Something remarkable is happening to the relationship between media and faith, the aftermath of the tsunami confirming an earlier trend, writes John Waters
I would describe it as a move to normalise questions about the Unknown in a medium for which rationalism is the strongest suit. That such matters are (for now?) mainly discussed in terms of scepticism, disbelief and anger is the least interesting thing about this.
For a generation, spiritual matters have been treated by mainstream media, here and in the wider West, as parallel realities meriting condescension or, at best, disinterested reserve. While substantial coverage was accorded to church politics, church-state relations and theological discussion, these were mainly treated as pertaining to a discreet reality, the language and assumptions of faith being notably absent from media treatment of more general issues. It is as though the consensus of media was that faith is a load of baloney, but a certain service must be maintained for those clinging to superstition.
These trends largely followed the pattern established by the separation of church and state, being partly a reaction to an earlier phase, in which religious pieties and assumptions were unquestioningly treated as primary elements of public thought. But they also followed changing styles of journalism. As reporting became less about regurgitating official pronouncements and increasingly a means of interrogating accepted reality, faith remained too big and irrational to be treated like other subjects.
This now seems to have shifted into a new phase. Just before Christmas, Time and Newsweek ran virtually identical cover stories questioning the story of Christ's birth, adducing gospel inconsistencies and theological paradoxes to hint that the Christian story, because it fails journalistic tests of rationality and literalism, is historically suspect. Both articles, perhaps mindful of recent political outcomes in the US, were highly sensitive towards Christian beliefs, but, more interestingly, stylistically in keeping with the normal fare of the magazines. They treated the Christian story as a legitimate object of journalistic inquiry, like a financial scandal or a sport-and-drugs story, with two sides and a remaining element of the unknown. Irish magazines Village and The Dubliner, ran pre-Christmas features along similar lines.
In the wake of the Asian tsunami, questions of faith and God have moved into the centre of the journalistic agenda. Last weekend, Village ran a remarkable cover story under the headline "Some Loving God", with the main article, by Vincent Browne, asking: "How could a caring God allow the tsunami to happen?" As with the Time and Newsweek pieces, the tone and presentation of the material was similar to the treatment of stories about politics or social policy. There were panel pieces canvassing the position of a selection of clerics and churches and enumerating God's previous miraculous interventions, including the plague of boils and the healing of lepers. The thrust of Vincent's piece was to treat God's failure to prevent the tsunami like a political failure, with Bible stories presented in the manner of a list of broken election promises or a portfolio of flawed intelligence. At last, one reflected, Village is delivering on its promise to hold the centres of power accountable for their actions. It seemed likely that the article would conclude with a demand for God to either resign or be fired, but instead it ended with a verdict: "Our rationality and the Bible tell us there is no loving, all-powerful God who intervenes in our lives, who cares for us and on whom we can depend."
It was a different emphasis to the conclusion of Patsy McGarry's piece in the Rite and Reason slot on this page last Monday: "Either He/She/It doesn't exist, has never existed or we have never understood Him/Her/It properly."
This is a big subject - the biggest there is - and I suspect that, now the culture of dissociation has begun to dissolve, the journalistic life of this "story" is only just beginning. To further this all-important investigation, I would like to recommend to both Vincent and Patsy a splendid book, extraordinarily germane to this matter and yet, it seems, unknown to anyone I have encountered commenting on it. When Bad Things Happen To Good People was written 24 years ago by an American rabbi, Harold S. Kushner, in an attempt to reconcile his faith with the death of his son, who had died aged 14 of progeria, a rapid ageing syndrome. The book addresses issues raised in the Book of Job about the irreconcilability of conventional ideas that God is, at once, all-powerful and just. Kushner's conclusion is startlingly simple, yet rational: God is all-loving but not all-powerful. Reduced, the book's analysis is that the world remains incomplete and imperfect, and no longer within the scope of its Creator. The reason we are here is to aid God's work of completion. God helps us in certain ways, but He neither causes things to happen nor is able to prevent them. The bad things that happen are neither punishments nor tests - simply events, and God is entirely innocent.