“Media’s religious ignorance is exposing us to terror”

Massive ignorance about religion by western journalists is giving terrorists freedom to operate.

So says Washington Post contributor Paul Marshall who has co-edited a new book called Blind Spot: When Journalists don’t get Religion published by Oxford University Press and launched by Lapido Media in London today. (Listen to MP3 podcast »)

He said:  ‘Many journalists tend to interpret radicalism through a grid of Western concerns such as poverty, ethnicity and what’s happening in the Middle East.

‘To the degree that our views of the nature and goals of Islamist terrorism are shaped by the media, we are consistently being misinformed about the nature of our enemies and the nature of the conflicts we are in.  A massive indifference to religion by secular journalists resulted in 9/11 and 7/7.’

Marshall, Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute’s Centre for Religious Freedom in New York, spoke this morning at the Frontline Club in London in a discussion moderated by New Statesman contributor and historian Tom Holland.

Marshall said that the media were refusing to address the content of different religions.

‘They are not seen as modes of understanding, or forms of knowledge.  What’s really driving believers they think is money, sex or power.’

Tom Holland, whose recent articles for the New Statesman on secularity’s Christian antecedents have caused a storm of controversy, said that Marshall’s analysis was more true of America than UK.

He’d had no difficulty placing his own articles.

‘In this country there’s a considerable interest in religion by those who run the media.  The blind spot is in the populace as a whole.

‘To be sincere is uncool.  To be deeply spiritual is the height of embarrassment,’ he said.

Ann Holt, Director of Programmes at the Bible Society said Christians often had only themselves to blame.  ‘It is not just journalists who have no theology; believers have none either.

‘People think, We don’t need to fear Christian belief because most Christian believers don’t believe it.  If they did, our lives would be very different.

‘The problem for the church is, we just don’t know how to live our religion.’

Marshall also criticized the church.  ‘The focus of the book is journalists, but religious groups are lousy dealing with the media.  They run away from them.’

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