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The News and the Good News
 When a
German priest named Martin Luther nailed
some of his pet ideas to a church door in 1517, it wasn’t big news.  Nobody
knew that the history of Europe was being changed forever, let alone that
this would eventually have profound effects on the other side of the ocean
that had only recently been crossed.
At the time it must have seemed
like a minor local story — one more disgruntled heretic venting his
spleen — just as the crucifixion of a Jew in Jerusalem, around what
would later be called, in honor of that Jew, A.D. 35, seemed a minor event at
the time. At least two others were also crucified in the city that day. Big
deal.
Today, even with our 24/7 news
coverage, both events would still pass unnoticed. They certainly
wouldn’t warrant bulletins of the “breaking news as it
happens” variety.
Except when an old pope dies or a
new one is elected, religious news hardly counts as news. If you want
religious news in the Washington Post, you can find it, as a
rule, only on the religion page, buried in the back of the Metro section every
Saturday morning. It’s so dull and trivial that I usually forget to read
it.
By contrast, the
Post devotes whole sections to business, sports, and style
every day of the year, with additional sections on the arts, travel, books,
real estate, and whatnot — but not religion — in weekend editions.
As a human concern, religion seems to rank, for the Post as
well as most other newspapers, with stamp-collecting. You’d never
guess, from the journalistic attention it receives, that it’s the most
vital part of countless people’s lives and has shaped whole
civilizations.
![[Breaker quote for The News and the Good News: Journalism versus religion]](2005breakers/050510.gif) Movies
are the same way, of course.
How often does Hollywood show people praying? On the big screen, which
prides itself on graphic realism, characters vomit more frequently than they
pray. I’ve yet to see James Bond appeal to the Lord when his life is in
danger, maybe because his enemies are always such bad shots anyway. But
let’s stick to journalism.
Secularist journalism segregates
religious news from what it deems “real” news. It has no place
for the biggest news of all time, the Good News of Jesus Christ, who said he
was the only way to God the Father. For Christians, the world is divided into
those who accept his claim and those who don’t. Secularist journalism
presupposes his unimportance and therefore the insignificance of his
followers.
Journalism, as G.K. Chesterton
observed, tells us that Admiral Bangs has died without having told us that
Admiral Bangs had been born. It takes notice of religious people only when
their activities begin to threaten secularism; it failed to notice the rise of
the Christian Right and militant Islam until they had already become
impossible to ignore, whereupon it reacted with alarm verging on hysteria.
More recently, secularist
journalism has been alarmed to discover that the new Pope is a Catholic. It
had hoped for someone more, well, reasonable. After Pope John Paul II died,
the Post ran just about the only kind of religious
“news” it reserves for its front page: reports on the
discontents of American Catholics, who, it seems, want their Church to
adopt the sort of “reforms” favored by Post
editorials (married and female priests, easy divorce, and so forth).
Catholics who oppose the Church,
especially “progressive” priests and nuns, are eligible for news
coverage, ample and sympathetic. Faithful Catholics might as well not exist.
They show up in the press only when their behavior seems bizarre.
Sexual scandals in the Church also
rate attention, though priests who abuse teenage boys are called pedophiles
rather than homosexuals; and even Protestant evangelists who chase women
warrant journalistic notice. Anything that portrays orthodox Christians as
hypocrites is grist for journalism’s mill; the hypocrisy of
“progressives,” on the other hand, is off limits. I could tell you
some stories, but they wouldn’t be “news”: I
didn’t read them in the Post.
William Schwenk Gilbert, of Gilbert
and Sullivan fame, once wrote to the president of a railway, “Sir,
Sunday morning, though occurring at frequent and well established intervals,
always seems to take this railway by surprise.” It’s safe to
predict that worshipers will continue to make news and even history, but
that this will continue to take journalism by surprise.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2005 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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