36 - Religion and the News

Summary

News – an acronym for the four directions – is current and consequential information that covers all corners of the globe. According to standard definition and contemporary practice, news is timely, significant, proximate, controversial, current, and unexpected. It is reported weekly in newsmagazines, daily in newspapers, hourly on radio, and instantaneously online. Ubiquity ensures its influence: news orders political priorities, structures social concerns, cements loyalties, and promotes a sense of belonging to something beyond oneself. “Newspapers,” writes Benedict Anderson, provide “remarkable confidence of community in anonymity which is the hallmark of modern nations.” Or, as 1010 WINS, a New York all-news radio station promises, “You give us twenty-two minutes, we'll give you the world.”

Religion performs similar functions of defining and ordering identities and worldviews, which helps to explain why the two have a complicated, often fraught, relationship. In today's world, religion is news when it meets journalistic expectations of timeliness and relevance. But in other periods and places, religion was the news; that is, events were newsworthy because they had teleological significance. Centuries before Christians adopted the term “gospel,” or good news, to convey the novel and world-changing message of their faith, men and women used oral, pictorial, and architectural media to share news about the seen and unseen worlds. These reports can still be “read” in places such as the Lascaux cave paintings, the Giza pyramid complex, and the Parthenon.