Archive: Roy Beck On Why People Need To Know, Even When It Hurts

In his tumultuous six-year tenure at the United Methodist Reporter, the church’s semi-official newspaper, Roy Howard Beck became almost as controversial as the investigative stories he wrote so regularly.

Beck had a habit of digging out new information from far beneath the surface. His tell-it-like-it-is style of reporting earned him a nearly unequaled reputation among his fellow journalists. Yet he also won the enmity of many church institutionalists.

His new memoir, On Thin Ice, recounts his most fascinating investigations (see following story), and, significantly, asks hard questions about intellectual and moral integrity within the Church.

Good News talked with Beck recently to get his thoughts on frank church reporting.

Good News: What is your philosophy of reporting?

Beck: I’m motivated by the feeling that there’s more to a story than most people know. And the kind of reporting I try to do is not something that you’d just read somewhere else if I didn’t do it. I [try] to get at something that will make a new contribution, that will get out new information. And it’s not a cynical view, but it’s a skeptical view that there’s more to a situation than you might imagine.

Good News: Why tell unpleasant facts to people who need, presumably, to feel good about things?

Beck: I think in many cases it can be argued that in the short term people would be better off not to be bothered with unpleasant facts. I really can’t make a case against that. But I think history is full of examples where if you don’t deal with smaller incremental kinds of unpleasantries, they build pressure. To use a metaphor, they become like boils and do much greater damage and inflict greater heartache later on, because you’ve not dealt with problems—smaller type problems—along the way.

Good News: In your experience, does it do any good to tell people the facts?

Beck: Yes, I’ve been doing this since 1969, and right now I feel better than I did in the early years. A lot of times you’ll tell people the facts and it looks like absolutely nothing comes out of it. Occasionally something happens immediately, and that feels good. But a lot of times it seems like people totally ignore the facts.

Yet I’ve had enough experience through the years to know that, in most cases, the facts start to build up in people and cause people to think a little differently, and eventually something happens because of it. It’s a lot like prayer. Fortunately we don’t get everything we ask for. Often when I put out information, the result I desire doesn’t happen, yet some other kind of result does occur. It’s not my responsibility, ultimately, to decide the results of putting down the facts. But [I have a] fundamental belief that people educated with truthful information will make decisions in a more humane way.

Good News: What is the single most important idea in your book?

Beck: The absolute essential importance of exercising intellectual and moral integrity as a Christian disciple. You really aren’t behaving like a disciple if there’s dishonesty and a lack of integrity in the way that you approach issues, approach other people, and in the way you live your life.

Good News: What do you think about the argument that “the end justifies the means”?

Beck: I think I can say that I absolutely reject that. For most of us journalists, our very profession works against that [idea], because [as a reporter] you do look at all the ramifications of what people do. What people do along the way is just as important as what happens in the end. Well, I shouldn’t say it’s just as important, but it is very important.

Goodness, how many times have we watched as a person’s legacy has been so reduced after one finds out about the people that were crushed or hurt along the way to achieving what we thought of at first as a crowning achievement. A very trite example is Christian leaders who have great success in their ministries but are tremendous failures in their families—and they’re failures because of lack of attention, lack of love, whatever. Once you know those things the results of their ministry, it seems to me, are reduced.

Good News: What do you hope your book will accomplish?

Beck: I hope it will make people who take their Christianity seriously think about the message they’re using and about their assumptions. It is so easy to get caught up in a righteous goal or a righteous concern that is well-intentioned. And, really, well-intentioned isn’t enough. You’ve got to be well-informed. And I hope that [the book] will cause all kinds of Christians involved in their own righteous crusades—whether it’s for corporate responsibility, or for peace, or anti-abortion, or any kind of thing that you feel so sure of—to stop and realize that they still have an obligation to examine every step of the way.

Good News: What is your vision for the United Methodist Church?

Beck: I’ll begin with my own feeling about the importance of the United Methodist Church. I think it has a wonderful heritage, a wonderful theological tradition. For me, as a person who was not reared in the Wesleyan heritage, once I found the United Methodist Church and studied the theology, I found that it was like coming home. In fact, it was more than just coming home; it was almost a rebirth for me. Studying Wesley was one of the key ingredients. Here was a person who had absolute conviction about the importance of individual personal spiritual experience and the power of God in the individual life but didn’t step away from the use of reason.

United Methodism has so much to offer as a mainstream faith. There’s a place for a kind of Christianity where people set themselves off from society like the Amish. But I think there’s a tremendous importance in having organized religion that moves in the mainstream of society, that can influence society, that can help build the character and form the values of society—not as a kind of a long, far-off aim like the Anabaptists, but as something that can make a difference, if not this year, three or ten years from now.

And I think the denomination, as all mainline Protestant denominations, has lost a lot of its influence through recent decades because of some of the examples I point out in the book. So my real vision for the denomination is that it would just get back to being what it has been and has continued to be in many areas, and that is a great spiritual and moral force in American society.

Good News: But you have to do it in the right way?

Beck: You’ve got to be using Christian means as well as looking for Christian ends.