According to Archbishop Charles Chaput, the media do not “provide trustworthy information about religious faith. ” His comments were made Wednesday during an address on religious freedom before some 10,000 pilgrims at the Catholic World Youth Day in Madrid, Spain.
Archbishop Chaput noted that the media gave a lot of coverage to the so-called “Arab Spring,” involving civil unrest in Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries. “But very little of that coverage has mentioned that the turmoil in Muslim countries has also created a very dangerous situation for Christians and other religious minorities across North Africa and the Middle East,” he said. “In Egypt, angry mobs have attacked Christian churches and monasteries, burning them to the ground and murdering the people inside.”
Archbishop Chaput also criticized the lack of media coverage for widespread anti-Christian violence in Iraq, Syria, Tunisia, and Pakistan.
“Christians face frequent discrimination, slander, beatings and even murder,” the Archbishop added.
The Archbishop seems to have a point. The White House has not made any public statements whatsoever denouncing the persecution of Christians and Jews during the rise of Islamism in the Middle East.
The Archbishop is pointing out how religious warfare is predominant and common across the globe. Islamism is on the rise and the Western democracies, satiated by their relative economic prosperity, or in these days weakened by economic distress, are too flaccid to respond effectively. Either they do not believe it could happen here, or are too weak intellectually to form a response as the West did during the rise of Communism throughout the Cold War.
In the West, "democracy," and calls for `this is what democracy looks like,' has been evoked to erase the Judeo-Christian heritage of those countries from the public arena. Erasing the Judeo-Christian heritage of the West, along with the intellectual tradition of the Enlightenment--tolerance and pluralism--has forced Judeo-Christian values out of our nation’s public square and out of this country’s public debates which does not serve democracy, nor the sustenance of this Republic. It does not serve real tolerance or pluralism. What it does do is impose a kind of unofficial state atheism, allied with those forces, such as Islamism, which seek to break the people of this country from their heritage. To put it another way, if we ban Christian Churches, Jewish voices, and their spokespersons from taking an active role in our nation’s civic life, we’re really just enforcing a new kind of state-sponsored intolerance — a religion without God, or something perhaps much more ominous and worse, creeping sharia or stealth jihad, at some point perhaps an imposed state religion, which works in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, et. al.
Cf. Blind Spot: When Journalists Don't Get Religion, Paul Marshall, Oxford University Press, (2008); http://www.librarything.com/work/7517845/summary/46467036
Cf. Terror and Liberalism, Paul Berman, W. W. Norton & Company, (2004); http://www.librarything.com/work/7829/23469307
This is an original contribution to an overlooked connection between violence and the Left, along with an insightful study of terrorists amongst the Islamists.
Cf. The Flight of the Intellectuals: The Controversy Over Islamism and the Press
Paul Berman, Melville House (2010); http://www.librarything.com/work/4897258/60815999
Berman convincingly demonstrates that the Western press is not seriously considering Islamist ideas.
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