One is the story of America as a whole—our media, our politics, our culture wars.
The other is the story of a single human life—what it means for one image-bearer to walk through trauma, vocation, faith, and loss.
On the one hand, John has been in the control room while much of our modern media landscape was being built:
- a reporter at a local NBC affiliate,
- then a correspondent at Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN),
- then a long stint as a writer and editor at CNN.
On the other hand, he has quietly taken the pain and experience of that life—family tragedy, personal grief, and decades in newsrooms—and poured them into a series of mystery–thriller novels centered around a young journalist named Lark Chadwick.
To understand why his perspective matters, it helps to look at both levels.
I. The National Story: From CBN to the Coliseum
John has never been a partisan crusader.
He entered journalism because he was tired of being spun—from both the left and the right—about the Vietnam War. As a UW–Madison student in 1968–70, he watched the country unravel and concluded that each side was “leaving out a salient detail that undermined their position.” He wanted to know what actually happened.
That desire led him to campus radio, to getting teargassed while covering protests after Kent State, to the army, and eventually to a degree in journalism. His early work at WMTV in Madison was straightforward local news.
Then, in the early 1980s, came CBN.
The Seed: “Tell the Stories Our Audience Wants to Hear”
By the time John arrived at the Christian Broadcasting Network in Virginia Beach (1983), Pat Robertson’s flagship program, The 700 Club, had already become an influential presence in evangelical homes. The show mixed testimonies, commentary, and a serious attempt at long-form news.
For the first half hour, The 700 Club was, in effect, a nightly newsmagazine. John would craft 10–12 minute in-depth pieces—an eternity by TV standards—often followed by live interviews or debates. It was patterned more on Nightline than on a Sunday sermon.
Robertson was no political novice:
- His father had been a U.S. Senator.
- He was both a lawyer and an ordained Baptist minister.
- He had strong conservative views on culture and government.
So it was no surprise that a subtle pressure emerged:
this news division should not simply inform; it should counter what they saw as “liberal media” bias.
Here’s where the seed was planted.
John recounts making a simple argument to his colleagues:
“If you think the mainstream media has a liberal bias, the answer is not to build a conservative bias. Two wrongs don’t make a right. Our job is to inform, not persuade.”
It’s telling that his boss at CBN asked him to cover stories on media bias, precisely because he trusted John to play it straight.
But structurally, something else was happening. CBN was increasingly functioning as an explicitly conservative alternative to the networks. Whether or not that was the intention at the start, it became part of the pitch: “We will tell you the stories from our side.”
In hindsight, John acknowledges that CBN News was—in some ways—a precursor to Fox News.
From Alternative to Coliseum
Fast forward to today.
We now live in a media ecosystem where:
- MSNBC speaks largely to one tribe,
- Fox to another,
- CNN tries to straddle, under pressure, with mixed results, and
- countless smaller outlets, Substacks, YouTube channels, and podcasts spin off to serve particular niches.
The logic is no longer “How do we tell the public what happened?”
It is often: “What does our audience want to hear—and how do we keep them coming back tomorrow?”
That’s where my coliseum metaphor comes in.
In ancient Rome, the crowds wanted spectacle. They had “their” champions. They wanted to see their side win in the arena, to the death if necessary. The emperors obliged.
Our situation is technologically different, but spiritually similar:
- Each side has its preferred arena: a network, a platform, a feed.
- Each side has its champion: a politician, a pundit, a “Tucker Carlson type,” a late-night comedian.
- Each side expects to see its champion win—rhetorically, morally, emotionally—every night.
As John put it, viewers now go to “their silo” to have their opinions reinforced. Not informed. Reinforced.
The incentives?
- Ratings and clicks for the channels.
- Fundraising and mobilization for the campaigns.
- Psychological comfort for us: the feeling that our side is righteous and the other side wicked.
This is why, as we discussed on the show, it is now possible for millions of people to see the same 15-second video clip and draw completely different conclusions:
- Our team was clearly defending itself.
- Your team was clearly attacking.
- Any contrary evidence is “fake.”
We become “judge, jury, and hangman” based on fragments.
And this is where John’s break with much of white evangelicalism matters.
Breaking with Evangelical Trumpism
John’s own faith journey runs from a mixed Orthodox/Lutheran upbringing, through the anti-war turbulence of Madison, into Campus Crusade’s Four Spiritual Laws and the Navigators’ legalistic scripture memorization in the army, and finally into the evangelical world that made CBN feel like a natural fit.
But somewhere between CBN and his later years at CNN, something shifted.
Watching large swaths of the evangelical world embrace Donald Trump as a kind of political savior—despite a life pattern that, in John’s judgment, showed “no moral core”—was a turning point. He put it bluntly:
“I broke with the evangelicals when they went for Trump. That’s not my brand of Christianity.”
You may or may not share his political judgments. My own aim on this platform is not to recruit anyone into a party.
But the theological question is unavoidable:
- What happens when a religious community that once defined itself by fidelity to Christ’s character realigns its allegiances around a secular champion in the coliseum?
- What happens when pulpit and newsroom, sermon and spin, become indistinguishable?
At that point, we no longer have “biased media” as a technical problem.
We have idolatry as a spiritual one.
II. The Personal Story: From Newsroom to Lark Chadwick
The national story, though, is only half of what makes John’s perspective worth hearing.
The other half is deeply personal.
Mining the Pain
When CNN promoted John from writer to editor, he found himself in a role that paid well but felt creatively numbing. Editing scripts day after day, he needed another outlet.
So he did something that, by his own admission, was never part of the plan:
he began teaching himself to write fiction.
