The International Religious Freedom Report for 2004
Monday 27 September 2004 @ 10:51 am

The International Religious Freedom Report for 2004 was released on September 15, 2004.

The entire document is here:
http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/irf/ opens in new window

Excerpt from the executive summary:

2004 Executive Summary
International Religious Freedom Report
Released by the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor

Religious liberty lies at the heart of a just and free society. Enshrined as both a foundational American value and a universal principle, the right to freedom of religion is also a cornerstone of democracy. It is a vital measure in the creation and maintenance of a stable political system. Conversely, the failure to protect freedom of religion and other fundamental human rights can undermine social order, foster extremism, and lead to instability and violence. Assessing the status of religious freedom can often serve as one helpful diagnostic for the overall health and stability of a nation. For these reasons and others, promoting religious freedom continues to be an essential element of United States foreign policy. President Bush has observed that “successful societies guarantee religious liberty,” and the Administration’s National Security Strategy declares that the U.S. will “take special efforts to promote freedom of religion and conscience and defend it from encroachment by repressive governments.”

…

Executive summary:
http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/irf/2004/35335.htm opens in new window

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Christian Citizens and the News Media–Part One
Monday 27 September 2004 @ 12:47 am

Albert Mohler
Author, Speaker, President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary
Monday, September 27, 2004

Christian Citizens and the News Media–Part One

http://www.crosswalk.com/news/weblogs/mohler/?adate=9/27/2004#1286894

How should Christians engage the news media? The expanding controversy over CBS News reports on President George W. Bush’s National Guard service–and the network’s acknowledgement that it used faked documents in its report–raises a host of issues about truth-telling, media credibility, and evangelical responsibility. Let me suggest ten principles for responsible evangelical engagement with the news media. Our responsibility is to consider the news–and the making of news–from a Christian worldview perspective. That makes a huge difference in how we analyze, assimilate, and judge media reports.

Principle One: In a fallen world, everyone is biased. There is no such thing as absolute objectivity. As a matter of fact, everyone comes to the news with some bias. We are all creatures of our own limited experience and information, and we all come to the issues of the day–controversial or otherwise–with a specific worldview. Even research scientists acknowledge that absolute objectivity is an impossible achievement. This is especially true when dealing with issues of worldview consequence. As Christians, we recognize that bias is not merely a matter of political interest or ideological conviction; it is evidence of sin. In a sinful world, bias creeps into every discussion, every judgment, and every news report. Evangelical Christians therefore have no excuse for being surprised when bias appears–we should expect it, and judge accordingly. At the same time, we should be aware of our own bias and submit our own assumptions to careful analysis. Every single individual confronts the issues of the day from specific worldview commitments. There is no escaping this reality.

Principle Two: News reports are heavily filtered–and the filters matter. The news we receive on televised broadcasts, in newspapers, and in virtually any other form, come to us only after passing through numerous filters. All along the process, reporters, editors, producers, executives, and others are making judgments about what stories are important, how stories should be reported, what sources should be used, and what perspectives should be included. These filters are extremely significant, and the news reports we receive are but a fraction of what could be published and presented. Someone is making those decisions, and the worldview of those decision-makers is of the utmost importance. The decision about what to cover is as important as decisions about how to cover any given issue or event. If we are unaware of these filters, we will assume that the news presented to us reflects what is ultimately most important. Actually, it may reflect only what individuals in the filtering process want us to see, read, or hear. As Marvin Olasky argues in Prodigal Press, “Many scholars suggest that journalists have their prime influence on society not so much by coverage of particular stories as by the choice of what to cover; journalists are sometimes called ‘gate-keepers’ or ‘agenda-setters.’ Readers and viewers should keep asking: Why was this story considered newsworthy?”

Principle Three: The media are driven by commercial interests. The vast majority of media outlets are commercial enterprises, driven by a bottom-line desire for profit. This has a great deal to do with how the news is presented, how the readers or audience are addressed, and how issues are framed. As Neil Postman and Steve Powers explained, much of what we see on television news is designed “to keep viewers watching so that they will be exposed to commercials.” Thus, producers and news directors are driven to cover stories that offer visual interest, regardless of news value. As the old newsroom adage goes, “If it bleeds, it leads.” Images often displace words, and a distorted picture of reality results. Furthermore, the commercial interest of broadcast news means that viewers must be held over a period of time by enticements. That is why news anchors advertise upcoming stories and, as C. John Sommerville of the University of Florida explains, “string us along.” As Sommerville argues, “The techniques of stringing us along show that the news industry is not as interested in satisfying a hunger as in creating an addiction.” The media have a commercial product to sell, and that product is television commercials.

