A Reader Asks: Are Christians Entitled?

Recently I shared an article commenting on the recent mini-controversy about a tweet from Sen. Ted Cruz's campaign and the response by one pundit that appeared to betray a serious lack of knowledge of the basics of Christianity. Sen. Cruz's campaign tweeted that "we have to awaken and energize the body of Christ," which Ms. Parker interpreted as a call for Jesus to rise from his grave and serve Ted Cruz--nevermind that Christ's tomb is empty, and that the central claim of Christianity is that Jesus Christ is risen from the dead.

A reader raised a concern about jumping on this gaffe:

I am, however, a bit conflicted about the first link. It seems to take an unkind view of an admittedly ignorant pundit. It sounds rather like 'everybody point and laugh at the moron who doesn't know the first thing about a faith that she probably doesn't share'. The author goes on to a laundry list of Christian themed works of art and lumps the experience of those in with both particular knowledge of Christian faith, and by analogue, basic knowledge that everyone has. 

It might be my own anecdotal experience, but I feel like Christianity as a whole is being affected by a kind of "creeping entitlement"; a feeling that because we as a group believe in these things, we're entitled to have everyone else believe them too. Therein lies my frustration with the article. The author seems to think he's entitled to a better class of pundit, who knows about Christianity, or better yet, believes the exact same way as him. The stark reality is that there a lot of people out there, and not all of them believe in or even understand Christianity. I somehow doubt that merely expecting people to have the knowledge or experience of Christianity will win many converts. 

Would it not be better to take an attitude of love and kindness toward this person who showed ignorance of something we take for granted? Use this instance to call people to live their lives as Christ would have us live, and be luminous examples that the unknowing would wish to understand or emulate.

For me, the point of bringing attention to this story was not to mock a woman for a public slip-up. Rather, it was to express surprise that a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a person whom we might expect to be familiar with basic facts about core constituencies in society, apparently thought that it was the belief of Christians that the corpse of Jesus Christ lies in its grave. One might argue, as you do, that we should not expect people who are not Christian to be versed in the basics of Christianity, and that such an expectation would entail a sense of entitlement that is unwarranted. If the point at issue were a minor one, an obscure notion, or if Christianity were a minority faith in this country, or if we were not part of a western culture that had been formed by Christianity, I could agree. 

But I think that in a nation that has a supermajority of Christians, with a culture rooted in and built up by the Christian faith, we could reasonably expect that an educated person whose profession it is to know about and comment upon national affairs would be familiar with the most basic tenets of Christianity, especially the most central one: that Jesus is risen from the dead. We can expect this not out of a sense of entitlement, that this is the way things ought to be, but rather in the sense that it is a fact relevant to a large percentage of the population. One need not be a Christian to know the basics of Christianity, any more then one need be a football player to know who's playing in the Super Bowl. 

This is a pervasive problem in journalism, as journalists are disproportionately non-religious and for some reason do not feel the need to brush up on the subject before reporting on it. Such practices lead to embarrassing errors sufficient in number to warrant an entire website to covering them. Shouldn't we expect better from our so-called intelligentsia? As David Mills has pointed out,

For some reason journalists can make almost any mistake about the church or religion in general and no one says “boo.” No editor would hire a guy who said the Steelers were going to draft a point guard to help improve their relief pitching, but religion? There it’s “OK, whatever, just say something.”

I do not know if Ms. Parker is a professing Christian of any kind, or what sort of personal familiarity she has with the faith. But regardless of whether she's a Benedictine Oblate or a lifelong atheist, I would expect that a person who is not only highly educated, supposedly in the world's diverse ideas, but also living in the milieu of a Christian culture, should be familiar with the basic shape of Christianity. I agree, there is no need to be nasty or personally insulting to her, but certainly, when journalists fail to do their homework, they should be called out on it.

If You Want to Learn Something, Don't Read Newspapers

Perhaps you've heard some of the hubbub over a document being called "The Gospel of Jesus' Wife." Well, I say "document," when it's a scrap of parchment showing fragments of sentences, one of which contains the phrase "Jesus said, 'My wife....'" But from the dramatic news headlines and the sheer volume of attention this find has received, you'd think someone had found an autographed picture of the Messiah and the Mrs. on vacation. You'd think we'd have learned before, from reports on comments made by the pope to pretty much everything blogged about at GetReligion, that newspapers aren't the best source for clarity and insight when it comes to things religious, but it appears we have one more lesson. Let's take a look at an example article and strain out the assumptions, hyperbole, and leaps of logic so that we can get something of a clear idea of just what it is we're dealing with.

