. It’s exciting and funny and maddening—and it should be embraced as such. Sun-Times editors have been very supportive over the years and let me do a lot of crazy things like, you know, get on the bus with Bono and fly out to the Playboy Mansion.

When you were sequencing the book, did you have themes in mind?
No. The very last thing my publisher, Sarah Crichton, and I did (she was my editor as well, we worked very closely together)—literally, I was done with the manuscript, it was the next day, we came in, we made a few line changes here and there, and then we sat in her office with each chapter stapled separately and laid them out like playing cards. We knew we wanted to start with Bono and end with Elie Wiesel, and then as we started thinking there was sort of a natural progression. It didn’t take very long; I think we ordered up the chapters in maybe an hour. And there were just people that made sense being next to each other and we wanted some contrast; some of the chapters are longer and some shorter. So, yeah, there wasn’t an overall story I was trying to tell when we ordered the chapters, but I think in some ways it does tell a story.

The sequencing pointed up the interesting parallel between Bono and Hefner— the one stereotypically the saint, the other the sinner.
And neither one of them is either one of those things.

They’re both misunderstood.
And I think they’d be a hell of a lot more comfortable around each other than around a lot of other people. One of them is a bit more proper than the other. Frankly, I think maybe that’s a generational thing. Or cultural.

So tell me more about 2002 in Dublin, which in the book you say is the first time you met Bono. Where as you left him you remember saying to him, “Everything you do is art.”
Yes. It was my birthday. I go to Ireland almost every year. I’ve been going for years. My best friend and I just decided to go over for a long weekend. I usually stay at the Clarence [Hotel in Dublin, owned by Bono and The Edge]. It’s where my husband and I stayed for part of our honeymoon. So my friend and I were going to the Tea Room [restaurant] at the Clarence. I’m usually ready first and I’m impatient, so I went downstairs to have a drink and wait for her, and by the time she came down I’d had a couple glasses of champagne. That started the evening.

While we were in the Tea Room, in comes Bono and Edge, and Gavin Friday and Andrea Corr—the usual suspects—with a bunch of other people. It must have been somebody’s birthday in their group as there was singing involved. And we watched from across the room, having a great time thinking, “Oh how funny.” Eventually, they went on their way and so did we. A little later in the evening in the hotel lounge, one of the guys who works at the hotel comes over to us and says, “Are you going to go down to Lillie’s?” [a nightclub not far from the Clarence] and we’re like, “Oh, I dunno, it’s kinda late.” And he’s like, “Go ahead, go to Lillie’s, we’ll call ahead to make sure you can get in.”

So we did. It’s a huge place and at one point my friend lost track of me and discovered me some time later in the VIP lounge with Bono and [his good friend, the artist] Guggi, with whom I was deep in conversation. Bono was sitting a few feet away under a sort of rose-colored lamp, if memory serves. Now mind you, I’ve never discussed this with Bono. I don’t remember any of it terribly clearly and if I had to guess, he probably doesn’t either.

But I do remember my parting words of “Everything you do is art.” It’s become a running joke among my friends and family. When I’m being really ridiculous, they’re like, “Yeah, ‘everything you do is art’” and I die a little.

I love your interviews with Bono, especially those you conducted with him during DATA’s Heart of America Tour, because with you, Bono talks about things he doesn’t often talk about otherwise.
I guess. He says I’m a pain in the ass. He does. A few years ago he had a Christmas party in DC for the people who’d been involved in the Heart of America Tour and a bunch of the people in DC that he’d been working with politically. My boss had not met him when he was in Chicago the year before because he was abroad at the time. They’re very much alike although my boss is British and, obviously, Bono’s Irish, but they’ve both been to Africa. They have very different ideas about what should happen in Africa, but they have similar dispositions and I thought they had to meet. So Michael [Cooke], my boss, flew in and at one point [Bono] finally gets to meet Michael and the first thing he says to Michael is, “She’s a huge pain in the arse, you know that? She just keeps coming back and back. She’s just a giant pain in the ass.” Yeah, I love you too, B.

