The Fox News of Religion

 Several times I’ve heard the, when he was creating FOX News, Rupert Murdoch commented that only with the news do we try to sell a product people a product that they don’t want. People don’t want a true account of what is happening in the world. Sell them, he suggested, what they want: tell them what they want to hear, and you’ll make a lot of money. All you have to do is lose that silly fetish of fact. 

It’s a cynical point of view. But it’s proven to be largely accurate. At least half the population of America—and the numbers look no better for the rest of the world—want to hear what they want to hear. They don’t want to hear demonstrable facts, such as that gun violence would plummet if we instituted and enforced reasonable restrictions on gun ownership. They don’t want to hear that there was no meaningful taint on the most recent presidential elections. They don’t want to be shown that the evidence of criminality on the part of the Republican front runner is clear and overwhelming, that the force driving the current and future indictments is more legal than partisan.  

However morally reprehensible, Murdoch was more right than wrong in his cynicism.  But he was wrong about the news. It is not the only product that offers to the public what they do not want to hear. There is also faith. 

That will sound odd to most people at first. If so, you’re thinking of religion—the religion anyway that dominates America. It’s often called Christianity or Evangelical Christianity. But that is the FOX news of religion. That is the part of faith that ignores the gospel and tells people exactly what they want to hear, what will get them into the churches and free them from the weight of their wallets.  

The FOX News of religion is what so many intellectuals and quasi-intellectuals turn to in order to scoff at faith: Russell, Dawkins, Hitchen, Rushdie, and Neil DeGrasse Tyson. They’ve been misled by FOX News version of religion.  

That the faith that does not tell people what they want to hear is the more genuine is, in the case of Christianity, attested at the very founding. Jesus was crucified. He told people what they did not want to hear. His disciples were murdered. His church was persecuted. But that church did not die. Both inside houses of worship and inside people who would not be caught dead in houses of worship there remains the Good News community. They hear what most people, most church-going people included, don’t want to hear.  

Whether they are right or wrong is another question. They have the right attitude. If focues on truth, not  comfort; on love not power.