Media blind to nature of religion

Thursday, May 31st, 2018

Compared with most countries we do rather well in New Zealand with our varied and differentiated public media. National Radio, certainly, is outstanding and on the whole newspapers present a fair range of views on contested matters.

The exception seems to be anything to do with religion.

The churches appear to be regarded as a free fire zone, where anything goes, and the usual conventions around fact-checking and objectivity do not apply.

A good example was a recent article in the ODT by Chris Trotter.

Few of us would agree all the time with Chris, but generally his contributions, however provocative, are backed up by research and a well-stocked mind.

He is well worth listening to. Yet off he goes here with wild exaggerations about New Zealand’s Protestantism being “conservative and evangelical”, out to mind-blast the young and vulnerable.

And this, sadly, is typical of much media ignorance.

It seems we can’t get beyond caricatures.

The terms “Presbyterian” or Calvinist are almost invariably associated with censorious moralism, while Anglicanism is dismissed as bland and nominalist, though the role it has taken, for example, in recognising the implications of the Treaty of Waitangi is in many ways exemplary.

Likewise, there is the current tendency to be dismissive of anything emanating from the Catholic Church because of its sorry involvement in sexual abuse.

This may be understandable.

There must be zero tolerance of such abuse.

But do we reject wholesale every film from Hollywood, every rugby league team, on similar grounds?

All this matters because we are mauling reality.

Why don’t the media see this?

One problem, evident in some New Zealand historians as well, may be a lack of acquaintance with religious language and sensibility.

We seem to have lost the tools to interpret religion adequately, although it is about the poetry of life, its passion and tragedy, its reach for transcendence. Continue reading

Peter Matheson is is a retired Presbyterian minister, Emeritus Professor, Knox Theological College, Dunedin. He also taught in the universities of Edinburgh and Melbourne
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