The failure to observe at all—not to mention to analyze and explain—the rise of evangelical Christianity in the U.S. (or around the world, for that matter) over two decades must constitute one of the great modern blind spots of the American journalistic mind. It is a failure sadly paralleled by the inability of Western reporters during the same period to grasp the scope of the Khomeiniist Islamic revival, or the dangerous reverberations of a renascent Islam even among Muslim communities not belonging to the minority Shi’ite sect dominant in Iran.
In a vague effort to push the concept of a large, grassroots American evangelical community out of sight and mind, much of the news media have resorted to the safe old standby term for people of religious conviction: “fundamentalists.” The word, with its connotation of fanaticism, has the useful effort of consigning evangelicals to the category of the unreportable.
Kept In The Dark
This media blindness to religious faith at home and abroad has had all sorts of unpleasant consequences, and not just among American evangelical Christians who have had to endure the many prejudices—born of ignorance—that swoop around the public marketplace. Americans as a whole have been shortchanged by those whose job it is to report and analyze events around the world. They have been kept in the dark about one of the great stories of the century: the emergence of a growing, perhaps mortal, competition among the world’s great religions (secular and otherwise) for the ultimate loyalties of mankind.
Why has the U.S. press failed so conspicuously to do justice to this phenomenon? An ordinary explanation would be ignorance. But that ignorance is at least partly willful. Surveys of the U.S. public media have confirmed one astounding fact: reporters tend to be overwhelmingly secular in their world view, they tend not to respect religious faith in general, and, for the most part, they espouse a system of values inherently hostile to the traditional Western values handed down in the Bible.
In a well-known survey of 216 leading U.S. journalists, conducted in 1981 by sociologists S. Robert Lichter and Stanley Rothman, 54 percent of the respondents thought adultery was not wrong, 75 percent considered homosexuality an acceptable lifestyle, 86 percent seldom or never went to church or synagogue, and 90 percent thought abortion was an inherent right of women. If those figures are frightening for Christians, they are likely to be even more skewed away from traditional values today than they were six years ago.
Open Hostility?
Of course, the recent string of scandals and internecine squabbles within the evangelical community has not made the task of reporting sympathetically (or even fairly) about it any easier. In fact, U.S. news organizations have at times displayed open hostility toward any Christian organization with a high profile and explicit evangelical position. Apparently lacking any degree of discernment—a requisite skill for journalists—they regularly tar much of Christendom with the opprobrium earned by only a small part of it.
In so doing, some journalists have departed from a principle of their professional code of ethics: keeping personal likes and dislikes out of the business of reporting. Moreover, they have departed from a more important principle as well: curiosity about life, with enough open-mindedness to ask a lot of questions. In theory, that is what journalists are supposed to do.
Redeeming The Media
Is there a Christian solution to this? Yes, there is. But if it is simple, it is not easy. For years, Christians have been content to drift along with the changing fashions of the general public’s trendy whims. They have been confident there is not too much difference between Christian and non-Christian standards and behavior in private life and society.
That confidence is utterly misplaced in today’s climate. If God’s people are not to be completely swamped by the evolution of much of modern culture into barbarism and neopaganism, then they must fashion the instruments of their own cultural expression, including their news media, for themselves. Otherwise, they will be unable to discern the sign of the times.
This refashioning includes reinventing journalism, and applying to it the biblical standards evangelical Christians demand of their own and other Christians’ private lives. Little by little, in such outstanding places as CBN University’s journalism program, or in the communications program of Youth With a Mission, this is being done.
But until journalism as a whole has been significantly redeemed from its present worldiness, one of the great stories of the millennium—how more people than ever are finding Christ—is going to be lost to the world.
By David Aikman, a correspondent for Time magazine, currently covering the U.S. State Department.
SPEAKING OUT offers responsible Christians a forum. It does not necessarily reflect the views of CHRISTIANITY TODAY.
