Summary: TVC Chairman Rev. Sheldon comments on the recent surge of interest by secular journalists in coverage of religion in the news.
Why Are Secular Journalists Noticing Religion?
by Rev. Louis P. Sheldon
Chairman, Traditional Values Coalition
Newsweek’s cover story for March 10, 2003 features a head shot of President George W. Bush with his hands folded in a position of prayer. The headline reads: “Bush&God;” and it was written by Howard Fineman.
Fineman’s article was an encouraging look into the spiritual life of President Bush. The author noted that Bush typically starts each day in a quiet place where he reads the devotional book, My Utmost For His Highest, by Oswald Chambers.
Fineman reports on President Bush’s appearance at the National Religious Broadcasters (NRB) conference in Nashville, Tennessee in February, 2003. During a keynote speech at the NRB, Bush told the audience, “the terrorists hate the fact that … we can worship Almighty God the way we see fit” and that the United States was called by God to bring the gift of liberty to “every human being in the world.”
The Newsweek article notes that the emerging evangelical movement is the core of the Republican Party now and that advisor Karl Rove is planning on turning out even more evangelicals during next year’s presidential election.
Howard Fineman’s article is only one of a number of articles to recently hit the newsstands on the topic of religion and public policy.
Why The Sudden Interest In Religion?
New York Times editorialist Nicholas Kristof penned “God, Satan and the Media,” in the March 4, 2003 issue; and Los Angeles Times writer David Shaw also recently wrote an article about religion and the lack of coverage it receives by the secular press. Eric Burns of Fox News weighed in on the way the secular media has ignored religion as an influence in our society.
None of these men claim to be religious, but perhaps there is a growing realization that religion is a very powerful force in our world—not only here in the U.S.—but abroad. It may be that the Islamist war on Western Civilization and freedom is the reason why these men are now paying more attention to religion. Whether we wish it to be so or not, we are now engaged in a religious war against a totalitarian religious force that will not rest until it slaughters all “Infidels.”
Kristof points out that most in the media are totally out of touch with at least 46% of Americans who consider themselves evangelicals. He disagrees with evangelicals on almost every issue but says that the media’s “sneering tone about conservative Christianity” is inexcusable.
Kristof notes that author Robert Fogel of the University of Chicago claims that America is undergoing a Fourth Great Awakening that rivals the earlier American revival movements. Fogel says he’s a secularist, but sees value in encouraging religious belief in our country because it helps give people a sense of purpose, a family ethic, and self- esteem.
Fogel is correct to say that Christianity in the U.S. has helped improve the lives of people, but it isn’t all about self-esteem or giving people a sense of purpose. Christians, from the earliest point in our history, have been motivated to serve God and to witness for Jesus Christ. They have improved society as an outgrowth of their commitment to God and their compassion for the helpless and the socially disadvantaged.
Christianity Today Weblog editor Ted Olsen is encouraged by this new interest in religion among secular journalists and urges this discussion to continue. In his March 3, 2003 Weblog, Olsen urges journalists to access the following web sites for more information on the importance of religion in public life: Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life; Religion Newswriters Association; and the Poynter Institute.
I would also recommend that those interested in learning about the importance of Christianity to Western Civilization purchase a copy of Under The Influence: How Christianity Transformed Civilization by Dr. Alvin J. Schmidt. He surveys history and the impact that Christians have had on civilization. Christians gave unprecedented freedom to women; Christians founded hospitals and charitable groups to help the downtrodden; Christians promoted education and higher learning and made pioneering discoveries in science, music, literature, and more. It was Christianity that gave us our belief in individual freedom and became the cornerstone upon which our nation’s representative Republic was founded. (Alvin Schmidt is a retired professor of sociology at Illinois College in Jacksonville, Illinois, and served as a consulting editor for Dictionary of Cults, Sects, Religions and the Occult.)
In his introduction, Schmidt writes: “With the increasing secularization of society and the current emphasis on multiculturalism—especially in matters religious—the massive impact that Christianity has had on civilization is often overlooked, obscured, or even denied. For this and many other reasons, a powerful response is long overdue, not only in the interests of defending the faith, but more urgently, to set the historical record straight.” Schmidt’s book should be required reading for our nation’s university journalism majors and for the editors and reporters on our nation’s newspapers, TV and radio networks. There would be less “sneering” at Christians among our nation’s journalists if they truly understood where their freedoms originated. Those freedoms did not come from atheism or from Islam. They came from Christianity.
As a counterpoint to Schmidt’s book on Christianity, journalists may also wish to read Death by Government by R.J. Rummel, a University of Hawaii political science professor. Rummel has documented the fact that during the 20th century, an estimated 203,000,000 people were killed by their governments either through war or through mass killings. The nations that were responsible for the greatest number of human slaughters were atheistic and/or totalitarian nations like former Communist Russia, Communist China, Nazi Germany, Cambodia, Vietnam, North Korea, and others. The Islamic nation of Turkey is high on the list of those countries that have deliberately killed their citizens. Turks massacred an estimated million and a half Armenian Christians between 1915 and 1923 in what is considered the first genocide in the 20th century. Dr. Serge Trifkovic’s book, The Sword Of The Prophet: A Politically-Incorrect Guide To Islam discusses the bloody Turkish genocide and Islam’s history of violence and death throughout the centuries.
Secular journalists who are seriously concerned about the role that religion plays in our world should eagerly seek out the sources mentioned above. They will learn not only that Christianity has created Western Civilization and its legacy of freedom, but they will also learn that atheism and Islam have brought upon the world untold death, misery, and bloodshed. The contrast is obvious to all who wish to see. It is the difference between freedom and slavery and life versus death.