The Christian faith does not fit into the consumer society, and is short-changed by the Western media, says the religious affairs correspondent of the Guardian. This is an extract from a lecture given this week at Gresham College, London. Sex case dean blames church politics; Bibles, bikinis and shimmering crosses; Church hit by new cult body blow; Rave priest confesses, ?I am evil?; Gays forecast poll gains in divided Synod; Gay rights priests win victory in synod elections; Priests cleared in sex scandals; The bishop?s secret son; Betrayed by the bishop. These are the headlines relating to religion which have reached the front pages in the past 18 months. The splash ? the main headline and story of the newspaper ? has been on a religious subject eight times. Five were sex scandals: in two cases about the Nine o?Clock rave youth church service, which collapsed amid allegations of a personality cult, and three times about the recent scandal over the Bishop of Argyll. The coverage of religion in the print media almost invariably involves sex in one way or another. My job title ? Religious Affairs Editor ? is most appropriate, my editor quipped during the Bishop of Argyll story. There are good and bad reasons for the obsessive linking of religion and sex, but the fact that it is virtually the only kind of religious news story which makes a news editor?s eye glint is the most striking illustration of an inherent bias in the media against religious institutions and religious expression. Most believers I have spoken to ? of whatever faith ? find the mainstream news media unrelentingly hostile. They are frustrated by the predominant tone of contempt and ridicule. Sometimes they are angry, more often they are resigned. Few search out the underlying reasons. The most obvious explanation for the hostility towards the Christian Churches in Britain is a cultural change which is affecting all institutions ? the end of deference. The treatment the Churches receive is similar in kind, though mercifully different in scale, to that received by that other ancient institution, the monarchy. There is a deep, pervasive cynicism in the culture towards any institution which projects itself as having, or as having inherited, a position of authority. There are clear advantages stemming from this loss of deference; for example, it is harder to cover up corruption or abuse of power. To be specific, the attempts of the Catholic Church to acknowledge and tackle child abuse by priests must be due in large part to media exposure of the issue. But this loss of deference is also destructive, and in two ways it is particularly vicious towards religious institutions. First, one of the key causes and characteristics of loss of deference is a strong emphasis on individual autonomy. The individual?s judgement is all. No collective institution has the right to say how individuals should behave in their private, personal lives. The deep resentment of exterior sources of authority results in ridicule of the Churches, and unrestrained glee at the discovery of scandals which embarrass them. Secondly, the Churches are targets for the obsession with hypocrisy which marks British culture today. The media crusade has brought many benefits. For example, in its history the Church of England has frequently allied itself with the ruling establishment; the meek shall inherit the earth has been understood as a promise strictly for the next life. Partly in response to exacting secular criticism in recent decades, however, Anglicanism has perceptibly shifted ground to identify increasingly with the marginalised and impoverished. But surely an element of hypocrisy is inseparable from the human condition? If we have ideals and aspirations, it is inevitable that we shall fall short of them. But since in our late-twentieth-century lexicon there are few sins worse than hypocrisy, it is considered better to give up ideals altogether than fail to live up to them. This view has been reinforced by the development of a more sophisticated psychological awareness which seems to undermine the very possibility of true altruism. Whenever Christians do not match up to the ideals of Jesus Christ, they can be ridiculed and criticised for being a bunch of hypocrites. Many stories which get widespread coverage illustrate this theme. Take just two examples: the mirth occasioned by the feud between canons at Lincoln cathedral, which has consumed so much newspaper space, derives from the stark disparity between ideals and the reality. The Bishop of Argyll scandal prompted a rush of stories of Catholic priests in relationships with women, showing the gap between the ideal of celibacy and what was perceived as the reality of sexual frustration and hidden relationships. The loss of deference towards the Churches has an important subtext. The roots of Western culture are Christian, and most people in Britain have a direct experience of Christianity from their upbringing and the continued faith of relatives or friends around them. So media coverage of religious affairs is, at a profound level, a dialogue of the secular or vestigially Christian present with the Christian past. The astute Christian recognises this. In the media blitz of scathing comment and sensational revelation after the Bishop of Argyll?s resignation, Fr Brendan Callaghan, the Jesuit principal of Heythrop College, explained in the Guardian that Christianity was part of the cultural fabric of Britain. He went on: Much of our public debate has been and continues to be shaped by ideas and arguments that inevitably relate to the Christian tradition, while much of our personal discussion and questioning, to say nothing of our participation in the arts, takes place in a cultural context shaped now as in the past in implicit or explicit dialogue with Christianity. This implicit dialogue goes a long way to explaining why Christianity and sex are so frequently linked in the media. For many, experience of Christianity was predominantly negative. They were presented with a harsh, judgemental God preoccupied with sexual morality. In the middle of the Bishop Wright affair, a genuinely puzzled Catholic priest asked me, why is everyone so fascinated by the question of Catholic priestly celibacy? The answer is that celibacy raises questions about whether sexual appetites should, or even can, be controlled ? questions about which, for all its brash sexual self-confidence, our society is deeply uncertain. With the loss of deference, does the Christian Church get a rougher