Beyond the Story With Bekah McNeel

In the June issue of Sojourners, freelance journalist Bekah McNeel reports on the ongoing battle over sex education in schools—and the role of Christians on both sides of the skirmish. While some Christians are leading the culture-war fight, McNeel highlights that there are others who are working for a comprehensive approach that goes beyond silence or shame. Editorial assistant Liz Bierly spoke with McNeel about her reporting process, her upcoming book, and what is keeping her hopeful. Read McNeel's story, “The Battle Over Sex Ed."

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Liz Bierly, Sojourners: I imagine there are times, especially with the topics you are covering (equity, race, abortion, education) where you talk to someone and all of a sudden, you’re like, “Wow, this story is not what I thought it was.”

Bekah McNeel: So often. And those are my favorite stories. I  love working with editors who I can call and be like, “Hey, this is bigger than we thought,” or “There’s a nuance here that we really want to highlight.” Especially as you earn trust with a source, a lot of times in the first conversation or the beginning of a conversation, they’re rightfully suspicious of you. If they tell you a piece of their truth and you’re like, “Anyway but back to what I want to talk about,” they’re going to be like, "Alright, you’re not interested.”

But if you have an open hand with the story, people will take you—sources will take you—to a place that the narrative and the discourse hasn’t gone yet. And that’s what I love. I’m a professional journalist—if the editor says stick to the plan, we stick to the plan. But I think the better stories are when we don’t.

As you’re reporting on communities that are at least visually external to you, especially when it comes to immigration, family separation, and racism, how do you go about covering those stories in a way that is sensitive to the communities and builds trust? I have to start with myself. I am white, I am cisgender, straight, in my 30s. There’s a lot of things I’m not and a lot of things I am. I try to acknowledge that up front, because once they know that I know it, that is an invitation for them to talk about [how] that dynamic matters: The dynamic of whether you’re a citizen or not matters in the criminal justice system; the dynamic of whether you’re white or Black matters all the time, in every system.

I find that a lot of marginalized communities have had enough life experience [to know] that the white person’s comfort level is going to dictate a lot of how this goes down. If you don’t tell them, “I acknowledge that I see this too, and I’m going to call it out too,” then the assumption is that you're part of it and you’re going to reinforce it.

As far as communicating something to that audience that they don’t want to hear, Solutions Journalism is great for that. I’ve really enjoyed those trainings and learning how to do the complicating the narrative work that they do. I give huge, huge, huge credit to them because that’s a lot of what I try to do, trying to find, “Okay, what’s one thing you do agree on?” You do agree that parents and children want to be together—you were someone’s child or are someone’s parent, and you can empathize with this. You may be shutting that down in yourself because it’s inconvenient to feel empathy, but we can start at that place.

Where do you find hope in your stories, your life, and the things that you’re covering? As you’re talking about inequalities and things that are not changing or only getting worse, what keeps you going? I’m not hopeful that we will see a day where this stuff doesn’t exist. I am hopeful that every step of progress makes it a little better for someone. I don’t think we’re going to fix the immigration system anytime soon, but I do think that ending a policy of separating families at the border made things better for some families at the border. There are times when you get those rare opportunities to go upstream and fix some things, and that’s great—you should take them. But that also doesn’t mean that if the way is blocked upstream, that you stop doing the downstream work.

I’m not an activist. I’m not trying to change the world, I don’t have a list of demands. But I have seen progress in some truths that more people believe than they did 10 years ago. The fact that there are more people who even know what systemic racism is, that even know what CRT [critical race theory] is, the fact that we have a more nuanced conversation around LGBTQ identities, that’s progress that has largely come at the hands of the activist community. But seeing that change is possible makes me want to keep putting information out into the discourse to see what people do with it.

What role do you think faith plays, if any, in your reporting, your life, or your parenting? The ironic thing is that the more my religious life has been upturned, the more faith has come into play because it has been more about something I have to internally reckon with.

In reporting, I absolutely believe that people are created in God’s image and that they have a compulsion and a draw toward what is good and true and beautiful. However, I do believe that we live in a world that has been corrupted and that is actively being corrupted, and that makes it very difficult to tell what that is. I’m not usually going in [to a story] looking for a villain as much as I’m looking for where someone’s view of what is good, true, and beautiful got twisted.

My mantra for a long time has been: Just be faithful. It’s helped me be able to say, “Just do the best you can with the story in front of you, and tell it as faithfully as you can, and speak the truth when the opportunity comes, and say the things that need to be said in that moment, rather than trying to strategize when and where you’re going to go next.” It’s about relating as human beings first and building our parenting out of that, building our storytelling out of that, integrating that with our faith, [and] integrating that with the way we see God.

I think parenting would be absolutely terrifying if I didn’t believe that a loving God was present in all things and was not better at loving my children than I could ever even be. I’m very dependent on the work of the Spirit to do a better job than I can. I have a book coming out called Bringing Up Kids When Church Lets You Down, and it’s about when your faith is shifting and you haven’t quite settled somewhere.

If you’re raising your kids in, say, conservative evangelicalism, you have tons of resources that can tell you, “Here’s how you talk to your kids about this, here’s how you go about this.” Parenting is very formulaic and has been very well-packaged, and you lose that if you say, “I don’t want those same outcomes—I don’t want the damage from purity culture; I don’t want my kids growing up afraid of Hell.” The book doesn’t offer answers necessarily, it just looks at different parents who have had to have that experience and what we—I put myself in there, there’s a memoir element to it—what we have found that helps.