What many of us don’t realise is that what the media report are the new, the different, the unusual. The first three letters of NEWS are NEW. The old, the accepted, the usual, are not news, from a media perspective.
In the days of my first job as a reporter, the law allowed us to report divorce cases, including the names of the parties. Divorce was difficult, and expensive, so many couples simply separated, or they stayed together without really being a couple any longer, “for the sake of the children”, or to avoid censure from their families. So divorce was unusual, and celebrity divorces even more unusual, so they made news, often BIG news. Papers like the misnamed weekly Truth thrived on these stories, and the evening tabloids, like the one I started work on, found they sold lots of extra papers.
Some private eyes made big money gathering “evidence” for divorce cases – climbing ladders leaning against the walls of houses and flats to take pictures of couples in flagrante delicto which would later be presented in court. Today divorce is so common that it no longer makes news, and when it does, the names cannot be reported.
In the same way, we hear a lot about bad religion, which, in my years of experience, is comparatively rare. One or two bad priests make news, but hundreds of good priests preaching and teaching, and comforting and helping people in need does not make news, because that is what a priest does, or is supposed to do. One Muslim fanatic slitting the throat of an “infidel” or shooting at random in a shopping centre makes front-page news, but thousands of Muslims worshipping in hundreds of mosques up to five times a day and learning to live better lives and to care for the old and the sick is simply what we would expect, and is not reported.
A recent study at the University of Oxford found that men and women are “naturally religious”, but this innate tendency can take many forms. There are probably more believers in the Rabbitohs in South Sydney than there are in Allah, and this belief can occasionally become ugly.
Evidence that suggests human beings are inherently religious is not always good news. It can lead to fanaticism and the belief that “only my beliefs are right”. The great 20th-century theologian Karl Barth reminded believers that: “No undertaking subjects men to so severe a judgment as the undertaking of religion … God treats it as arrogance, and men as illusion.” (Quote from his commentary on the Epistle to the Romans.)
So, how do we tell the difference between “good” and “bad” religion? We need more than media reports. We need to understand that belief and non-belief are both acts of faith, as there is no “scientific” evidence that any particular religion is true or false. We need to consider what most believers do, what goes largely unreported, rather than what we see and hear and read in the media.
We need to understand that our judgment about what is good and bad says a lot about us as well as about what we are judging, and that what is good for one person or one group may not be good for another. What is good at one time may be bad at another time – 75 years ago Germany and Japan were our worst enemies, today they are among our best friends.
Some people apply the happiness test, promoted by the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century – what is good is what makes someone happy, what is best produces the greatest happiness for the greatest number. On that test, most religions get a good mark, but none score anything like 100 per cent.
