COMMENTARY: What’s Up with Religion, Jesus and the Media?

c. 2003 Religion News Service (Darrell Bock is a research professor of New Testament studies and professor of spiritual development and culture at Dallas Theological Seminary. He was a Humboldt Scholar at Tubingen University in Germany.) (UNDATED) I feel a bit schizophrenic about what is going on with Jesus and the media these days. I […]

c. 2003 Religion News Service

(Darrell Bock is a research professor of New Testament studies and professor of spiritual development and culture at Dallas Theological Seminary. He was a Humboldt Scholar at Tubingen University in Germany.)

(UNDATED) I feel a bit schizophrenic about what is going on with Jesus and the media these days. I suspect I am not alone.


Actually this situation has been going on for several years now. The media have started to cover religion and religious topics in ways that 10 years ago would have been unprecedented and while they are making strides in the direction of substantive religious coverage, they still have a way to go.

There is a kind of revisionism under way in religious faith to which the media have given much attention, highlighting the latest, supposedly new findings about Jesus.

Jesus is suddenly everywhere and quite in.

However, I am afraid Jesus and the faith he generated are largely invisible in most of these recent treatments. I also suspect people of other faiths feel similarly about how their religious faith is often covered.

The new dawn of religious discussion about Jesus in the last few years includes hourlong specials on Jesus, the recent debate over Mel Gibson’s still unreleased but already so commented upon movie, “The Passion of Christ,” and the crossover fictional book “The DaVinci Code,” with its claim that it really is quasi-nonfiction.

The blurring of all these categories and the debates they spawn give people the impression that religion is merely each person’s opinion. It obscures the real human issues that religion, spirituality and especially Christianity seek to address.

My schizophrenia simply put is that I am grateful religious topics are again in the public square but worry that the trivializing of religion in a book like “The DaVinci Code” will obscure the real discussion about what humanity is. It obscures how created beings should relate to the Creation and others in it.

All people need to give serious attention to such questions. We need careful consideration of human motivations in times that have become strained because of serious religious misunderstanding. To attempt to argue that these faiths need revision is not the way to gain real understanding about what motivates people allied to such faiths in their more historic, traditional form.


The way to address this question is not only to have the media promote revisionism in order to garner ratings and grab the glitzy eye of a culture. What we need from the media is a more frequent, substantive engagement. What is also needed from our media is real discussion of basic issues that fuel religious beliefs of all sorts. It is here that the public is served with reporting that engages fundamental issues about what it means to be a human being in a multiethnic and multireligious culture.

We need to see and understand that major religions give distinct answers to fundamental questions. They are not all the same, nor are they always driving down the same path. This kind of in-depth engagement is especially important when that religious faith, whichever one it is, motivates people to act, serve, direct their lives, and even in some cases act with violence. The media has a public trust for all of us as a resource through which information about the variety of perspectives can be made available as the basis for informing our most important discussions.

Like a nearsighted person, the media’s recent efforts often engage matters that can grab instant attention and short-term interest. However, such nearsightedness lacks an approach that will help us see the big picture that has extended over centuries both behind and ahead of us.

May we have more public dialogue about faith and about Jesus. May the media cover it, and do so with a balance that allows the various major elements to speak (and not only from the perspective of revisionist efforts or topics that suggest religious faith is strange). May we be honest about where real differences in faith lie. Perhaps what can emerge will be a better understanding of our neighbor and the building of a better basis for appreciating what is both similar and unique about the various faiths that inhabit our world.

DEA END BOCK

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