Rushing to Judgment

Recently, as part of an ESL class I was teaching to upper-level undergraduates, I gave my students an excerpt of a Brooke Gladstone's Influencing Machine, a graphic novel dealing with the public's relationship to the media.  Gladstone points out that, while the public tends to be focused on the question of whether the media have a liberal or conservative bias, there are actually other biases--many rooted in the media's need to make money--that ought to be of more concern.  One of the ones she points out is "narrative bias", the attempt by the media to create story where, in fact, there is none.

A good example of this kind of narrative bias occurs in Bob Unruh's recent piece on WND.com sensationalizing the appointment of Anglican priest Jane Shaw as Stanford's Dean of Religious Life.  Unruh's title, "Stop Conversions, Stanford Religious Dean Tells Churches", is as melodramatic as it is misleading.  In the video of an interview Uhruh supplies, the Rev. Shaw never says that the church should stop performing conversions, only that the church must be an environment in which all can be welcome, including people of other faiths who have no intention of converting.  The title, however, implies that Shaw does not believe the church should welcome sincere converts in the fold.

Uhruh's distortions also extend to misrepresenting Shaw's comments on global climate change.  Noting that climate change has become one of the great issues of our time, Shaw quite reasonably suggests that the church can have a role in doing something about it.  This position seems to be consistent with Gen. 1:26, in which God grants humanity dominion over animals--a dominion that implies responsibility on humanity's part to ensure the continued existence of God's creation.  She does not claim, as Uhruh suggests in quoting Rush Limbaugh's laughable reaction to her interview, that we ought to "worship earth as a religion."

Nor does Shaw suggest that the church should "stop doing religion", as Uhruh and Limbaugh claim; she says, more mildly, that the church shouldn't "just be doing religion"--that the church must do more than simply provide doctrinal instruction and worship services.  This seems consistent with a long tradition of churches involving themselves in social and political controversies that gave us, among other things, abolitionism and the civil rights movement.

Uhruh and Limbaugh's motivations in distorting Shaw's interview are pretty clear. They are more interested in promoting a conservative political and social agenda--one that ignores the reality of global climate change and even seeks to reverse the basic constitutional principle of birthright citizenship.  It is a shame that, in advancing their agenda, they choose to pillory a woman who has achieved such distinction within her denomination and within academia as well.

But the real shame is that millions of Americans know so little of the teachings of their own faith that Uhuh and Limbaugh's rantings can seem plausible.  Far too few Americans know that religion
has anything to say about the responsible use of the earth, or that the Bible specifically demands protection for the stranger.  Deuteronomy 10:19 specially commands the Israelites not merely to welcome, but to love, the stranger, as they have been strangers in the land of Egypt; in the parable of the sheep and the goats, in the book of Matthew, Jesus notes that at the final judgment, those who welcomed in the stranger will be as those who welcomed in Jesus himself.  It says a lot about the religious literacy of many Americans that assertions such as those of Uhuh and Limbaugh can seem plausible.