Picking up on Morrissey’s piece in the previous post concerning the plethora of liberal media attacks on presidential contenders that don’t end with the name ‘Obama’, another aspect of bias is playing into the usual media games: religion, specifically Christianity and the media’s ignorance on the subject. Erick Erickson of RedState writes:
…instead of lecturing candidates on how the candidates should shut up about religion, it is really obvious the American political press should shut the hell up when it comes to issues of heaven and, well, hell.
Ed Morrissey noted at Hot Air that the media really is ignorant about religion. More specifically, the media is ignorant about Christianity. Even supposedly professing Christians in the media are ignorant about Christianity, the religion a majority of Americans profess to believe in.
Both Morrissey and Erickson point out how supposed top-tier editorialists err on the fundamentals when it comes to writing about Republican presidential candidates' faith, and are quick to jump to conclusions based on their own biases either against the candidates themselves or against the very religious beliefs they’re attempting to write about. It is with these skewed perspectives that such writers then assemble attacks on Christianity, as opposed to their rather benign treatment of say Islam, or any of the individuals of Christian faith who would dare challenge Barack Obama for the presidency. Case in point, Morrissey ponders:
Perhaps they are as ignorant about Islam as they are about Christianity. However, if they want to start asking questions about religion of presidential candidates, how about starting with Barack Obama and his 20-year affiliation with Jeremiah Wright and Trinity United Church of Christ? Wright took a lot of political stands that the media roundly ignored in the 2008 election, including his sermon that the US deserved the 9/11 attacks as “chickens coming home to roost,” supports Hamas, and infamously declared, “God damn the United States.” Maybe someone can ask about the TUCC’s adopted “value system” that insists that the US sends black men to “concentration camps.” Does Obama believe that? We don’t know, because Keller and his ilk didn’t bother to ask questions about Obama’s religion in 2008.
These people are no more religious scholars or experts than the next man on the street, but it’s evident that this is yet another method that they’d exploit in an attempt to sway voters away from any alternative, Republican, or press forbid, conservative, to their sacred, or rather invested, Obama presidency. And Erickson concludes his piece with the following:
These examples are, at best, deeply, deeply ignorant of Christianity and have taken atheist formed stereotypes of Christianity and treated them as mainstream depictions of evangelicals. These are complex questions for which even within Christianity there is no settled answer. Labeling the whole of the Christians who actually believe their scripture as some group of fringe nuts is rather vile and we could never expect reporters and editorialists to do the same of other mainstream religions.
In fact, were any Christian to raise similar points about Islam, the media would immediately call them bigots — dare I say despite the Christians having a more thorough understanding of Islam than the same members of press willfully bashing Christians and painting Christians as bigots if they engage in discussions on Islam.
What’s sad is the American press corp at the national level is largely devoid of practicing Christians and these largely secular, if not out and out atheist, reporters are attempting to write about and cover a religion most Americans profess to believe in and they write about it with either ignorance or outright contempt.
It’s not the politicians who should stop talking about religion. It is the American press corps who should shut up.
Interestingly, both men reference a passage from Rick Perry’s book Fed Up!:
Let’s be clear: I don’t believe government, which taxes people regardless of their faith, should espouse a specific faith. I also don’t think we should allow a small minority of atheists to sanitize our civil dialogue on religious references.
