BOB GARFIELD: On September 27th, NPR ran an obituary for 27 year old Sergeant Ben Isenberg, who was killed in Iraq. Here's a clip. [TAPE PLAYS]

CORRESPONDENT: Ben was a devout Christian, as is the whole family -- Mom, Deanne, and Dad, Robert says it has helped them deal with Ben's death.

ROBERT ISENBERG: This war is not about Iraqis and Americans, oil. This is a spiritual war, and the people who don't understand that, they need to just dig into their Bible and read about it. It's predicted, it's pre-destined. [TAPE ENDS]

BOB GARFIELD: Kristian Foden-Vencil reported the story of profound grief with no commentary on the family's religious beliefs or their display. According to Bob Case, the director of the World Journalism Institute, that kind of reporting is all too rare. His organization attempts to counter what he sees as the compulsive secularization of journalism by getting more evangelical Christians into the newsroom. His institute holds seminars for young evangelicals -- what he calls a, quote, "boot camp for aspiring journalists of faith." He joins me now. Bob, welcome to the show.

BOB CASE: Thank you, Bob.

BOB GARFIELD: Okay. You want to get evangelicals into the newsroom, but to do exactly what?

BOB CASE: We believe that evangelical journalists ought to be, are called to be by their God, faithful in reporting the news accurately, fairly, comprehensively, verifiably. But in the newsroom itself, from a philosophic standpoint, an evangelical would bring to a discussion of a given story a perspective that would be sensitive to the claims of some 100 million evangelicals in this country. Now how that plays out politically, of course, is going to depend on the particular journalist. There is no partisanship to this. But it does have certain moral, ethical and social policy ramifications, and an evangelical journalist could bring those to bear in a given newsroom.

BOB GARFIELD: You've been quoted as saying that your role model in this enterprise is homosexual America. Tell me about that.

BOB CASE: We have created an evangelical ghetto, and so we've forfeited the right to speak to the mainstream media. For years, gay journalists were excluded from the mainstream newsrooms, and so they developed a strategy to mainstream themselves. Looking at how the gays have used their intelligence and their gifts and their talents to mainstream themselves would be a role model for us.

BOB GARFIELD: And what do you hope to gain from being represented within the mainstream?

BOB CASE: Evangelicals would not go along with the prevailing secular mind set that seems to be evident in so many of the elite media newsrooms in the country, right now, anyway. The reason I say that is we have a number of folks that teach for us or used to teach for us or would like to teach for us who are evangelicals in the elite media who have said it's kind of toxic to touch us right now, so they're keeping their head down and heading for the tall grass. Or, to use the gay journalists' idea, they're in - they're in the closet now.

BOB GARFIELD: Here, let me ambush you with a completely [LAUGHS] unfair question. [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]

BOB CASE: [...?...].

BOB GARFIELD: Maybe the most famous journalist of faith, at least up to a year ago, was USA Today's Jack Kelley, who--

BOB CASE: Yes.

BOB GARFIELD: -- went far and wide, talking about how his faith and his journalistic career really dovetailed.

BOB CASE: Yes.

BOB GARFIELD: And he often spoke of using God to help find truth, and now, of course, it turns out that Jack was a pathological liar who invented stories and did so for years without being caught. Now he's had his comeuppance. He's been fired, and many of his colleagues have gone down with him. How do you deal with the Jack Kelley situation?

BOB CASE: The fall of Jack Kelley is an astonishing tragedy for journalists of faith in this country, and when it was proven that Jack had manipulated and plagiarized and stolen money from USA Today, we didn't have an adequate response, and I think the evangelical journalists or the journalists of faith now in the mainstream media are gun shy about associating themselves with any kind of Christian endeavor, largely because of the backwash from what happened with the Kelley affair.

BOB GARFIELD: There are other fairly notable journalists who have been associated with the Institute in the past. One is NPR's own Barbara Bradley Haggerty--

BOB CASE: Yes.

BOB GARFIELD: -- and, and there's others, no?

BOB CASE: Yes. We have David Cho at the Washington Post, and Hamil Harris at the Washington Post. Rod Dreher at the Dallas Morning News. Those are folks that have publicly distanced themselves from the Institute, because of what they believe to be either our particular brand of evangelicalism or just the sense that they were told by folks at their particular news outlet that it would be better for them and their reputation in the organization and in their listenership or readership if they did not associate themselves quite so closely with such a purposely Christian organization. But I would argue that the idea that Barbara Bradley Haggerty would somehow compromise herself by associating with us or any other Christian organization is foolishness. Haggerty has entre into the leadership of, what, a hundred million evangelicals. NPR is denying themselves and their listenership the opportunity to have someone of, of Haggerty's extreme reputation and wonderful abilities to ferret out the news that are being generated by this group of a hundred million American citizens.

BOB GARFIELD: So, in the end, is the analogy like the one of racial minorities in the newsroom -- to bestow upon the secular monolith another point of view, or is it, as the mission statement kind of suggested, a, a Trojan Horse to get evangelicals into the newsrooms so that they can change the culture and carve into the very idea of secularism itself? Which is it?

BOB CASE: Is it our intention to make it a Christian newsroom? It's not the Institute's intention. But is it our intention to say there are other voices out there that take matters of the soul, matters of religion, matters of Christianity seriously, and will, in newsroom discussions, want to bring up these matters.

BOB GARFIELD: So let me ask you one hypothetical question.

BOB CASE: Yep.

BOB GARFIELD: Let's just say the World Journalism Institute had begun this process many, many years ago.

BOB CASE: Yes--

BOB GARFIELD: And there were many evangelicals within newsrooms, and now we're in the midst of a very important election in which religious issues are very much at the fore.

BOB CASE: Yes.

BOB GARFIELD: Are they out there to flog a religious point of view, or just to report the action, come what may?

BOB CASE: Report the action, come what may. If we believe -- as we say we believe, evangelicals -- in a sovereign God, then we believe that history is under his control, and we don't have to manipulate, we don't have to lie, we don't have to plagiarize. We can report the events as we see them, with verifiable accuracy, and let the results lie in the hands of our God.

BOB GARFIELD: But he still has to go through the copy desk.

BOB CASE: [LAUGHS] Indeed.

BOB GARFIELD: All right, Bob. Thanks very much.

BOB CASE: Thank you.

BOB GARFIELD: Bob Case is director of the World Journalism Institute. [MUSIC]