Are they reporting trouble or creating it?

The media are ramping up their coverage of religion and politics, and they’ve started focusing on the subject with more intensity. CNN has done quite a bit in recent times.

Now, The Economist is out this week with the cover story “The new wars of religion”, and the picture of the hand of God reaching through a black cloud holding a grenade. Incendiary, eh?

In the section sub-titled “Start praying now,” the editors have a lot of advice for the world.

The state should not tell people whether they can wear headscarves, let alone ban “unauthorised” reincarnation (as China did recently in Tibet). But the line is not always easy to draw: this paper disapproves of publicly financed faith schools, especially ones that discriminate against non-believers, but it also believes in giving poor parents more choice—and in American cities the main alternative to public schools is Catholic ones.

Of course, editorials are matters of opinion, and papers are written by people with worldviews. But that’s the point. The ‘should’s and ‘ought’s are value statements themselves, based on some moral belief system.

There’s a provocative debate planned over this whole subject, and if you’re around New York this coming weekend try to catch it. I’d love to be there, but First Things will no doubt follow through with coverage afterward. Stay tuned, we’re going to be hearing a lot more about this from all directions.