Fox News' Chief Religion Correspondent Reveals What Media Gets Wrong About Faith

Believing for years she would go on to become a concert pianist, covering religion for one of the largest news networks in the country wasn’t really on her radar.

Lauren Green, who grew up in a Christian home and now serves as chief religion correspondent for Fox News, told Faithwire she developed an affinity for church history — and religion more broadly — while studying music in college, noting even still today she understands much about faith through that lens.

"Music is how I understand the world,” she said. “And when I became a journalist, it was as if I was trying to translate into a different language, from the world of music into the world of words. So faith, to me, was that bringing together of those two worlds.”

Green, 63, said she never doubted God’s existence, but had to grapple with her own understanding of who God is and what such a profound truth means as it relates to human existence — a loaded question, no doubt. It was particularly important to Green because, as she noted, she grew up in a culture so steeped in Christian tradition that to ask questions of it was a foreign concept to many people.

There was a moment, she recalled when her two worlds collided when music deeply informed her view of God.

It was in 2007 when Green accompanied the Abyssinian Baptist Church of New York City — one of the oldest African-American congregations in the U.S. — on its pilgrimage to Ethiopia. She remembered being in her hotel room in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, performing a harmonic analysis of the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s “Messiah” and something of a “revelation” happened for the journalist.

”It was like a revelation that hit me that I realized I saw the 10 Commandments really displayed in the harmonic analysis of the Hallelujah Chorus, and it just hit me, ‘That can’t be a mistake,’” said Green.

Now, many years later, having covered so many different issues — spanning 9/11 and the Charleston church shooting to the coronavirus pandemic and the collapse of Afghanistan — Green suggested she can’t imagine how much more broken the world would be without God.

While coming face-to-face with these heavy subjects can at times be daunting, as a Christian, Green said she never worries she’ll pose a question too difficult for God to answer.

”I know there is no question you could ask that would destroy God,” she explained.

In October of 1971, John Lennon debuted his famous song “Imagine.” At the time, Green said, she didn’t think much of the line: “Imagine there’s no countries / It isn’t hard to do / Nothing to kill or die for / And no religion, too.”

Now, though, she sees it differently.

“It strikes me so hard today because he was so wrong,” she said. “You will always worship something. The human condition is that we are going to worship something. And if you don’t make a decision about what you’re worshipping, something else will come in there as the default idol, and this is what the Bible warns against.”

There are so few in the media landscape, however, who seem to truly understand these theological nuances of religion, and particularly Christianity, which is why Green was so quick to acknowledge there is “absolutely” a bias against faith among many in the mainstream media.

In the Western world, there is a push toward pluralism that suggests all religions are the same. Many reporters, Green argued, operate from that false premise.

“That is absolutely not theologically true,” Green said of the assumption that all religions are “equal” to one another. “For anybody that actually believes in their faith — and I don’t care if you’re Christian or Muslim or Jewish, Buddhist or whatever — you believe that your faith is the truth. So they can’t all be equal.”

”One of the big mistakes mainstream media makes is that they don’t understand the nature of most religions and they’re trying to project a secular humanist understanding of religions, which is that all religions are basically the same,” she added.

While all the major faiths advocate greater morality, it’s the motivations behind that advocacy — the “means of salvation,” as Green called it — that differs greatly.

“I think that’s where most mainstream media don’t understand the nature of religions,” she said.

As Fox News celebrates its 25th anniversary, Faithwire asked Green to reflect on the stories that were most impactful to her personally. You can see her answer to that question and more in the full interview above.