Principle Four: The media elite is demographically and ideologically removed from the world inhabited by most Americans. As researchers S. Robert Lichter, Stanley Rothman, and Linda S. Lichter argued over two decades ago, the news business is now largely in the hands of a “media elite.” As these researchers made clear, this media elite is comprised of persons from a very thin slice of the American population. They are highly educated, socially mobile, metropolitan in focus, and overwhelmingly liberal in terms of ideological bias. They have often attended America’s most prestigious universities, they were often radicalized by the 1960s, Vietnam, and the Watergate experience, and they see the news media as an opportunity to revolutionize society. As Robert and Linda Lichter and Stanley Rothman described the media elite, “In their attitudes toward sex and sex roles, members of the media elite are virtually unanimous in opposing both governmental and traditional constraints. A large majority opposes government regulation of sexual activities, upholds a pro-choice position on abortion, and rejects the notion that homosexuality is wrong. In fact, a slight majority would not characterize adultery as wrong.” Does the coalescence of leading journalists into a media elite make a difference? Bernard Goldberg, a long-time veteran of CBS News, poses the questions this way: “Do we really think that if the media elites worked out of Nebraska instead of New York, and if they were overwhelmingly social conservatives instead of liberals, and if they overwhelmingly voted for Nixon and Reagan instead of McGovern and Mondale . . . do we really think that would make no difference? Does anyone really believe that the evening newscast would fundamentally be the same?” No sane person can believe this would make no difference, and in the case of media bias, naivete is deadly.

Principle Five: Headlines often lie and language often misleads. Readers of newspapers are often unaware that the reporter usually has nothing to say about the headline of an article or report. Headlines emerge from the copy-editing process, and are used to draw attention to a story and attract readers. Furthermore, the headlines are powerful editorial devices, casting a story in a particular context of meaning, even before the article is read. But headlines often lie–and careful readers will often discover that the claim made in the headline is completely undermined by the content of the article. Some newspapers are particularly offensive in this regard, showing clear bias in their headlines and article contexting. Similarly, language and terminology within an article or broadcast can be used to mislead the public. What words are used to describe principle figures in a story? Will the reporter describe a suicide bomber as a terrorist, or as a freedom-fighter? Will an individual be identified as a presidential aide, or a political operative? Will a spokesperson be identified as an opponent of same-sex marriage, or as a defender of traditional marriage? These decisions amount to both distinction and difference, and can often mean the difference between understanding or misunderstanding. The choice of language is of vital importance, and with the culture of political correctness now invading newsrooms across America, this usually means that those arguing for an overthrow of moral restraint are referred to in a positive light, while defenders of traditional morality are referred to as repressive and negative. Beware the power of words!

Christian engagement with the news media requires intelligence, thoughtfulness, and an awareness of how the media elite really think. As always, knowledge is power.

http://www.crosswalk.com/news/weblogs/mohler/?adate=9/27/2004#1286894

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The Passion Of The Christ
Wednesday 22 September 2004 @ 10:56 am

Mr. Steyn re-posted this and I think it worth repeating. -jw

The Passion Of The Christ
from The Spectator, March 27th 2004
by Mark Steyn
http://www.steynonline.com/index2.cfm?edit_id=29 opens in new window

The headline on the Washington Post review sums it up: “‘Passion’ Is A Gory Take On A Gentle Teacher’s Violent End”. Somebody’s confusing their Scripture with Godspell. A few days before the “violent end”, the gentle teacher had been hurling tables around in the temple. And, even if you overlook the rough stuff, rhetorically Christ was as forceful as He was gentle.

That’s the real argument over The Passion Of The Christ. It’s not between Christians and Jews, but between believing Christians and the broader post-Christian culture, a term that covers a large swathe, from the media to your average Anglican vicar. Some in this post-Christian culture don’t believe anything, some are riddled with doubts, but even the ones with only a vague residual memory of the fluffier Sunday School stories are agreed that there’s little harm in a Jesus figure who’s a “gentle teacher”. In this world, if Jesus were alive today he’d most likely be a gay Anglican bishop in a committed relationship driving around in an environmentally-friendly car with an “Arms Are For Hugging” sticker on the way to an interfaith dialogue with a Wiccan and a couple of Wahhabi imams. If that’s your boy, Mel Gibson’s movie is not for you.

