Southwest Airline’s Christian blogger

This morning I was reading about Jessica Turner, who has been hired by Southwest Airlines to be the company’s new “mommy blogger.” As a blogger, she’s extremely appealing. Her voice is both lively and down-to-earth. Her son, Elias, is adorable. But what caught my eye wasn’t her advice about flying with an infant –I’m a travel writer who has three kids, so this is a service I don’t need. Rather, it was that with just one click of the mouse, I learned that Jessica is a proud Christian. 

Why is this interesting? Because I don’t think that in the pre-social media days a company would be so comfortable letting a spokesperson be so frank about her personal life. (I could be wrong, but I doubt the Florida Citrus Commission was giving two thumbs up to Anita Bryant’s anti-gay crusades, even if they privately agreed with her.) Today, the most successful bloggers trade on the fact that readers feels like they know the real them.

I come from a professional background where you are never supposed to betray a bias toward one opinion or another. (That I believe all journalism is in some way biased is the topic of another post.)  When I was working at a newspaper during the election, I was careful to follow the rules of my employer: no yard signs, no campaign buttons. But if you visited my facebook page and saw the Obama love-fest taking place with the vast majority of my 266 friends, you could make a pretty educated guess about how I voted. 

So why does it matter to me that Jessica Turner is Christian? Not because I consider myself to be part of her flock. My husband is agnostic at best. I am a Catholic who thinks that our current Pope is sadly steering the church towards even greater intolerance. And on more than a few days, I wake up on the non-believer side of the bed. Still, despite my serious misgivings with the church and my husband’s status as a near-atheist, our children have been baptized and are being raised in a free-wheeling church that is on the verge of being cut loose by the diocese. 

What I find refreshing about Jessica Turner’s Christianity is simply the fact that a company is allowing her to be who she is and in turn allows customers to make their own informed choices about whether or not they want to follow her or patronize the company that’s paying her to blog. I don’t think that employing Jessica Turner makes Southwest a Christian airline. And I wouldn’t be writing the same kind of mash-note to a public school that was promoting one faith over another. But I like Jessica and her equally frank husband’s online personas and that they haven’t been watered down to a one-size fits all marketing message. And that makes me like Southwest Airlines even more than I did when they came to my hometown and lowered the one-way airfare to Chicago to $39.