Terry Mattingly

Terry L. Mattingly (born January 31, 1954) is a journalist, author, and professor. As columnist for the Scripps Howard News Service, Mattingly has written "On Religion", a nationally syndicated column, since the summer of 1988. Mattingly also runs a well-known religious journalism blog, GetReligion.

Mattingly was also Director of The Washington Journalism Center, a program run by the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities.

Early life and education
Mattingly was raised by a father who was a Southern Baptist pastor. He was involved in Boy Scouts as a youth. Mattingly graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School in Port Arthur, Texas. He then attended Baylor University, where he graduated with a B.A. in journalism and American history in 1976. He then obtained an M.S. in journalism in 1982 from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a M.A. in church-state studies from Baylor University in 1984.

Career
Mattingly's first major journalism job with the Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette. As a staff writer and copy editor, he wrote Backbeat, a rock 'n' roll column. While writing Backbeat, one of Mattingly's subjects included a 1982 tour by U2.

From 1982-1984, Mattingly worked for The Charlotte News and later The Charlotte Observer, and from 1984–1990, he was a religion writer for the Rocky Mountain News in Denver. He taught at Milligan College.

Since 1988, Mattingly has been a religion columnist for On Religion at the Scripps Howard News Service in Washington, D.C. Mattingly also runs a well-known religious journalism blog, GetReligion.

As the current director of the Washington Journalism Center, Mattingly teaches journalism to students in Washington, D.C. Mattingly has a long association with Howard Ahmanson Jr. and his wife, Roberta, dating back to Roberta's tenure as a religion reporter for The Orange County Register in the late 1980s. Roberta was an original financial backer of GetReligion and Ahmanson has funded the Washington Journalism Center and the Oxford Centre for Religion and Public Life, which currently hosts the website.

After leaving the Southern Baptist Convention, the Christian body in which he was raised, Mattingly was for a time a member of Episcopal Church. Mattingly goes by the nickname of TMatt and often refers to himself a prodigal Texan. He is a practicing Orthodox Christian, a member of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America.

Mattingly is a supporter of the American Solidarity Party.

Books
Mattingly's first book was titled Pop Goes Religion: Faith in Popular Culture.