A media that doesn’t ‘do God’ isn’t worth believing in

• In the wake of 2016’s surprise presidential result, The New York Times admitted that it might have been less surprised if it had been better connected with the country’s Bible Belt. As Katie Harrison’s “Believers in Trump” documentary explains, white evangelicals may not have approved of his personal morality but the Republican nominee’s commitment to put a judge on the US Supreme Court – who would most probably return abortion laws to individual states – was enough to give him 80% of their votes.
• Even in increasingly secular countries like Britain, the Church of England has, through its parish system, a truly nationwide presence. Unlike the Conservative Party, it’s in every inner city. Unlike Labour, it’s in every rural community. And as events such as the Grenfell Tower inferno demonstrated, the church, mosque and synagogue are there 24/7 when their “fourth emergency services” are required. They are still there when most local government caseworkers have gone home. And often much more ethnically diverse and far more varied in wealth and circumstance than, for example, the media. It’s no accident that it’s faith communities who again and again are aware of injustices such as food poverty before most others. They live at the frontline and with frontline people.
• And I hardly need to spell out the third argument for better religious literacy within newsrooms. The fact that, in 2015, people spent more time reading Graeme Wood’s “What ISIS Really Wants” (sub-heading: “The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it”) from The Atlantic than any other article on the internet wasn’t just a reminder to the very secular media class that there might be an appetite for religiously-informed subject matter, it reminds all of us that the most unstable region in the world – the Middle East, if you hadn’t already guessed – cannot be properly understood if we lack a basic grasp of the religious teachings (and the perversions of those teachings) that motivate its peoples.

Religion is not the only subject area that – because of the news industry’s economic challenges – is receiving less journalistic resource. With foreign coverage particularly expensive, events in unfashionable parts of the world are in greater darkness, too.

The centralisation of news gathering in major cities has meant there was not just shock, but incomprehension within the newsrooms of London and Brussels and New York at the angry mood in the ‘flyover’ places and their votes for Brexit, Trump, Orban, Grillo and the like. With much less journalistic infantry to deploy, there are quite simply more gaps in the scrutiny of what takes place in local courts and national parliaments.

The economic realities cannot be wished away, but the best media operations will reflect on what they could do to minimise the impact of them. That thinking could begin by appointing people with more diverse hinterlands. The candidate from Tyneside for the consumer affairs reporting role may have to be based in London but at least they would not be yet another employee from the home counties. That pictures editor who chairs the school attached to her synagogue might ensure that next time faith schools are discussed at news conference there might be at least one voice who doesn’t want them all shut down.

When religion is sidelined from the media and from the public square we don’t just lose an opportunity to reflect on how Catholic Social Teaching might help us to recognise the communitarianism missing from the individualistic and materialist outlooks that dominate both the modern Left and Right. We don’t just miss warnings from clerics that, as religion retreats, the danger is that it is nationalism rather than liberalism that fills the space it once occupied.

When religion is sidelined we are not just sidelining the inheritance of believers – we are sidelining an inheritance that is everybody’s. Throughout the dark ages, the church and monastery were refuges for thoughtful people from all walks of life. When the church was too close to the state and much richer than it should have been, it was able to afford to be the greatest of patrons. When we marginalise religion we are marginalising all of that. We are marginalising the wisdom of the ages.

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Tim Montgomerie was most recently a columnist and comment editor for The Times of London. Before that journalistic turn he was steeped in centre right politics, founding the Conservative Christian Fellowship, then the Centre for Social Justice and, just over ten years ago, ConservativeHome.com.

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