This article from the Boston Globe is headlined "No evidence of modern forgery in ancient text mentioning 'Jesus' wife.'" The lead reads:

New scientific tests have turned up no evidence of modern forgery in a text written on ancient Egyptian papyrus that refers to Jesus as being married, according to a long-awaited article to be published Thursday in the Harvard Theological Review.

Already in the headline, and here in the first sentence, we have a problem. The smidgeon of text we have does not posit that Jesus had a wife. Jesus begins a sentence saying, "My wife...." How does that sentence end? It very well could end, "My wife is the one who follows my teaching." Think of Matthew 12:50: "Whoever does the will of my Father is my brother and my sister and my mother." So, first problem: people are inferring too much from these four words.

Second problem: the article calls the text "ancient." But dating the text precisely is difficult, and very problematic. One carbon-dating test put it in the 4th century BC, leading to the apparently miraculous conclusion that a text recording Jesus' words was written 300 years before he lived; another carbon-dating test placed its origins in the 8th century AD, 800 years after Christ lived. You could just as well call the 700s AD "medieval" as "ancient"--it's right on the borderline. So calling it "ancient" (or assigning any time value to it at all) is a tad misleading.

Third problem: the article calls the text "authentic." If by "authentic" they mean it isn't a modern forgery, that may be an acceptable usage of the term, provided that's true. But many people will read "authentic" to mean "telling us something really true about Jesus." I may have an "authentic" (meaning "not forged") text of Harry Turtledove's book The Guns of the South, which imagines a time traveler coming to the Confederacy and giving Robert E. Lee automatic weapons; but that doesn't mean that the text has any relation to reality. There were all kinds of false gospels written in the early centuries, like the Gospel of Thomas or the Gospel of Judas, that made up all sorts of stories about Jesus--think of them as "Jesus fan fiction." And those false gospels were a lot older than this thing appears to be. This text, even if it's not forged, could just as well be one of them.

"Ah," you say, "but it's an ancient text. It was written close to the time of Jesus! It must be telling us something true!"

You mean "ancient" as in 700 years after Christ lived? That's like saying I have an "ancient" copy of St. Thomas' Summa Theologica because my copy was printed last week--it's only 700 years older than the original!

And even assuming that this text was written much closer to the time of Jesus, that just makes it old fan fiction. There's no attestation to this idea from any other authority or tradition in Christianity. You would think if this were true, and since it would be a fairly important or interesting piece of information about the life of Our Lord, somebody somewhere, and indeed, everybody everywhere, would have remembered it. If your cousin says, "Hey, wasn't Uncle Jack married?" and everybody said, "I never heard anything mentioned about a wife of his," you'd conclude, "Oh, then he must not have been, because surely someone would remember that Uncle Jack had a spouse."

Don't let the headlines and the hype mislead you. There's no reason to believe that this bit of paper tells us anything actual factual about the life of Jesus. It's probably the equivalent of stories written in online forums in which fans write that Han Solo is really the secret eldest son of Anakin Skywalker--it may have been written down somewhere by someone, but it's not canon.

Women Cardinals and Clericalism

The pope has given an interview to Italian Journalist Andrea Tornielli, mostly focusing on the meaning of Christmas, but with a few random quick questions thrown in. I found this one particularly interesting:

May I ask you if the Church will have women cardinals in the future? 

“I don’t know where this idea sprang from. Women in the Church must be valued not 'clericalised'. Whoever thinks of women as cardinals suffers a bit from clericalism.” 

Clericalism is an attitude that clerics (bishops, priests, deacons, cardinals) are somehow morally superior to the rest of the Church, that the authority they hold and the power they exercise to enact that authority are the highest goods in the Church. Clericalism is overly concerned with power, and it is a problem you find on all sides of the ecclesiological spectrum. Anyone who is more interested in using authority to put into place their ideological agenda than using it to further the Gospel and the Kingdom of God is a clericalist. Clericalism is about power, not servant leadership.

