The Media Hate All Religions: An Example

The Media Hate All Religions: An Example May 27, 2015

One thing Christians need to remember about the media and our self-styled elites: they don’t just hate Christianity. They hate all religion.

However, their progressive reflexes prevent them from attacking faiths they consider the province of “minorities.” This includes Muslims (1.5 billion practitioners, roughly 23% of the planet), Hindus (1 billion, 15%), Buddhists (500 million, 7%), and Other. The provincial mentality of the progressive files those believers under Protected Other Status, largely driven by the perception that, as majority non-white faiths, they must be some kind of victim class, even in their own countries.

Thus, we get twits like cartoonist Garry Trudeau accusing critics of Islam of “punching downward, by attacking a powerless, disenfranchised minority.” Yes, a minority that comprises almost a quarter of the planet. Why, these plucky little guys even have their own countries and armies and everything, Garry!

But it’s not really about Islam, a religion that stands foursquare against almost every value dear to progressives. An orthodox Christian has more beliefs in common with a devout Muslim than he does with a secular liberal.

The left realizes this on some level, and so their hatred for all religion gets deflected onto Christianity. This has less to do with creedal concerns than with the fact that Mrs. Crabapple made them learn the doxology in Sunday School and that guy in that episode of that sitcom was SO obnoxious. Oh, and Footloose. In the liberal imagination, all religious people are John Lithgow.

Their contempt extends to the Dusky Other more than they can even see. It emerges in their reporting even when they think they’re being nice. Witness this story that went viral this week:

sikh

It’s a perfectly nice story about a decent guy named Harman Singh who took off his turban to cradle the bleeding head of an injured child.

But let’s look at the amazingly patronizing and wrong-headed way the story is reported. He is said to “place humanity over strict religious protocol,” with the assumption being that some element of the Sikh faith would prevent him from removing his turban to help another in a crisis.

Since Sikh do not remove their turbans in public, the reporters are saying that he had to violate his religious principles to help the boy. But as one Sikh writer points out, no Sikh would criticize this action because it represents “Sewa, where one transcends self to help the needy.” Refusing to uncover the head is a central element of Sikhism, but it does not override higher obligations of the believer to another in a serious emergency, and no Sikh would claim that it did.

Thus the narrative–good people have to violate narrow-minded codes of religious conduct and belief to do good–is a lie. Furthermore, it’s a patronizing lie. You can almost sense the nice little head pat the white reporters are giving to the gentle brown man for being a Good Example of His People.

A good man did a good deed. The media wants you to think he did it in spite of his faith, when in fact, he did it because of his faith.

 


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