Indeed, though Mel is Catholic, his Passion is a hit thanks to evangelical Protestants – those who believe the Bible is the literal truth and not a “useful narrative” culminating in what the Bishop of Durham called a “conjuring trick with bones”. Instead of Jesus the wimp, Mel gives us Jesus the Redeemer. He died for our sins – ie, the “violent end” is the critical bit, not just an unfortunate misunderstanding cruelly cutting short a promising career in gentle teaching. The followers of Wimp Jesus seem to believe He died to license our sins – Jesus loves us for who we are so whatever’s your bag is cool with Him.

Strictly as a commercial proposition, Wimp Jesus is a loser: the churches who go down that path are emptying out and dying. Those who believe in Christ the Redeemer are booming, and Mel Gibson has made a movie for them. If Hollywood was as savvy as it thinks it is, it would have beaten him to it. But it isn’t so it didn’t. And as most studio execs have never seen an evangelical Christian except in films where they turn out to be paedophiles or serial killers, it’s no wonder they’re baffled by The Passion’s success.

The picture opens in the Garden of Gethsemane with Christ’s arrest, in the midst of which a servant of the high priest gets his ear lopped off and, in the melee, is quietly healed by Jesus. (This is from Luke; the other three have the lopping but not the healing.) For Gibson, this is the point: Christ had power over His captors but didn’t use it, and His sacrifice is our salvation. To that end, the director’s come up with a structure that folds flashbacks of Jesus’ life into the two hours of scourging and crucifixion, presumably to remind us that it’s through the “violent end” that the “gentle teaching” becomes universal truth.

Sometimes this works very well: the Last Supper – “This is my body, this is my blood” – is intercut with the pulpy wounds of the real body, the rivers of real blood, and has a rare intensity. The idea of embracing Christ’s life within His death is smart moviemaking, and a suppler director would have done more with it. But Gibson is something of a stolid storyteller and his picture settles into an almost mechanical rhythm: flaying – flashback – beating - flashback – nailing – flashback. Jim Caviezel is a physically conventional Jesus, whose lean, rangy body seems to have been selected on the basis of how it looks when battered and bloody. He’s okay in the pre-arrest scenes, except for a strange decision to do the Sermon on the Mount as a Richard Gere impression, all rueful smiles and fussy hand gestures.

The dialogue is Aramaic and Latin, but there’s not a lot of it and actresses like Maia Morgenstern (Mary) and Monica Bellucci (Mary Magdalene) seem to have been chosen for their anguished facial gestures and ability to reflect Christ’s pain rather than their command of language. Miss Bellucci, the sexpot schoolmarm in Malena, is the nearest thing to a big name in a cast of unknowns. It’s surely the right idea not to have famous faces distracting from the story (as they did in the old-time Hollywood biblical epics) but it’s less effective than it might be because, even though they’re played by obscure actors, almost everybody looks exactly like a central-casting version of whoever he’s meant to be – Caiaphas, Pontius Pilate and his missus; Barrabas is a scurvy, tongue-wiggling cartoon.

That’s another limitation of Mel’s movie. Although they’re speaking Aramaic and Latin, its real language is Hollywooden. So, for example, one of the flashbacks shows Jesus the carpenter making what seems to Mary like a “tall” table. Jesus explains that it’s for a rich man who likes to eat sitting down on “chairs” and mimes the position. “This will never catch on,” says Mary. More problematic are the troll extras from Harry Potter and Lord Of The Rings who haunt Judas, and the weird figure stalking Jesus - I know who he’s meant to be, but he looks like a cross between Nosferatu and Jessica Lange in All That Jazz. Worst of all are the Roman soldiers who torture Jesus and laugh and spit and jeer like corrupt banana-republic cops in an action movie. Regardless of whether that’s a slur on one of the great empires of our civilization, it serves Gibson poorly: the sins that Jesus died for are our everyday ones, not the worst excesses of an Amnesty International report. A brisker, more professional soldiery would have made the point better.

But that’s nitpicking. Mel Gibson was driven by his own passion to make a movie that speaks to millions of people. As I said a couple of weeks back, if it’s not the Jesus movie you’d have made, then go make your own. I saw it on a Monday night full house – a rare event in itself – and the crowd was rapt and eerily hushed, except for the occasional sob. It’s true that if you don’t believe that Christ’s death on the cross is the central event in His time on earth then Mel’s telling won’t convince you and the film will look, as it does to Christopher Hitchens, like an S&M flayfest. One can regard this as a criticism of Gibson. On the other hand, all manner of movies – Star Wars, X-Men 2 – leave you cold if you’re not already a devotee. For millions of people, Mel Gibson shows them their Jesus and their salvation.

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The End