The clericalist assumes that one's worth within the Church is determined by the authority or power one holds in the Church. We see this mindset everywhere within the ecclesiological spectrum, whenever someone tries to turn every utterance of a priest or bishop into an infallible proclamation, binding by force of excommunication--be it ueber-traddies who denigrate receiving Communion in the hand because some saint somewhere allegedly said it was bad (even though it's an ancient practice and the Church officially allows it), to the super-lib who says anyone who doesn't adhere to their reading of every suggestion of prudential judgment from every USCCB statement on peace and justice issues is "not really Catholic" (ignoring, of course, all the conference's pro-life statements, which are just as much "peace and justice" issues as anything).

Those who agitate for women to be included among the College of Cardinals usually couch their argument in terms of power and authority: the Church needs to include women in decision-making roles; women need to have their voices heard at the highest levels; and so forth. And dig a little deeper with these folks and ask why they think women need to be placed in these positions, and 11 times out of 10, you'll hear things like: "...because then we would have the influence to change the Church's teaching on contraception/abortion/women's ordination...."

Aha! It's not about humbly serving the Church, but about substantially changing the Church. They think that might makes right, that the will determines the truth, that the teaching of the Church will be determined by the personal ideas and preferences of the governors of the Church--an even more twisted form of cuius regio, eius religio. It is the clericalist mindset that thinks the ruler makes the religion.

Pope Francis' point in this brief quotation is to slap down clericalism and uphold the dignity of every Christian and the unique calling God makes to each. You don't have to be a priest or bishop to do the work of God. Indeed, as Jeremiah 23 reminds us, the shepherd has an awful burden and responsibility before God should he lead the sheep astray--if that authority is misused, "woe unto you shepherds."

Pope Francis has said elsewhere that Mary is the model Christian, around whom the apostles were gathered at Pentecost... and she wasn't an apostle, wasn't a bishop, wasn't a cleric. She was simply herself: a disciple of Jesus Christ. Which is what we are all called to be. Let's be that.

Journalism 101 and the Pope's Interview

For the past 80 years or so my tiny home parish has put on a traditional Dutch sausage & sauerkraut dinner as a fundraiser for the church and its school. It's a huge event, known throughout the state, and the local news channels usually cover it. They send down a camera crew, talk to people, eat some sausage, then go off to produce their segment.

And every year the story gets something wrong: they mispronounce someone's name; they place our parish in the wrong city; they quote someone who has little to nothing to do with putting on the dinner and they say something incorrect. You see this and think, "Man, what a bunch of amateurs! They got this all wrong!"

But what do you do then? You watch the next segment, and assume that everything is accurate and correct! Even though you just saw for yourself that they make mistakes!

When we know something about an event being reported, we're able to see where the reporting goes wrong; why don't we remember that when we hear other news stories?

I was reminded of this recently in the hubbub over the interview with Pope Francis. Newspapers and TV news outlets made a story out of this interview, but anyone who had actually read the interview for themselves would be able to tell you that these news media grossly distorted what the pope had said.

Every single news story I saw on the interview made the same fundamental reporting mistakes, things my journalism classes taught me were absolutely unacceptable in reporting.

• They made the increasingly more prevalent error of mixing news analysis with news reporting, speculating on the pope's intentions or motivations in giving the interview. The news page is supposed to report what happened; the editorial page is supposed to give opinions. If the news page wants to give voice to the opinions of particular people on a story's content, they should attribute those opinions to those particular people, e.g. "Professor John Q. Academic thinks this could signal..." instead of just saying, "This could signal...." Really? It could? Says who?

• They quoted the pope out of context, warping his words to make him say things he didn't. In most stories, this practice started right at the headline and worked its way down. Nearly every headline said something like, "Pope says church is 'obsessed' with rules on abortion, contraception, gay marriage." What a gripping headline! Only problem is HE DIDN'T SAY THAT. This glues together words from THREE DIFFERENT PARAGRAPHS to fabricate a quotation. In one paragraph he said, "We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods" (adding that "the church's teaching on these things is clear"); in another he said "The church’s pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently" (instead desiring to first and foremost focus on the "proposal of the Gospel"); and in another he said that "The church sometimes has locked itself up in small things, in small-minded rules." Nowhere did he say what the headline reported him to say.

How did these news outlets end up making this mistake? They took their first mistake of improperly inserting analysis into news and applied it to these quotations. The headline they concocted tells you more about what the media thinks on these issues than what the pope thinks: to them, the Church's teachings on these moral issues are nothing but small-minded rules that the Church has spent far too much time obsessing over.

