Isn't Understanding Religion Easier If You're, Well, Religious?

The MSM continues to show basic ignorance and lack of inquisitiveness regarding religion in the ongoing coverage of papal succession.

Hunter Baker's on to something here:

The coverage for breaking taboos of the Christian faith has been uniformly positive in secular media, which is good because enthusiastic press is typically the only reward one should expect based on recent historical trends in the Protestant world. Since the time of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy of the 1920s and '30s, in which fundamentalists decisively lost the battle for control of the Presbyterian and Northern Baptist denominations, the conservative offshoots (fundamentalist, charismatic, and evangelical) have far surpassed their home churches in numbers, activity, and cultural influence. The reason for the long recession of the liberal church is easy to explain. When the church conforms itself to the prejudices of the popular, it resembles culture rather than standing as a powerful critic of it. As such, it becomes another boring non-profit operation sending forth useless platitudes. ("Here's one to grow on!")

The question for the accommodating churches becomes how long the thrill of breaking down a major taboo can sustain an enterprise sitting on a limb cut from its tree? After transitions have been made and parishioners have enjoyed a brief charge from the nice story in the Times, there is really little point in taking out Sundays or any other part of the week for church. Once the victory seems final enough (a few lesbians are consecrated and even the most patient foes find their way to more sturdy communities of faith), the clock once again begins ticking in earnest on the future of the church-in-name-only. The golf course and the agreeable scriptures of the swollen Sunday New York Times beckon those who see no more acts of liberation to perform. Meanwhile, ministers with little to proclaim help ever-dwindling flocks understand that they must get over their need for a savior.

Heedless of the latest poll by the AP or, well, anybody else, Pope John Paul II insisted on orthodoxy over focus group feedback. Though many liberal American Catholics desired a series of newspaper-happy taboo busters after Vatican II, the great Bishop of Rome refused to oblige. He lived through terrible periods of fascist and communist oppression and knew that only a church built on a firm foundation of historical claims and supernatural revelation could stand against the machinations of "scientific" ideology gone mad with power.

Atheist reporters miss the boat when they cover papal succession as a purely political issue. Politics are strictly a secondary (if not tertiary) concern.

It would help if the MSM had enough churchgoers within its ranks to realize the basic differences between the various Christian denominations, which they tend to call "conservative" or "liberal" (or more likely, "regressive" and "progressive") instead of providing context for why Presbyterians and Catholics don't see eye-to-eye. As Patrick O'Hannigan notes:

It is impossible to understand John Paul without understanding that his entire thought and being was grounded in the incarnation, the teaching, the suffering, death, resurrection and promised return of Jesus Christ," Neuhaus wrote, letting the proverbial cat out of the bag.

Some of those Protestants who did not join Neuhaus in crossing the Tiber to Catholicism are silent about papal motivation not because they feel out of their depth, but because to credit Jesus with inspiring the pope would force a re-examination of their own prejudices. Doing that, they might find unwelcome confirmation of what an American Spectator alumnus called the editor of this publication's "cheeky assertion" that "Among Christian
religions, only one is the genuine article, and it's known as Roman
Catholicism."

Protestant failure to address papal motivation can be read as a backhanded compliment to the late pontiff. For example, at least one preacher on the militantly Calvinist edge of the reformed tradition is of the opinion that the pope's death represents a chance for other Christians to "expose Catholic errors," which by his curious lights include "dogmatic denial of the gospel."

One presumes that more Catholics, Baptists, and Pentecostals truly believe in their faith than your typical reporter believes in their abiding socialist faith or the Democratic Party to which they lend their allegiance---wouldn't it provide for interesting stories on a regular basis to explore the faultlines of the major religious sects in America? Why confine this to Christmas and (perhaps) Easter?

And watch out for the theocracy being erected even now by the Methodist-in-Chief and his nefarious compadres in the Evangelical Movement:

"The elements of this transformation have included advocacy of a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, opposition to stem cell research involving both frozen embryos and human cells in petri dishes, and the extraordinary effort to keep Terri Schiavo hooked up to a feeding tube," Danforth wrote.

"The problem is not with people or churches that are politically active," he wrote. "It is with a party that has gone so far in adopting a sectarian agenda that it has become the political extension of a religious movement."

Well, if three legislative initiatives are all it takes to prove that a political party has been taken over by a sect, then clearly the Democratic Party is wholly controlled by the radical environmentalists. Or maybe it's the radical feminists. Or the lawyers. Or the unions. Pick one, and your argument would be just as persuasive as Danforth's, whose assertions just don't hold up to close scrutiny.

