Global media shirk religion

Global media shirk religion

Different faiths deserve understanding, respect By Gwynne Dyer, Winnipeg Free Press, April 8, 1996 Save the cows! Kill Salman Rushdie! Jesus found dead! Those headlines are just a representative sample of what passes for religious news in the global media of the later 20th century. On March 31, the World Council of Hindus offered to rescue all the cows due to be "executed" in Britain because of mad cow disease (up to 12 million). The Vishwa Hundu Parishad, the world council's parent group, declared that the disease was a manifestation of "divine displeasure" at the slaughter of sacred cows—and asked the Indian government for $1.6 billion toward the cost of transporting them to India.

Siddiqui achieved notoriety in Britain seven years ago as the leader of those British Muslims who successfully lobbied Iran's late leader Ayatollah Khomenini to issue a fatwa decreeing the killing of British novelist Salman Rushdie, But time passes and the public memory is short. Siddiqui's fame outside Britain's Muslim community is as faded as his influence within it.

So, in an announcement timed to coincide with the opening of talks between Iran and the European Union in Tehran on April 1, Siddiqui called once again for the death sentence against Rushdie to be carried out. He got his publicity, but Tehran was furious.

"Kalim Siddiqui does not speak Iran," said an embarrassed official close to Iranian President Hashemie Rafsanjani. "It is only the British who take him seriously." The Iranian government's annoyance was understandable, since the purpose of the meeting Was precisely to lay the issue of the fatwa to rest and permit closer relations between Iran and Europe.

And then there is the British Broadcasting Corp., which plans to show a documentary claiming to have found the ossuaries (boxes for the bones of the dead) of Jesus and his entire family in a Jerusalem warehouse, where they have rested since they were dug up on a construction site in south Jerusalem in 1980.

The discovery of an ossuary that once held Jesus's bones would, if true, automatically disprove the central tenet of the Christian faith, the belief that Jesus rose from the dead. So the BBC decided to broadcast the show on Easter Sunday. Such tact.

What BBC producer Chris Mann actually found was six ossuaries, taken from the same family cave-tomb, that bore the names of "Jesus son of Joseph", plus a Mary and Joseph (his parents), another Mary, a Matthew, and one Juda, son of Jesus. The bones were gone, since grave robbers had long ago looted the bomb, and there was not a single shred of evidence, apart from the names and the first century date, to suggest that this was the right Jesus.

"I thought it was April Fool one day early," said Professor Geza Vermes, an expert in early Judaism, when told that the BBC would air a whole program on the find. "A Jewish archeologist, seeing those names, would simply think, 'Oh, more of them.'"

The names Jesus, Mary and Joseph were about as common in first century Palestine as Ahmed, Fatima and Aisha are there today. It's like some 23rd century archeologist finding the names Bill, Hillary and Chelsea on adjacent headstones in a Washington cemetery and declaring that he has found President Clinton's family. Except that this would upset the faithful rather less, since Bill Clinton has no known plans to rise from the dead.

But would the BBC reconsider its plan to broadcast the show on Easter Sunday and stir up some controversy? Do pigs have wings?

The thread that links all these incidents is the fact that the global mass media do not know how to treat religion in a serious, grown-up manner; and so the field is left clear for charlatans , political manipulators and well-meaning amateurs.

In most countries, the media pass directly from a reverential and uncritical coverage of the dominant local religion to a postmodern reluctance to touch on religious matters at all (except, of course, in trivial ways). But why?

Mass media by definition have to address the concerns of a broad audience, and the real controversies in religion are over subtle questions of theology and moral law that do not translate easily into headlines. This problem is compounded in societies where several or many strands of religious belief co-exist.

Faced with a fragmented audience where any given religious group's beliefs, politics and problems are of limited interest to everybody else, the media give up—and only those who shout the loudest and say the most bizarre or angry things get heard at all.

This is a disgraceful failure, because all the major religions, and even most of the minor ones, are attempts to understand and come to terms with the underlying truths of existence. They cannot all be true, but they certainly deserve to be taken more seriously by the media.

Each religion, for its followers, is a map of the universe.

Even for non-believers, religions are major transmission belts of culture, and so deserve their attention and respect. It may be accurate to speak of the Industrialized West today as "post-Christian" (except for the United States, where observant Christians still dominate)—but the West is post-Christian, not post-Muslim or post-Buddhist."

And if we truly are on the brink of a global culture with shared democratic values—as global economic integration, global communications media, and much of the world's recent history all suggest that we may be—then understanding and reconciling the different religious traditions that will make up that mosaic is a very high priority. Which those same global media shamelessly shirk.

Gwyne Dyer is a journalist and historian.

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