Religion and the Media

When choosing slots for our AMS reports, no-one in the class chose "Religion & Morality". (Kind of surprising in such a sensitive and thoughtful group!)

So let me provide you with a couple of stories from this morning's papers.


From the Hartford Courant: "Church Moderates Seek Airtime".

Now at first glance one would say that Religion is more evident in the media and in society than it has been in a long time. The question posed in the article, though, is "whose voices are we hearing?"

The major networks have "silenced" mainline religious voices in favor of more conservative or fundamentalist church leaders, said the Rev. Robert Chase, communication director for the United Church of Christ, which this week launched an effort to get more moderate religious views on the air.

Moderate voices are conspicuously absent from cable news and Sunday morning talk shows, Chase said Wednesday.

By comparison, he said, the Rev. Pat Robertson; the Rev. Jerry Falwell; James Dobson, chairman of Focus on the Family; Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention; and Gary Bauer, former head of the Family Research Council, have accumulated more than 30 appearances on Sunday talk shows such as NBC's "Meet the Press" and CBS' "Face the Nation" over the past eight years.

In the same period, the principal U.S. leaders of the United Church of Christ, the United Methodist Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church, the Presbyterian Church and the African Methodist Episcopal Church have not appeared at all.

"The fact is that these [mainline] leaders do speak for millions of people whose perspective is not being heard," Chase said.

Pat Robertson, seen on TV's The 700 Club, has previously called for the assassination of a foreign head of state, and blamed hurricanes and 9/11 on gays.

Jerry Falwell, perhaps most famous for outing Tinky Winky, (of course they deny it), blamed 9/11 on " the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way."

Why are these guys getting all the airtime, if they don't represent the mainstream, if some of their ideas tend toward the outrageous? Well, they're well-known, and outrageous is good TV. It's this thirst for viewers, more than political bias, that results in bad tv.

"There is a dangerous trend with the political and religious right feeding off each other's agenda and ascribing theological validity to it that is troubling to me, because we have a society that supposedly is built on a diversity of voices," Chase said.

From the New York Times: "A Preacher's Credo"

Maybe you've seen this man on tv. His name is Joel Osteen, and he's a very wealthy man. How did he get to be rich? By preaching.

You may not think that ministering is a very lucrative profession. But it can be. The first thing you need is a big enough church. Lakewood Church, Mr. Osteen's church seats 16,000. (It's the former home of the Houston Rockets basketball team.) When they pass the plate at Lakewood, it's a big plate.

Collections at the church's service bring in close to $1 million a week, with $20 million or so a year more sent in by mail, said Don Iloff, Lakewood's spokesman and Mr. Osteen's brother-in-law. Don't get too excited, though. It's not all profit.
The money goes to pay the staff of 300, service the debt on the $95 million it cost to turn the Compaq Center into a church (now about half paid off), support ministries in India and elsewhere and buy television time around the country.

And Mr. Osteen doesn't even take a salary from the church. He doesn't have to.

Two weeks ago he signed a contract with Free Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, that could bring him as much as $13 million for a follow-up book to his debut spiritual guide, "Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential," which, since it was published by Warner Faith in 2004, has sold more than three million copies.

It's not enough to have a big church though. You need the right message.

Mr. Osteen exhorts readers to shun negativity and develop "a prosperous mindset" as a way of drawing God's favor. He tells the story of a passenger on a cruise ship who fed himself on cheese and crackers before realizing that sumptuous meals were included. "Friend, I don't know about you, but I'm tired of those cheese and crackers!," Mr. Osteen writes. "It's time to step up to God's dining table."

Or, as he also puts it: "God wants you to be a winner, not a whiner."

He is not shy about calling on the Lord. He writes of praying for a winning basket in a basketball game, and then sinking it; and even of circling a parking lot, praying for a space, and then finding it. "Better yet," he writes, "it was the premier spot in that parking lot."

Are there critics? Sure. Some people are always jealous of success.

"He's not in the soul business, he's in the self business," said James B. Twitchell, professor of English and advertising at the University of Florida and author of a forthcoming Simon & Schuster book on megachurches: "Shopping for God: How Christianity Went From in Your Heart to in Your Face."

"There's breadth but not too much depth, but the breadth is quite spangly, exciting to look at — that's his power," said Dr. Twitchell who called Lakewood "the steroid extreme" of megachurches. He said church critics fault Mr. Osteen for "diluting and dumbing down" the Christian message, "but in truth," he said, "what he's producing is a wild and alluring community."

Whatever. It sure sounds like a form of religion that would appeal to a lot of 21st century Americans.

All-in-all, a very positve piece on Mr. Osteen from, of all places, the New York Times.