Media Waxing Moralistic with the Religious Right
June 20, 2005
I finally read Jeff Sharlet’s fascinating tour inside America’s most powerful megachurch which contrasts sharply with Chris Hedge’s tour through the recent National Religious Broadcasters conference, where nearly everyone is a “Dominionist,” a label likely to become America’s hottest new bogeyman. Hardly above writing even more simplistic, hot and heavy diatribes, Jeff performs well for Harper’s but turns in the same essential moral as Hedges: for the religious right, pride comes before a fall.
The Weekly Standard’s feature on Ralph Reed comes to a similar impasse, mistaking it for profundity. Here is another “ugly” or at least unsavory, self-serving evangelical. The hypocrite angle is the easiest one in journalism. It writes itself. The politician who starts with principles and ideals but then makes compromises on them for political and perhaps personal gain.
I doubt there is a man of power and influence alive about whom this sort of story cannot be written. Can journalists dig no deeper because they, like academics (who tend to think very similarly–perhaps a generally liberal habit), maintain a studied naivete, an above-it-all attitude and false sense of superior insight and objectivity, claiming at once “influence” and denying the unseemly effects of “power?” Journalists seldom betray an awareness of their own complicity, indeed their starring role, in the politics of cynicism, hypocrisy, time-serving self-interestedness, and worse.
What I can divine as the upshot of the common morality tale behind Sharlet, Hedges, and the WS Reed piece is the rather humorous message: “See what happens when you mix religion and politics? Give us back our naked public square and all will be well!” Interrogating that idea could be the starting point of an interesting article on the “religious right.” So would questions about Reed and megachurch politicos that ask different sources whether, in the pragmatic realm of realpolitik, the net results of vigorously politicized religion justify its sins and compromises. The rest is just moralizing and secular theologizing–business as usual for the press.
This is Media Waxing Moralistic with the Religious Right in The Japery, a part of The New Pantagruel. Previously: Matt Taibbi | Next: Our Need to Master the Secondary Literature Leads to a Totalizing Brain Hemorrhage | TrackBack (0) | Comments (0)
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