Aaqil Ahmed, beleaguered Head of Religion at the BBC, called me in for a cup of tea last September to ask what I meant by religious literacy. He’d got wind of an event I had run that had unpacked for journalists and opinion formers why the media were getting Egypt’s revolution so badly wrong. As usual the media had been siding with the political opposition, in true British fashion, assuming them to be the under-dog in a game of two sides. They had ignored the complicating third and fourth factors: the persecuted Copts, and browbeaten Sufis, either ignorant of their existence or embarrassed about siding with Christians or more esoteric religion. Almost no investigative work was being done on the plight of Coptic or Sufi minorities as Egypt went into revolutionary meltdown, beyond macho scenarios of Jeremy Bowen in Tahrir Square. There was a clear lack of contacts and channels into the Coptic world even though Copts are often fluent in English.
The Sunday Times took two weeks after the main mass arsons in August 2013 to file their report. Ignorant? ”“ or suppressing the news of burning churches lest they appear ”˜partisan’? What it betrayed was ignorance of the Coptic contribution to Egyptian civic life and worse, a cavalier attitude to the life-threatening nature of religiously illiterate reporting. Ignoring the Copts, vulnerable as a tiny minority despite their disproportionate economic and cultural clout, consigned them further to oblivion. This was religious illiteracy in the media at its worst ”“ and it’s the consequences of this that a new Commission on Religion and Belief in British Public Life, founded by the Woolf Institute in Cambridge, has an opportunity to examine and even change.
Yes, as has been long apparent, journalists (whether in the print, broadcast, or online forums) just don’t “get religion.” Just consult Terr Mattingly of GetReligion.com for endless examples. And that grim fact is indeed ominous for lots of reasons. Three brief dicta by way of illustration or comment.
1. We have a HUGE problem on our hands when most Christians, of whatever denomination, get most of their news from sources that manifest a strong, if often somewhat hidden, bias against Christianity. The large numbers of mostly nominal or at best half-committed Christians inevitably absorb lots of anti-Christian values and presuppositions from this constant exposure to the secular, relativist mass media. Among other things, that means we desperately need to develop our own internal system of communication as Christians, conscious of our new minority (or even despised) status in the Global North.
2. When foreign journalists or Western observers make dogmatic statements like the one that the brave ++Ben Kwashi is objecting to here, i.e., that violent jihadist movements like Boko Horam are motivated more by poverty than by religious ideology, there are at least two other ways we can counter those dogmatic (and unwarranted) claims (besides the kind of refutation made by the great Nigerian bishop).
A. Oh yeah, smartypants. How do you know this? On what basis do you know that fanatical Muslims like the those involved in Boko Horam are motivated MORE by poverty than by Islamic fervor?? What reliable polls or scientific surveys have revealed this?
B. Just how do you, as a foreign observer, know more about the motivations of Boko Horam fighters than local Nigerians like +Kwashi? In fact, how do you, as an armchair psychologist, know more about the motivations of Islamic militants than they do themselves? Why do you discount the public statement of Boko Horam leaders and refuse to take them at face value??
Both of these questions are ways of bringing the axiomatic assumptions of secular journalists out into the open where they can be debated.
This is not to deny for a moment that there is some truth in the claim that dissatisfaction with dire poverty is one of the contributing factors to the emergence of militant Islamic terrorism in our time. But the glib, smug relativistic assumptions of Global North journalists, academics, and politicians simply fails to take seriously the fact that poverty hasn’t caused such horrific terrorism to arise everywhere around the world, but predominantly in Islamic areas.
3. Finally, a semantic note in closing. Pay attention to the significance of the phrase “religious illiteracy,” because it’s apt. We’re not just dealing with massive ignorance here. That’s bad enough. The real problem however is deeper and more ominous than that. The root problem is appropriately called one of illiteracy. The mass media simply has never learned how to read religion. That’s much worse.
David Handy+
(FWIW, today is the 7th anniversary of my first post on this blog)