Alicia Mundy, a columnist for Editor & Publisher,
writes that “it’s time the press developed a new paradigm for
covering the possible fallout of religious beliefs.” The media
“uses kid gloves on mainstream religion,” she argues.
Mundy is upset that the Washington Post didn’t blame
traditional Catholic moral teaching for the accidental death of a
21-month-old girl from a large Catholic family in Virginia. The
Post titled one of its stories about the child’s death
(she was forgotten in a van, due to a family miscommunication),
“Death Mars a Flattering Family Portrait.” Miffed at that puffy
title, Mundy probably would have preferred something like,
“Catholics Shouldn’t Have Large Families.”
She writes: “I believe that if the religion involved here
weren’t one of the mainstream Judeo-Christian sects, editors and
reporters might have raised some serious questions: Did the family
priest not notice any problems — or urge the couple to reconcile
their religious views on birth control with their ability to handle
so many children? Stories indicated the older children were being
used as a built-in baby-sitting service while the parents continued
to produce more kids than they could handle.”
Alicia Mundy is no doubt a proponent of “reproductive freedoms”
— just so long as they don’t result in too much reproduction.
Feminism so loves children it doesn’t want many of them born.
Mundy’s heart bleeds for a child she didn’t want the child’s
parents to “produce.” Touching, isn’t it?
Mundy is worried about the “fallout” of religious beliefs. What
about the “fallout” of the lack of religious beliefs? In the
interest of fairness, perhaps she can now urge on the Post
a “new paradigm” for covering the fallout of atheism. The next
time, say, a child of a Hollywood star blows his brains out, maybe
she can demand that the Post ask the grieving actor, “Did
your therapist not notice that your atheistic degeneracy would
create problems for your child — or urge you to reconcile your
casual view of marriage with childrearing responsibilities?”
On Wednesday, the Los Angeles Times, to its credit,
reported on a danger of mainstream religion Mundy wouldn’t
recognize: namely, it is no longer religious. “Mention of hell from
pulpits is at an all-time low,” reports the Times. “The
downplaying of damnation shows the influence of secularism on
Christian theology.”
Christianity without Christ is the flavor of the day. Though
Christ spoke of hell frequently — describing it as the “outer
darkness” and “everlasting fire” — modern Christians know better.
“It isn’t sexy enough anymore,” said one Orange County evangelical
pastor to the Times. “It’s just too negative,” says Bruce
Shelley, a church history professor at the Denver Theological
Seminary. “Churches are under enormous pressure to be
consumer-oriented. Churches today feel the need to be appealing
rather than demanding.”
Martin Marty at the University of Chicago Divinity School says,
“Once pop evangelism went into market analysis, hell was just
dropped.” Marty added to the Times: “When churches go door
to door and conduct a market analysis…they hear, ‘I want
better parking spaces. I want guitars at services. I want to have
my car greased while I’m in church.’”
Post-Vatican II Catholicism, needless to say, isn’t too worried
about hell either. As Marty notes, “Who goes to confession anymore?
Time was, a (Catholic) church had 16 booths and people snaked
around the block. Today, a church might have one left.”
Hell polls surprisingly well — 71% of American adults believe
in it, reports the Times — but they “just don’t want to
hear about it.” The Times views this attitude as a
philosophical outgrowth of the “European Enlightenment.”
And what is the fallout, Mundy might say, of this secularized
Christianity? The answer is obvious in the morning headlines: the
less Christians talk about hell, the more hellish their behavior
becomes.