time of it than, say, political institutions? The answer is both no and yes. No, because religion is not a central preoccupation of the media, and therefore receives much less space than politics. But yes, in that religious institutions are particularly vulnerable to attack, and particularly ill-suited to defend themselves by hiring spin doctors and learning to manipulate the media, as the political parties or members of the Royal Family do. By reason of their structure and values, religious institutions are in a necessary tension with contemporary media, according to the Jesuit, Avery Dulles. He identifies six points where this tension is most evident: the Church?s message is a mystery of faith, whereas the press is investigative and iconoclastic; the message of the Church is eternal and seeks to maintain continuity, whereas the press lives off novelty; the Church tries to promote unity, whereas the press specialises in conflict; the main work of the Church is spiritual, whereas the press concentrates on more tangible phenomena, and selectively reports church teaching as though the Pope were chiefly interested in sex, politics and power; in a democratic society, the press has great difficulty in appreciating a hierarchical structure, and has an in-built bias in favour of the disobedient priest and the dissident theologian; church teaching is often complex and subtle, whereas the media want stories that are simple and striking. I would add one more point to Dulles?s list; the media increasingly focuses on personalities, not on issues or institutions, as a way of covering stories. It is people who grab the reader?s attention. What motivates them? What is their family background? This deep and invasive curiosity presents a particular dilemma for a religious institution which believes that its message and purpose transcend the fallibility of the individual personality. The necessary tension which Dulles describes has been exacerbated in the English print media as the four daily broadsheets have taken on the agenda and style of tabloids, which thrive on sensation, novelty, conflict, scandal, simplicity and human interest. The fight for readers has led all four broadsheets in the same direction; for example, in 1995, they devoted 1,752 column inches to the story of the actor Hugh Grant being caught with a prostitute. The bias against religion in the media also reflects the values of a secularised consumer culture. The media is dominated by a secularised ?lite. Believers ? of whom there are many and some in very powerful positions ? seem to make little, if any, headway. Faith is presented in the print media as essentially absurd. Such coverage shows what newspapers believe their readers want. It reflects an increasingly powerful secular consensus that the truths of Christianity are implausible, and that the Bible is not the revelation of divine truth, but rather a collection of tribal myths. Anthropology and comparative religion have made Christianity?s exclusive claims to truth appear an imperialistic arrogance. The perception is that religion is a cultural dinosaur; its decline is self-evident in all advanced societies and is a mark of progress as people are better educated and prepared to take responsibility for their own lives. In time, the argument runs, it will wither away altogether. Religion has been discredited, and along with it, the whole idea that human beings have a spiritual capacity and that there is a God whom they can know. The secular media?s intolerance and lack of interest towards religion reveal a further prejudice in which both editors and readers are steeped. Religion is, and has always been, about participation of individuals in the body of believers through ritual and shared beliefs. Religare, the Latin root, means to tie together. Religion, at its most fundamental, is about ordering the relationships between individuals within the context of an ultimate reality. In stark contrast, the modern media cast the consumer in the role of spectator. Newspapers, television, radio and the Internet now bring more information more quickly from all over the globe into our homes. We sit in our armchairs watching the world?s conflicts flicker across our television screens: Bosnia, Israel, Rwanda and Afghanistan. We are saturated with information about terrible personal tragedies, awful crimes, huge global economic inequalities and ecological depredations. From the perspective of a passive spectator, however, religion makes little sense. The media offer scandalous, simplified, conflict-ridden news stories about religion on the endless information carousel. What can we do with all the knowledge modern communications heaps in our laps? If we absorb even a fraction of it, we can easily become overwhelmed and exhausted. The media, however, cannot allow this to happen, because it might lead to a drop in circulation or ratings and a loss of advertising revenue. So the consumer has to be reassured in various ways. In broadsheet newspapers such as the Independent, the Guardian and to some extent The Times and the Telegraph, the reassurance is through a tone of knowingness: irreverent, cynical, sophisticated. It has no concept of the sacred or of holiness. The implicit message of the proliferating newspaper supplements is, you are in control of your life. Control is the key word, the litmus test of meaningful existence: control over your relationships, over your career, and over your life, so as to achieve the maximum possible amount of happiness. But in an age of unprecedentedly high job insecurity and marriage breakdown, control is a fond illusion. There is a gap here, between appearance and reality. It is a gap which newspapers carefully negotiate around. Religion falls into that yawning gap, because it recognises the limits of the control that individuals have over their own lives. At its most raw, religion is about encountering and confronting on a daily basis the limits of human existence and our own unpredictable mortality and frailty. With the collapse of Communism, religion is now the only challenge to the rationale of the consumer culture. It questions and opposes the idea that the meaning of life is a consumer experience, and thus finds itself silenced. Such a challenge is unacceptable to the hegemony of consumption, and the culture spawned to facilitate it, legitimise it, expand and develop it continually in a restless search for the ephemeral perfection of a particular consumer good.

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