Archbishop Chaput Blasts Mainstream Media
Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver – a bishop with a history of publicly scolding Democrats and progressive Catholic organizations – will soon officially take the reigns in Philadelphia, one of the nation’s most prominent archdioceses in a battleground state where Catholic swing voters will again prove crucial to the 2012 presidential election. Chaput seems to be a favorite in Rome and had a prominent speaking role during World Youth Day events in Spain that drew over a million young Catholics to Madrid for a papal Mass. In a speech to over 10,000 young people last week, the archbishop urged Catholics to tune out mainstream news outlets and rely instead on Catholic media. Chaput takes up the cudgels over at First Things:
We make a very serious mistake if we rely on media like the New York Times, Newsweek, CNN, or MSNBC for reliable news about religion. These news media simply don’t provide trustworthy information about religious faith–and sometimes they can’t provide it, either because of limited resources or because of their own editorial prejudices. These are secular operations focused on making a profit. They have very little sympathy for the Catholic faith, and quite a lot of aggressive skepticism toward any religious community that claims to preach and teach God’s truth.
This is not a new drum the archbishop is beating. Addressing the Religion Newswriters Association last year, Chaput challenged journalists to acknowledge that a secular worldview common in newsrooms creates an “attitudinal, even ideological bias” against covering religion fairly. He has also noted that reporters frequently have a limited understanding of religious history, get basic facts wrong and provide coverage that lacks nuance. I agree with the archbishop that the press often handles this complicated beat in a clumsy or superficial way, especially during election season. Those of us who make our living at the intersection of faith and public life work with smart and dedicated religion reporters all the time, but we also see our share of simplistic and distorted coverage (think the Religious Right = Values Voters) that does a disservice to readers and viewers.
But the archbishop is wrong to urge a retreat to the Catholic bunker, where the only news Catholics get about religion is filtered through diocesan papers where bishops serve as publishers. Let me be clear. Catholic News Service and other religious media outlets disseminate religion news and perspectives that secular newspapers either ignore or don’t have the resources to cover. And while I suspect Archbishop Chaput isn’t a fan, the independent National Catholic Reporter has been an indispensable institution for investigative reporting and analysis that mainstream journalists often turn to as a source of expertise. But if Catholics only read or listen to Catholic news sources that are deemed “kosher” (to borrow a term from my Jewish brothers and sisters!), I fear this perpetuates a broader trend in which liberals and conservatives only seek out news that confirms their ideological bias. This isn’t healthy for religion or democracy. It’s also not the media’s role to have “sympathy” for the Catholic faith, as Chaput suggests, but to help explain it to a diverse audience in an accurate and balanced way. Propagating the faith is best left to spiritual leaders, not news editors.
Chaput’s larger argument is a cultural critique that views faithful Catholics (and Christians more broadly) as victims of a secular society that marginalizes, mocks and generally rejects a Christian worldview. This is a frequent meme of conservative Christians and to some degree echoes, in a political context, the longstanding beef conservatives have with so called “elitists” in government and the media who attended Ivy League schools, supposedly never go to church and do other sinister things like eat arugula. This is a harder point to dissect, and it would take a forum longer than a blog post to do it justice. But David O’Brien, one of the nation’s most prominent Catholic historians and a professor of faith and culture at the University of Dayton, offers a helpful warning in an essay in the current edition of America magazine.
The events of 9/11 left me determined to contest the countercultural, sectarian Catholicism increasingly dominant in our church. This Catholicism thinks we Catholics can define ourselves by our difference and distance from other Americans. Such views are sometimes challenging; more often they are hypocritical, irresponsible, blaming of others while exempting ourselves, standing apart.
While a counterculture stance has its place, Catholic leaders and lay Catholics can’t simply be a faithful “Party of No” railing against a society we hope to influence. As Bishop Blase Cupich of South Dakota warned his fellow bishops after Barack Obama was elected president, this “prophecy of denunciation quickly wears thin.” The Catholic intellectual and social justice tradition is not served well by embracing such an embattled, defensive posture.