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It took several days for the mainstream media to find a way to focus on the religious element of tsunami tragedy in South and Southeast Asia. This often happens with events that are simply too stunning and too important for the leaders of major print and electronic media to see them as “religion stories.”
Hanna Rosin of The Washington Post has written a fairly good analysis for The Atlantic of religious believers’ role in the 2004 election. The central insight of the essay comes in this remark from Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission: “I’ve got more in common with Pope John Paul II than I do with Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton.”
William J. Stuntz, whose “Faculty Clubs and Church Pews” essay drew a year-end endorsement from New York Times columnist David Brooks, now lists the issues on which he believes the secular left and the Christian right may cooperate: abortion, poverty at home, poverty abroad and spreading freedom/nation building.
The editors of Arts & Letters Daily state it bluntly: “If God is God, he’s not good. If God is good, he’s not God. You can’t have it both ways, especially not after the Indian Ocean catastrophe.”
In order to deal with the dearth of "hard" news that usually comes at the end of the year, columnists and magazines come up with gimmicks to fill space and keep readers interested. Time has the person of the year, Jeff Jacoby collects a "liberal hate speech" folder and shares the results with readers (favorite bit from this year’s column: "The St. Petersburg, Fla., Democratic Club took out an ad calling for the death of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. ‘Then there’s Rumsfeld who said of Iraq, "We have our good days and our bad days . . . We should put this S.O.B. up against a wall and say, "This is one of our bad days," and pull the trigger.’").
Anyone who has been reading GetReligion in the wake of 11/2 knows I am convinced that one of the major stories of 2005 will be the early signs of what the religious left will do to help the political left address the “pew gap.”
More than two decades ago, my graduate advisers at the University of Illinois gave early approval to the idea of me writing my final project about the state of religion coverage in mainstream American newsrooms, which I also condensed for The Quill. One professor was skeptical, until I brought him a copy of the Associated Press’ top 10 stories for the previous year. At least six of the stories were linked to religion.
Here’s a quick way to take the theological pulse of churchgoers. Imagine you’re attending an urban parish with a reputation for liberal theology and political activism. Your new senior pastor begins the Lord’s Prayer with “Our Mother and Father in heaven,” baptizes children in the name of “the Creator, the Redeemer and the Sustainer,” attends an anti-war rally in Washington and offers unequivocal support when the associate pastor announces from the pulpit that she is a lesbian.
You know, apart from trifling matters such as suicide bombers, acute shortages, a plummeting U.S. dollar, and lousy troop morale, I thought the Iraq occupation/handover was going swimmingly. We had a date certain to hold elections and, after, the U.S. could make concrete plans to withdraw, and Iraqis could go about charting their own course.
