Fez, Morocco • It began with a rumor.

Word had spread in an Egyptian village that a Christian man and a Muslim woman were in a romantic religionship — a union religiously prohibited and socially taboo in the Arab country.

As the gossip circulated, a mob of thousands torched Christian homes and churches, reports said. Journalists flocked to the scene to understand the causes and relay what they saw. One published account featured an interview with a Muslim woman, claiming to be an eyewitness, who added more lies to already enflamed accounts. She said that Christians were practicing “black magic” to cause infertility throughout the village, holding up a sheet of paper inscribed in a language she did not recognize.

“In reality, the paper was a page from the Bible written in Coptic, a language still used in some Christian religious rituals,” said Egyptian researcher Ishak Ibrahim, who recounted the episode. “Furthermore, the actual cause of infertility in the village was rooted in poor healthcare and malnutrition.”

But the journalists at the time failed to analyze or contextualize “this dangerous rumor,” or to correct the falsehoods, Ibrahim said, feeding further discrimination against Egyptian Christians.

That makes evenhanded, fair reporting on religion even more crucial, the Egyptian speaker emphasized. “A single inaccurate headline can spark tension and violence. Therefore, we must double-check news involving religious attacks or accusations, and rigorously review images and headlines prior to publishing.”

Speaker after speaker at a conference titled “Beyond the Headlines: Journalism, Religion and Society” offered similar examples in an assembly hall full of international and Arab religion journalists as well as scholars and students gathered in Morocco.

As I sat among them, I had an immediate insight: Good religion reporting can calm troubled believers, while bad reporting can cause troubling clashes.

During my 35 years as a religion reporter for The Salt Lake Tribune, I have seen members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in intense — often nasty — debates with former members. I have watched Latter-day Saints and evangelical Christians hurl theological insults at one another, and seen secular Americans attacking and demeaning the faith of Muslims.

Globally, though, such battles can escalate into sectarian skirmishes with serious consequences and eventually lead to actual warfare.

Until I heard the speeches at this conference, I hadn’t fully appreciated the role that religion journalism plays in it.

During the meetings in Morocco, I came to realize that any reporter who misrepresents a faith (intentionally or unintentionally), spreads hearsay, or actively promotes disinformation may be partially culpable for conflicts that could ensue. I felt an ever greater sense of urgency in what I and so many other religion-reporting colleagues do.

Creating fear

As an example of what a disinformation campaign can do, Montaser Marai, an editor with Al Jazeera, presented a short video, which purported to show a public school teacher in Scotland instructing British students about Islam.

The video went viral in the United Kingdom, the soft-spoken Marai said, implying that Muslims were trying to convert British youngsters to their faith.

“When we checked it at Al Jazeera (we have a hub to verify videos and news), it was not from the U.K. It was from Australia, and it was an old video. It was at a Muslim school, which was working officially and teaching the kids,” Marai said. “How could right-wing people spread hate speech or use disinformation to direct emotions in the country against a religion or a group of people or immigrants?”

Simple, he said. Ignorance.

Telling the truth about religion can be “dangerous” and can “get us into trouble or even killed like in Gaza or Ukraine or Vietnam,” the Al Jazeera editor said. “But it is our obligation since the first day we decided to be a journalist.”

As I listened to Marai, I watched my fellow religion reporters from Serbia, Indonesia, India, Germany, Qatar, Egypt, Palestine and Pakistan nod in recognition, thinking of the events and trends they covered, the risks they faced and the idealistic reasons they did it.

Risk and responsibility

For two conversation-packed days, I swapped stories with two dozen journalists and scholars working on what I call “the global God beat.”

The conference was hosted at a light-filled campus of the Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah University in Fez, Morocco, in partnership with the International Association of Religion Journalists, which I helped found in 2012.

Topics included reporting on religion in the Arab world versus the West, how journalists can cover Arab culture and sensitivities, the pluses and minuses of social media in the Arab world, how to recognize propaganda, and how to avoid preachy approaches and news release prose.

More than 100 students listened attentively, asked thoughtful questions and offered their own conclusions. For some, it was the first time they had ever considered religion reporting as a future career.

A curious Muslim student wondered how journalists could cover traditions besides their own. It’s a question for religion reporters.

The answer, speakers said, lies in study, discipline and empathy.

But such reporting is always a balancing act.

“An insider may understand nuances that an outsider misses but may also have personal commitments,” said keynote speaker Khalid Saqi, a retired professor of media studies in Rabat, Morocco, who also hosts a radio show on the Quran. “An outsider may guarantee a certain distance but may lack the background needed to understand what is being reported.”

Neither position, the professor warned, “automatically guarantees objectivity.”

The job of a faith reporter “is neither to idealize religion nor to reduce it to a source of problems,” said Mohammed Lazrak, who teaches English and culture studies at Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah University in Fez. “Our task is to understand, investigate, contextualize and report.”

Religious minorities

Much like Utah, settled by Mormon pioneers and still the headquarters of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, many countries have a majority religion — often connected to political power — and multiple minority traditions. Recognizing the rights of minorities often proves challenging for reporters.