So how did you get on the Heart of America Tour?
I’d been writing about AIDS in Africa occasionally, here and there. It’s been an interest and concern of mine since I was an undergrad. All of the sudden I started seeing [Bono’s] name attached to it in evangelical circles, which I thought was rather interesting, knowing his history from the mid-eighties, the mid-nineties. So one day, I don’t know where, I read or saw or heard something about him getting on a bus and driving across the Midwest; I’m like, “There is no way this man is going to Nebraska—I don’t believe you.” But I did a little Googling around and saw it was true, and I thought, “Huh.”

I was having dinner with my husband, who’s also a journalist, downtown that night, and we’re driving home on the Eisenhower Expressway. My husband and I had met [U2 manager] Paul McGuinness previously under completely unrelated social circumstances. So my husband says, “Well, why don’t you just call Paul and see if you can get on the bus?” and I laughed at him. I’m like, “Yeah. Oh, yeah, I’ll just get right on that!” He’s like, “You know, you’ll never know if you don’t ask.” So I started ruminating on this and I thought, “What the hell?”

So the next morning I start calling around and no one’s in the DATA office because they’re already in the field because it’s three days before they were starting the tour. After a lot of hunting by phone and on the internet I eventually find [DATA’s then-publicist] Jen Bluestein and she says, “Fine, fine, fine, you can go on the bus.” But she’s like, “You might have to be in a chase van. You might have to rent a car.” I’m like, “But then who’s going to drive my car while I’m on the bus with him?” She said, “We’ll figure it out! Come to Nebraska!” The next thing I knew I was in Nebraska.

Having told you part of the birthday story from a couple months before that, my initial reaction was “YESSS!” and then “Oh, sssshhh-t. I really hope he doesn’t take one look at me and go, “You were that really drunk girl at Lillie’s.” But he did not. So I don’t know if he remembers.

People have said much more embarrassing things to him.
This is true. I’ve seen it.

I still wasn’t sure what I was going to get or what kind of access I was going to have. There were another two journalists who were with us for a day or two, but the rest of the time it was just me traveling with DATA. And yeah, it was great, to spend time on the record and to watch Bono do his thing in different venues.

Frankly, when I convinced Jen Bluestein to let me on the bus, I didn’t know they were going to Wheaton. I think I realized it later that day and I thought, “Oh, okay, this is providential.” Going back to Wheaton with him was really—I wrote a column where I think I wrote something cheesy, like: “I guess you could call it a sort of homecoming.” It was because I’ve never been back for homecoming weekend. I went back with him and the experience there changed the way I had felt about some things that I had been disconcerted about since I’d graduated. It was a great experience.

And then to spend time on the record and off the record and to see how he behaves with strangers and to see how he behaves when he’s misbehaving and when he’s pissed off or when he’s talking to his wife, all those different things, a vantage point that not many people get to have—I was very fortunate.

When I was younger, I used to tell people, “I don’t want to hang out with Bono, I don’t want his autograph. I want to go to church with him, I want to have a conversation with him.” And then I went to church with him—four times in a week and had all these conversations. It was an extraordinary experience for a fairly young journalist to get the ultimate assignment in my particular, peculiar little universe.

I learned a lot, and it was really challenging; he was great and challenging sometimes. And I appreciate that in him. He was remarkably open; all of those good things you would hope that when you finally meet someone who you had so much regard for from a distance for such a long time—it’s no secret that I was a fan since I was like eleven or twelve. To have him be even more, even better, than I thought and hoped he would be, that was a real blessing. If he had turned out to be some schmuck I think I would have been crushed. He’s great with people—and not just people that he is trying to get something from politically to help suffering Africans, just with people in general. He’s got a real gift that way.

What I have heard and seen about his manner reminds me of the idea of seeing Jesus in everybody you meet.
He has that kind of gift. It was interesting; recently I wrote about a fellow named Jean Vanier who is the founder of L’Arche (when he was here in Chicago). L’Arche is all over the world, where disabled adults live with non-disabled adults in these small homes. Being in the presence of Jean Vanier, the way he interacts with people and the way he looks at you, really looks at you, there’s a similar quality about [him and Bono]. They’re just fully present. Even as frenetic [as Bono’s life is]—when you have his attention, you have his attention. It has to do with respect and all of that good stuff. And he’s a very loving guy. Now I don’t pretend to know him terribly well, certainly I wouldn’t presume to call him a friend or anything like that, but the time I have spent around him was illuminating and inspiring, spiritually and otherwise.

