c. 2004 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) In discussing news coverage of religion in 2004, a modified version of Winston Churchill’s famous words applies: Never in the history of reporting on religion has so large and consistent a distortion been imposed on so many by so few.

Most religion writers are as seasoned to the human condition as old pastors. They have seen everything and, if they forget little, they forgive a lot. Because they understand the nature and subtleties of the experience of faith in the great religious institutions, they _ unlike many mainstream media pundits _ do not write the kind of shorthand and shortsighted accounts of belief that have appeared so often in a year in which faith was front and center in everything from politics to the movies.

It was a year in which Catholic candidate John Kerry was challenged by Catholic religious leaders over his position on abortion. The bishops who raised questions made headlines, and were dismissed by pundits, many of them Catholic, for, imagine this, having the audacity to speak out on a religious issue.

This was the year Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” ignited a media uproar, led largely by the New York Times’ Frank Rich, who condemned the film as anti-Semitic, a charge that even many rabbis thought unsustainable. But ordinary people flocked to see it as the kind of message for which they had been hungering.

Yet, as in the abortion debate, Church authorities were almost uniformly presented as antediluvian oligarchs trying to force their own ideas onto everybody else.

But it was religion itself that suffered most. By year’s end religion had been reduced to a vast right-wing conspiracy bent on establishing a theocracy in America. Christianity, a broad, rich and inclusive religious tradition, had been blurred in popular coverage into a dangerous fundamentalist sect, especially with a president who acknowledged the influence of Jesus in his life and the importance of his faith in making difficult decisions. In short, Christianity has been reduced to the fascist fantasy of the narrow-minded, uninformed and prejudiced masses.

If this is all that some editors know about religion, about which they pontificate regularly, what do they really know about politics, terrorism, the energy crisis, global warming, or how you should vote, on which they also pontificate confidently every day?

While Christianity was being editorially distorted in some places, it was make-nice time with the Muslim faith that is generally characterized as misunderstood and, indeed, be-nice time with those splinter Muslim terrorists who really believe in making a theocracy out of the world.

Immature religion deserves criticism, but mature religion at least deserves recognition as a powerful positive force in the lives of individuals and the community. Mature religion was described as intrinsic by the late Harvard psychologist Gordon Allport. Many in the news media are covering the immature or extrinsic religion that people inherit along with the grandfather clock and worn Bible and which they never examine or internalize. Extrinsic religion, research shows, pretends to know all the answers and is compatible with prejudice. Intrinsic religion opens people to more questions and allows no place for prejudice of any kind.

Extrinsic religion is a superficial imitation of intrinsic religion, and some editors are therefore amazed when people say that, yes, my religion is important to me and I take its teachings to love my neighbor and to work for peace and justice seriously. Those who take religion seriously must be some kind of nuts, they suggest, dismissing them without making any distinctions about the substance of their faith.

That, of course, is why experts are still trying to explain the November elections so that they won’t have to re-examine themselves and what they believe and what guides their decisions. They are now reinterpreting the expressed concern of a majority of Americans for moral values so that it is not a function of religion.

This need to dilute the authority of intrinsic faith must be very stressful for some media pundits. The best resolution they can make is to learn something about religion so that they can stop embarrassing themselves in their coverage of it in the coming year.

MO/RB RNS END

(Eugene Cullen Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author of “Cardinal Bernardin’s Stations of the Cross,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)