Religion in the press

This transcript has been adapted from the attached audio. It may not be in its final form and may be updated.

LAND: I’ve got a copy of this new book that we are going to talk about, The Religions Next Door: What We Need to Know about Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam. I think it is important that someone like yourself is willing to study these religions and to help people understand them because most Americans don’t have much understanding of their own traditional Christian faith, much less, other faiths do they?

OLASKY: That’s right. Very little understanding of Christianity, less of other religions, and that makes people patsies in a sense for journalists who may, for their own reasons, hate Christianity. There are a whole lot of religion reporters out there who see Christianity as the enemy and they tend to give a good press to Buddhism, they tend to give a generally good press to Judaism and Hinduism, and they even give a much better press than you’d expect since 9/11 to Islam.

LAND: And yet, many of them still don’t see the importance of religion and the fact that religion has been a huge story, both in Russia, in the Ukraine, in China, and the biggest part of that story has been Christianity, hasn’t it?

OLASKY: That’s right. They don’t understand how important it is around the world and even in the United States. There was a religion editor, a reporter in Austin up until a couple of years ago who came there from another newspaper and, at the other newspaper she said her title was, “Food, Fashion, and Religion Editor.” And that was about the category in which religion was placed. I mean, it’s a fashion. Some people may gyrate to it for reasons of their own psychology but there is nothing objectively real there, nothing that we really have to pay attention to, the way we pay attention to politics. See, I would like religion to be covered the way we cover politics. You know, this is a competitive situation; there were debates going on. One of the problems with religion coverage is that when it is covered at all, it is usually kind of covered as just a little community affairs, public relations thing. You know, church of the week, or mosque of the week, or something like that, but it’s not taken seriously. A reporter would not go, say, to the Democratic headquarters, well, maybe some reporters who are really biased would, but even so, if you go to the Democratic headquarters and you get a position paper on something, then you probably go to the Republicans and ask them what is their opinion. You don’t see that in religion reporting. You don’t see the clash of ideas because it is not really taken seriously; so, this, I think, is a real problem also among journalists, and that is another reason that I wanted to write this book, to try to educate our local journalists and at least hear the serious things you should be dealing with.

LAND: One of the stories that has been missed by a lot of the journalistic sector is that Christianity is alive and thriving, and it is the most traditional part of Christianity, both Protestant and Catholic, that is thriving and, yet, few American journalists are aware of it or write about it, do they?

OLASKY: No, they don’t, and what they tend to be aware of in Christianity, if they have any Christian interest themselves, they tend to be in very theologically liberal churches. They often are not aware or they just don’t want to report, that those churches tend to be the dying churches. They may write about some of the splits going on in the Episcopalian church and so forth, but they don’t really understand what is going on in the very vibrant. You have the Southern Baptist congregations, the Pentecostal groups; the ones that are growing because there is something there. It’s not just a club for Sunday morning to feel good for an hour, but it is something that lasts people all through the week. That’s what folks are searching for and those are the growing churches, and journalists miss it because they are not part of it themselves. It is a foreign thing to them, and it is very easy just to stay in their comfort zones.

LAND: You tell us in this book that while the big stories in Christianity have been overlooked and underreported to a vast extent, other religions get lots of media attention to the extent that the media pays attention to religion. Talk to us about that.

OLASKY: Well, I’ll tell you again what I find among my students is a certain enthrallment with Buddhism. They don’t know anything about Buddhism, really, but they have occasionally read articles about how warm and embracing and gentle and kind Buddhists are, often as contrasted with those narrow fundamentalists, Christians. They have seen praise in papers and in movies also for Tibetan Buddhism, the Dalai Lama, and so forth, who is seen as just a real cute gentle person, and that is their understanding of Buddhism, and some of them gravitate to it and they get in deeper. They don’t have that same sense of the warmth of Christianity. They never read about it, they don’t see it in movies and, sometimes, very sadly, they have grown up in some aspects of Christianity but they have just come to see it as a bunch of rules and not a religion of grace.

LAND: You have pointed out in your book, and I think it is a very telling point, that when journalists do talk about religion, that they tend to paint a rosy picture of some other faiths, and a good example of that is Islam and the definition of the word, jihad. Talk to us about that.

OLASKY: Well, jihad means two different things. It means military action against people who aren’t Muslims. It means basically taking the rule to “Allah” and giving people a choice of either you worship Allah or else. Well, in some situations “or else” would kill you. In other situations you can remain as a Christian or as a Jew but you have to pay double taxes, you don’t have equal rights with Muslims, and so forth. There is no equality of religion in Islam. There is a desire to take jihad to the world, historically, most often by military means. That’s one definition. The other definition is jihad as personal testing and working out. I mean, you could go on an exercise jihad, you could go on a jihad of giving up alcohol or pornography, or other things. In that sense, jihad is an extended form of lent, I suppose. A student could say I am going to really devote myself to getting A’s this term—I am on an A jihad. That is the way it is used sometimes but the majority usage overall has been the military Muslim apologists want to say, “Well no, we are just kind, peaceful folks; forget that definition and use this other definition that is used by some people.” Journalists tend to emphasize that. American journalists tend to emphasize that, but if you want to look at Islam history, if you want to look at the way it is used most often, it is used in relation to the military.

LAND: Marvin, some people have said that Islam is a many-splintered thing. That there is this radical wahhabist jihadism but that that is no more than 10-15% of Islam worldwide, although it is growing evidently because of the incredible financing from the Saudi kingdom. What would be your assessment of that statement that Islam is a many-splintered thing and how would you assess it in it’s current state around the world?

OLASKY: I think that is accurate. I spent the month of June this past year in Turkey, which has it’s 10-15% of radical Muslims, but it has a whole lot of other people who are very liberalized Muslims, and I think that is what we, in the United States, should be cheering for. That secularism in Turkey is actually a good thing. Turkey, I think, is somewhat of an ally of ours and I think we can certainly co-exist very well with Turkey. Turkey will probably join the European Union, and it will be interesting to see what happens there. But I am impressed with lots of those folks. There are people in the press who really do want to have a free play of ideas in a debate, that goes against traditional Islam, which has no sense at all of religious liberty or even allowing that. But, some of that may come in Turkey, and I am hopeful that given the recent elections in Iraq that they can move towards democracy within Islam which would be a real change from the type of autocracy that they have tended to have in Middle Eastern Muslim countries, but they can move to democracy within Islam, and then they can move from there to democracy which would include people who aren’t Muslims, and then they could move to freedom of speech and freedom of religion. It is a long and winding road; democracy within Islam is just the first step on it but I think it can happen.