In regard to being a religion reporter, how have you chosen how much to reveal about your faith background?
I was never shy about it; it was just a matter of journalistic integrity, and trying to not appear to be biased and all that stuff. There’s a big debate within the religion journalism community about what you should and shouldn’t reveal about your religious predilections. I used to be very, very hard and fast about not revealing anything about myself because I didn’t want to tell people what “team” I was on. I think now it’s a judgment call. I think if you use it as leverage in one direction or another, it’s not right. But when I became a columnist and I was writing about these personal things—when you’re writing in your own voice—you get a very different kind of response from readers, and they were sharing things with me that were very intimate. And then when I started to have more of these conversations with public people, and they were telling me these things, I thought, I really should be talking about this myself. So when it feels appropriate, I let it come out instead of stifling it.

So you didn’t start doing columns right away?
No, I think I was at the paper for a year before I started doing a column in addition to religion reporting. I wear two hats. I write a column once a week. I also occasionally do a guest column more often than that, but it’s normally once a week every Friday. Other than that it’s daily reporting—like today I’m writing about some pastor who got evicted from his parsonage because of some infighting in his Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, and a Catholic school that is closing and I’m working on a couple of big feature stories for this weekend and next weekend.

Originally “The God Factor” was a series you were running in the paper. How often do you do the big “God Factor” interviews?
I haven’t done any since the book came out and I probably won’t. I have no plans to continue “The God Factor” series in the Sun-Times—at least not in its original form. It’s a book now and that’s the medium where I believe the project (me talking to famous people about faith) should remain. I continue, however, as I always have, to have long, interesting conversations about faith, religion, spirituality, values, ethics, philosophy, morals, and mores with all sorts of people in the pages of the Sun-Times. It’s one of my favorite things about my day job.

You make the conscious decision to let people go with what they’re saying.
Right. It was very conscious that when I approached people I’d say, “I am not going to judge you, I’m not going to say whether what you believe is right or wrong, genuine or otherwise.” Frankly, if I didn’t think it was genuine, they weren’t in the book—if I thought they were playing me or something, which was a very rare experience.

Like with Hugh Hefner—he would have said completely different things if he’d felt attacked.
Of course. And I didn’t want people to be on the defensive, I wanted to give them the opportunity to really explain what they believe to a person who understands the language of faith, whether it’s mine or somebody else’s. I’ve spent ten years dealing with people who talk about their faith. I know what question to ask next and I don’t have to judge you in order to get you to say the thing that you really want to say without being afraid. They were very brave, very generous, kind, candid people. They were easy interviews to do; it wasn’t like pulling teeth. There wasn’t anybody who clammed up. They knew I was coming. A lot of them had weeks, if not months, to prepare for me showing up on their doorstep. They knew. There were things they wanted me to know about themselves and they told me. So, they were great, very sacred encounters, a lot of them.

I was struck by that quote from one of your interviewees on how moral people do a lot of evil.
Barry Scheck. Yeah. Barry’s one of my favorite interviews in there. Very interesting, really let his guard down, and he’s a terrific guy. Doesn’t intuit the existence of a God but yet he believes that what he does is an inherently spiritual pursuit and that sometimes the people who think they’re the most moral do incredibly evil things because they don’t see their own vulnerability. I’m paraphrasing. He says it far more articulately than I do.

You wouldn’t necessarily get that insight from someone with a religious background. It’s good to have across the board spiritualities—I would have been tempted, if I could have done a book like this, to just concentrate on the people who have a deep spirituality—
—Or on people who are known for their spirituality. And we did ask those people. But we didn’t want a whole book full of those. I wanted to go, as I say, to the places God supposedly isn’t supposed to be—or the unlikely places, the counterintuitive places.

—Angela Pancella is a free-lance writer now living in Cincinnati. She’s written for @U2 (www.atu2.com), PlaybackSTL (playbackstl.com) and CityBeat (www.citybeat.com). She sometimes tells people what she’s up to at www.wuta.net/eshtine.

To read more from Cathleen Falsani, check out her blog at The Dude Abides.