Again, if MSM reporters (and apparently some GOP Senators) knew anything about religion, they'd realize that getting the various Christian denominations to come together and make common cause on anything is next to impossible. When you believe that your church represents the One True Faith, it's quite hard to bind together with another church's adherents. The Hair Helmet Hamas fail to understand this, since they lump all Christians together into the Religious Right bucket. A trip through the Bible Belt (the horror!) might disabuse them of this notion. Yet given the glow in their reporting of Communism to this day, they simply might be immune to anything which challenges their worship of the abstract State.

If there's anybody who's simply better opining about religious issues than George Neumayr of The American Spectator, I don't know who it is. Once again, he nails it:

Since they can't get away with imprisoning popes anymore -- though a group of Dutch liberals did try to prosecute Pope John Paul II, declaring him a criminal for having violated a "hate crimes" code (he had simply reiterated the Church's teaching that homosexual behavior is sinful) -- they are reduced to controlling popes through media propaganda and pressure, which at the moment means mau-mauing timid or heretical churchmen into naming a liberal one. On the Op-Ed pages of the New York Times and other organs of predictable anti-Catholic bias has come a blast of unsolicited advice to a leaderless Church.

Why would people who hate the Church pose as reformers who know what's best for it? Why would they care so passionately about the direction of a religion to which they don't belong? For the same reason the French philosophes and revolutionaries monitored and pressured the Church: it is a force that they must either neutralize or hijack in order to achieve their designs for the world. Look at the immense, obsessional energy that the left spends on trying to pressure the Church into green-lighting their favorite sexual sins. Why do they care so much about what the Church teaches? The reason is that they know that if they could just get the Catholic Church's imprimatur on the Sexual Revolution it would spread everywhere. A liberal Pope, as far as they are concerned, would be even better than a liberal Chief Justice on the Supreme Court.

Modern liberalism is an acid that burns through everything it touches. The Church has shriveled in proportion to its exposure to it. Now those who have long sought its death present themselves, carrying more of this acid, as its healer, and even, as Thomas Cahill wrote in the New York Times, finger Pope John Paul II, who resisted it, as the Church's enemy. "He may, in time to come, be credited with destroying his church," writes Cahill, who blames the Pope for "intellectual incompetents" and "mindless sycophants" in the episcopate. "The situation is dire. Anyone can walk into a Catholic church on a Sunday and see pews, once filled to bursting, now sparsely populated with gray heads." He then proposes a "solution," which amounts to trading the teachings of Jesus Christ for modern liberalism.

This Op-Ed is worth remembering when the liberals, both outside and inside the Church, begin their march for "reforms" on the grave of Pope John Paul II. The roses that they lay on it have many thorns.

Anyone familiar with the Catholic Church in New England can attest to the rightness of this commentary. The fall of the Episcopal Church in America is due entirely to embracing these "reformers", who have plenty of opinions yet somehow don't make it into the pews on Sunday, volunteer for anything, or throw cash into the offering plate. Liberalism is indeed an acid wearing away religion.

The New York Times claimed that the religious supporters of Terri Schiavo and her family were an angry lynch mob waiting to erupt. We're still waiting for the eruption:

So what became of that mob after Schiavo expired last week?

They wept and prayed, hugged one another, and went home.

Such "extremism" was mirrored by President Bush, who reacted to Schiavo's passing with this expression of fanatical religiosity: "The essence of civilization is that the strong have a duty to protect the weak. In cases where there are serious doubts and questions, the presumption should be in the favor of life."

What the cognitive shut-ins at the Times cannot seem to grasp is that commitment to articles of faith, like those professed by the President or enacted by the protestors, doesn't equate with contempt for the Enlightenment. On the contrary, the actuating principle of the Enlightenment, the proposition that all human beings are created equal, is itself an article of faith -- since human beings are not created equal intellectually or physically or in any measurable way. Enlightenment values of reason and tolerance now infuse the belief systems of Jews and Christians.

It's funny how the MSM doesn't fear the Islamic fanatic terrorists who incinerated thousands of people right in the very capital of Blue State America, and yet they spend their nights losing sleep over an American religious fanaticism which never arrives.

If there's any better indication as to why Americans should ignore the recommendations of the MSM and keep the Left out of political power in perpetuity, I can't think of one.