Your ten-dollar word for the day is eisegesis, which means "the interpretation of a text (as of the Bible) by reading into it one's own ideas." The news media, in reading and reporting on the pope's interview, was doing eisegesis: they inserted their own presuppositions and opinions into the text and tried to make the pope their puppet. Whether this was done intentionally or not, I couldn't say. Sometimes people just hear what they want to hear. But, at the very least, I would hope this episode would make you wary of trusting everything you read or see in the news. If they can't even get my parish dinner right, why should you expect them to report accurately on a 12,000 word interview? 

Why the Press Doesn't Get the Pope

Once upon a time, in the halcyon days of my undergraduate education, I majored in journalism. Well, technically speaking, I majored in Communication Studies with an emphasis in journalism, but the point is that which my courses were directed toward was a formation and education in the journalistic art. I entered college wanting to be a sports writer, so I took classes called Writing & Reporting, Public Affairs Reporting, Communication History (which was basically a history of newspapers), and so forth. This is pertinent only to establish my credibility for the topic at hand: when I talk about journalistic mindsets and practices, I know a little of what I speak.

The media hubbub in the last few days over Pope Francis' comments to reporters while flying back from World Youth Day has demonstrated once again that, by and large, the news media knows about as much about religion as I do about internal combustion engines: that is, not much. Why is this? I can think of a few reasons.

First, journalists are primarily educated in the field of public events reporting. Anything that involves a basic who-what-when-where-why-how breakdown, they can do pretty well: "two people were injured on Mulberry Street Thursday morning in a freak gardening accident that has some questioning the practice of marketing chainsaws as lawn trimmers," and so forth. Easy enough. Anything that requires a little specialized knowledge usually requires a specialty reporter: our science correspondent, our sports reporter, etc. But news bureaus are getting smaller these days, meaning that specialty topics are being covered by non-specialists. This seems to be most true with religion reporting (or perhaps just appears to be so to me because it's something I know a little about), and the result is often pretty shoddy. The website GetReligion is dedicated to bringing to light these sorts of poorly told tales and is filled with examples of reporters misrepresenting the most basic of Christian beliefs (the best are always at Christmas and Easter, when reporters try to explain what mysteries are being celebrated--it would be hilarious if it weren't so sad)--never mind the subtleties and nuances of, say, moral theology or sexual ethics, or the all-important distinction between the sinner and the sin. They often just plain don't know what they're talking about.

This leads to our second point. Before they might gain a specialty (assuming they aren't a specialist-turned-journalist), usually most reporters are encouraged to be well-versed enough in politics to enable them to report on the important events of the day, so that political reporting becomes less a specialty than a standard modus operandi for the reporter. And because most reporters are trained in politics, they tend to see every story as a political story, a story about groups struggling for power or influence. Look at the reporting on global warming, for example: it's much less about any of the science involved and much more about various political pressure groups or international scientific bodies vying for the nation's attention. Too often, it's the same with religious reporting.

Reporters tend to view religious groups, such as the Catholic Church, solely as political organizations that have "policies" and "agendas" and do "messaging"; they definitely do not view the Church as the organized body of believers in Jesus Christ, convened under the headship of Peter among us, preaching the Gospel and teaching the truth for the salvation of souls. (Though to play devil's advocate for a moment, the Church does have a bureaucratic structure and does, in fine Italian fashion, have in-fighting between various offices at times, so the press can't be entirely blamed for treating it like any other organization on occasion.)

To the point: when Pope Francis makes comments on the Church's pastoral responsibility toward homosexual persons, on the importance of distinguishing the sin from the sinner, on the reality of the forgiveness of sins and the duty to recognize that fact in people's lives, he is simply expressing, as a true shepherd of his sheep, what the Church's Magisterium says in a dozen other places. But because most of these reporters 1) do not know the Church's teaching on this topic and think the Church "hates gays or something," and 2) see everything through a political lens, they start reporting that the pope "may have signaled a shift in tone" or "may be setting up a change in policy," etc., as though he were a senator "pivoting" on an issue to gain a few points in the polls. But of course, it was nothing of the kind.

So, guys, a few helpful hints here. First, learn your facts: when given an assignment on a religious story, do your homework, read up on the issues and doctrines involved, and don't always go to the same three dissident priests for quotes. Second, stop thinking everyone is a political schemer grasping for power; you'll sleep much better at night when you realize not everyone is out to get what they can for themselves.

You have a responsibility to the public: you provide the data from which people in this free republic shape their conclusions. The least you can do is give them accurate info.