“We are the country with the largest Muslim population in the world,” said Endy Bayuni, former chief editor of Indonesia’s Jakarta Post and an IARJ co-founder. “We have 280 million people and nearly 90% of them are Muslims. The other 10% are Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Confucians, and hundreds and hundreds of indigenous beliefs.”

The groups “have coexisted peacefully, by and large, but we also have had our share of tensions, conflicts and wars,” Bayuni said. “So tensions are real. We cannot ignore them or the conflicts that happen, they are also real.”

Questions often arise, he said, when Muslims ask, “Why are the Christians having three or four churches there? Why can’t they just have one church?”

Clearly, Bayuni said, they don’t understand Christianity and that it has multitudes of separate denominations, each wanting its own building.

“Religious beliefs and practices actually define the life of the people,” he said. “This means that if you don’t understand the religion, you don’t understand the community you write about, and you are bound to distort the reality.”

Religious versus political identity

Some 35 years ago, members of three faiths — Catholics, Orthodox Christians and Muslims — lived peacefully together in the former Yugoslavia, said Jelenna Jorgačević Kisic, a multimedia journalist in Serbia and head of IARJ’s board. “They shared the same language, the same popular culture and so on. The only identity that separated us from each other was religion.”

Unfortunately, religion was “instrumentalized for national purposes and weaponized,” she said, “and, of course, there were the voices within all the religious communities that advocated for peace, but they were often silenced by the political elite.”

Decades after the war, Kisic said, Serbia is still called by the Western press “a post-conflict society.” Reporting that “lacks cultural and religious literacy actively fuels further divisions in society.”

The same goes for Syria, reported Mohamed Hamdan, one of IARJ’s founders who fled to Tunisia. He was not able to secure a visa to attend the conference in Morocco but sent his remarks for others to read.

“I stand before you as a Syrian journalist who witnessed his country’s identity transform from a unifying culture into a political weapon,” he wrote. “I saw with my own eyes how civilians were asked about their sect, not their actions; how doctrine became a passport or a sentence of exclusion.”

A person’s identity is “multilayered: national, ethnic, religious, professional,” Hamdan explained. “It cannot be reduced to a single dimension.”

Identity politics “is the transformation of this sense of belonging into a tool of political organization,” he wrote. “When a politician or a party uses ‘doctrine’ to define ‘who is a good citizen,’ this is not an expression of religious identity — it is a political project clothed in religion.”

After years of covering the Syrian conflict, Hamdan said, he has learned that “a journalist covering religion needs double courage: the courage to confront power and the courage to confront the audience when it wants him to adopt its narrative.”

Morocco’s place

Among Arab countries, Morocco has been seen by some as a leader in trying to protect minority rights.

Several speakers pointed to the 2016 Marrakesh Declaration — an agreement signed by more than 300 Islamic scholars, politicians and activists, as well as a small group of interfaith observers — to affirm the rights of religious minorities living in Muslim-majority countries.

Its “legal framework draws from Islamic tradition, particularly the seventh-century Charter of Medina,” according to a report from the U.S. Institute of Peace, “to affirm equal citizenship as an Islamic principle and traditional form of governance prescribed by Prophet Muhammad.”

A year later, the United Nations organized a meeting in Fez to tackle the question of “hate speech,” much of it having to do with religion. The group came up with the “Fez Plan of Action.”

Even so, Morocco recognizes only two religions — Islam (Sunnis, not Shiites) and Judaism. Minarets reach to the sky in every town, village and community, but there are no steeples in sight.

Roman Catholic, French Protestant, Greek and Russian Orthodox and Anglican churches can hold services but — here’s the catch — primarily for foreigners.

Still, our hosts recognize the importance of minority rights and celebrate diverse views.

“Coexistence should not be treated as a decorative word or a tourist slogan. It is a practice. It requires attention to the dignity of neighbors, the protection of places and memories, the rejection of collective blame and the willingness to understand people whose beliefs or customs differ from our own,” Mohammed Lazrak, the English professor in Fez, said in his opening remarks. “It also requires honesty about painful histories and unequal experiences. Genuine dialogue does not erase difference. It creates ways of living with difference without turning it into hostility.”

This is where, he said, religion journalism plays a vital role.

“The way we tell stories matters. It matters for what societies know about themselves, for how communities see one another,” he said, “and for whether difference becomes a reason for fear or an opportunity for understanding.”

Lazrak praised efforts to elevate religion reporting standards everywhere.

Religion reporting “becomes stronger,” he said, “when journalists learn from one another across borders.”

I certainly learned from — and was inspired by — my international colleagues. We share a common awareness of the challenges we face and the urgent need to continue.

After traveling across a country that looks amazingly like Utah – from snowcapped mountains and winding roads, to redrock canyons and sandy dunes (OK, the Beehive State has nothing quite like the Sahara) — I felt like our Moroccan hosts were reflecting my life’s journey as if it were their own.

We walk together on this pebble-strewn path of religion journalism to, hopefully, peace.