The trigger was an old wound.
As a nine-year-old in northern Illinois, John had witnessed a car–train collision that killed three people, including a child his own age. Later, he remembered hearing a radio report that an infant had survived.
Decades later, sitting at a keyboard, he decided to write down what he remembered. As he did, a question surfaced:
What if that surviving infant grew up and wanted to know her story?
That “what if?” gave birth to Lark Chadwick:
- a young woman whose life begins with that car–train tragedy,
- who grows up not knowing her past,
- who eventually becomes a journalist.
From there, John realized something else: he had more pain to mine.
Over the next twenty years, as he wrote six Lark Chadwick novels, real events in his own life found their way into her world:
- His sister’s suicide.
- His son’s death from a heroin overdose in 2011.
- His memories of covering the White House.
- His knowledge of newsrooms and media ethics.
He didn’t sit down to “write about grief.” But looking back, he can see that he was working through his grief in story form. As he put it, what began as a creative outlet became, almost without his realizing it, a form of “catharsis that had therapeutic byproducts.”
He also went to grief counseling. He did the inner work. But writing—shaping experience into narrative—was part of that work.
This is where his advice to other writers, and to anyone carrying pain, intersects directly with a theology of the image of God.
Pain, Loss, and the Image of God
“Pain and loss are universal.”
John repeats that phrase often in his workshops.
He widens the frame so we don’t romanticize suffering as only “big” tragedies:
- The loss of a loved one is profound—but so can be the loss of a pet, a job, health, innocence, or a cherished dream.
- Any of these can trigger deep grief and confusion.
Because of that, he tells his students:
“Whatever personal, painful thing you’re writing about, chances are someone else is going to be able to relate to it. If you can move toward the pain and mine it, your writing will not only resonate, it can enhance emotional healing. The better you know yourself, the better your writing will be.”
From a Christian perspective, this rings true for at least three reasons.
- We follow a crucified and risen Lord.
The central event of our faith is not an escape from suffering, but God entering it, bearing it, and redeeming it.
To pretend that pain is irrelevant—or to numb it—is to live an un-Christian story. - We are created in the image of a Creator.
Part of that image-bearing is the ability to make meaning—to shape chaos into order, experiences into narratives. Writing, painting, composing, even careful conversation are all ways of exercising that gift. - We are members of one body.
When one member suffers, all suffer. Honest storytelling about hurt is not self-indulgence; it is generosity. It gives others language for their own wounds.
John’s novels embody this. They are not “Christian fiction” in the sanitized, everything-turns-out-nicely sense. They have:
- flawed characters,
- ugly behavior,
- unresolved tensions,
- and real moral ambiguity.
But threaded through them is a commitment to honesty and a refusal to give up on grace.
Small-t Truth, Capital-T Truth
As we talked, John drew a helpful distinction:
- Capital-T Truth: ultimate reality; God’s perspective; the full story.
- Small-t truths: the concrete facts, observations, and experiences we can gather in this life.
Daily journalism, he said, is about assembling small-t truths into a mosaic. It is never the whole Truth. It can be more or less faithful to reality, but it is always partial.
The same is true of fiction.
A good novel does not deliver “The Truth” in propositional form. It offers:
- a pattern of experience,
- believable characters,
- a moral and emotional logic.
Readers recognize something of their own small-t truths in it.
And sometimes, through that recognition, they glimpse a ray of Capital-T Truth:
about God, about themselves, about others.
That was on display in the passage John read from his novel Fake, where Lark sits in Washington National Cathedral before a state funeral and thinks about God:
- She sees design and order in the universe and senses an “intelligent designer.”
- She admits that’s evidence, not proof; the rest is faith.
- She confesses that her one or two “mustard seeds” of faith are regularly tested—especially by those who use God as a cudgel.
- She’s honest that she often prays only when in a jam, but is slowly noticing a dawning gratitude.
That inner monologue is not a doctrinal statement. It’s a truthful soul in process.
And that is exactly where many of us actually live.
III. Why Both Stories Matter Now
At the national level, John’s career lets us see how easily:
- a desire to correct bias can become a new bias,
- a call to inform can drift into a mission to persuade,
- and religious communities can turn cable networks into their coliseums, demanding ever more spectacular victories from their champions.
At the personal level, his later turn to fiction reminds us that:
- we are more than the roles we play in those arenas,
- our deepest work often happens offstage,
- and our griefs, if we’re willing to face them, can become sources of connection and healing.
Both stories are crucial for those of us who believe we are created in the image of God.
- As citizens, we need to be awake to how our desire for “our side” to win can deafen us to inconvenient facts.
- As persons, we need to resist letting the noise of the coliseum drown out the quieter work of God in our own hearts.
That doesn’t mean we retreat from public life. It means we engage it:
- with a commitment to small-t truth wherever we can find it,
- with a refusal to baptize any arena champion as our savior,
- and with a willingness to let our own stories—especially the painful parts—become places where others can glimpse the mercy of God.
In a time when the national story feels increasingly shrill and fragmented, there is immense power in tending to the personal story with honesty and courage.
That, too, is Kingdom work.
Coming Up Next on Created in the Image of God
If this conversation about truth, narrative, and the coliseum of our media life resonated with you, you’ll want to join me for the next episode. I’ll be talking with Mick Wienholt, a dynamic storyteller and faith-driven communicator who helps ordinary people excavate the extraordinary ways God has shown up in their lives. We’ll explore how sharing real-life “God stories” can deepen our own faith and help others recognize Christ’s fingerprints in their past. If you’ve ever wondered whether that “coincidence” in your life might actually have been providence, you won’t want to miss it.
