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S. E. Cupp

Forfatter af Losing Our Religion

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S. E. Cupp is a nationally published political columnist and a regular guest commentator on MSNBC, CNN, C-SPAN, and Fox News Channel, on programs such as Hannity Larry King Live, The Joy Behar Show, Red Eye with Greg Gutfield, Geraldo, and Reliable Sources. She is currently an online columnist for vis mere the New York Daily News and senior writer at The Daily Caller. She coauthored Why You're Wrong About the Right with Brett Joshpe. Visit www.redsecupp.com. vis mindre

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1CIn old days men had the rack. Now they have the press. That is an improvement certainly. But still it is very bad, and wrong, and demoralizing. Somebody 14was it Burke? 14called journalism the fourth estate. That was true at the time no doubt. But at the present moment it is the only estate. It has eaten up the other three. The Lords Temporal say nothing, the Lords Spiritual have nothing to say, and the House of Commons has nothing to say and says it. We are dominated by Journalism. 1D

14Oscar Wilde, 1CThe Soul of Man Under Socialism, 1D 1891. (Partially quoted by S.E. Cupp, page 4.)

Over one hundred years ago, the British biologist William Bateson, arguably one of the founders of neo-Darwinism, made his children read the Bible out loud every day. Once his oldest son became wise to the apparent contradiction and asked, 1CFather, why must we read the Bible? Aren 19t we atheists? 1D

1CAye, 1D said Professor Bateson, 1Cbut not ignorant atheists. 1D

Bateson illustrates how atheists in an earlier age recognized the necessity of giving the dominant religious culture its due, at least from a literary viewpoint. S.E. Cupp 19s 1CLosing Our Religion 1D (presumably a reference to R.E.M.'s 1991 hit song 1CLosing My Religion 1D) goes further. 1CAs an atheist 1D 14and, she ought to add, a political conservative 14 1CI like to think that Judeo-Christian values form the points of my moral compass. 1D The Ten Commandments, she declares, contain nothing with which an ethical atheist should quibble. I am not so sure about that since the First Commandment is 1CThou shalt have no other gods before me, 1D which means nothing to most atheists because they have use neither for the one nor the other gods, and the commandments that immediately follow concern such matters as idolatry and the Sabbath. However, I am reminded of something I read decades ago, in, I believe, a book called 1CAfrican Religions 1D by John Mbiti, about an African tribe that upon its first contact with European missionaries astounded them because five of the Ten Commandments were included in the tribal code. Although Mbiti does not say which commandments were so enshrined, it seems hardly surprising that a viable social group would set its canon against murder, adultery, theft, lying/perjury, and perhaps cursing, covetousness or disrespect for parents.

Today, the putative mainstream of media culture: the major television networks, national magazines and, perhaps above all, the big city newspapers and major wire services, all seem tone deaf to the actual mainstream American heartland. Not only are news outlets in the United States abandoning the dedicated coverage of news about religion, but many in the media take the position that the doctrine of separation of church and state means that people who have traditional religious values do not have a legitimate role to play in society. And they state their position harshly. Cupp argues that many of the large, well-financed media outlets habitually engage in inaccurate, unfair and uncivil reportage and discourse 14doing exactly the opposite of what we should expect from the fourth estate. She also sides with religion against the political apparatus found in the national and some state capitals, and mentions the favored relationship between the mass media and the political elite, especially President Barack Obama. In one of her later and best chapters, 1CThou Shalt Have Standards 14Double Standards, 1D Cupp shows how, during the 2008 presidential race and subsequent to it, the media over-scrutinized and demonized vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin 19s religion while it first overlooked and then apologized for presidential candidate Obama 19s. Not only does a picture of ugly and unreasonable favoritism emerge from the evidence marshaled by Cupp in this chapter, but the exercise encapsulates her thesis better than some of her earlier chapters.

Throughout her book, Cupp cites many examples of how the media tends to ignore or denigrate as extreme the beliefs and practices that, in fact, form the bedrock of most American Christians 19 religion. In an appendix, she collects more than thirty of these outrageously false, dehumanizing and incendiary comments from print, television and Internet journalists and commentators most of whom 14though not all 14are supposed to be 1Cmainstream. 1D (Including 1CNewsweek, 1D 1CThe New York Times, 1D NBC News and CNN.) The thing that has changed over the past few decades is that whereas no one would have dared to make a vituperative attack on religion at one time, such opinions are completely tolerated now. 1CThe secular liberal press has made its opinion of Christianity very clear 14it 19s a joke, a fraud, a fringe belief, and a prehistoric relic from the Dark Ages, 1D says Cupp.

Cupp runs up against a paradox that she at first does not explain. On one hand, the mainstream media is losing viewers and readers, but, on the other, it can pose a danger to American Christianity despite Christians being about eighty percent of the country 19s population. Through much of the book I was asking, 1CHow can the media win if the people are starving them of customers? 1D Cupp gives a couple of explanations but her book would have made more sense if she had been clearer and more explicit about this thesis from the beginning: The influence of the media is felt most strongly in Washington, D.C., and in state capitals where politicians and regulators consume mainstream news and are most vulnerable to its bias against traditional American values. The media, Cupp says, is 1Cnot worried about the spread of Christianity as much as they 19re terrified that you 19re not. 1D If you are a government bureaucrat or a politician, that terror goes double. 1CWhen this anti-Christian meme is taken up so wholeheartedly by the media, it 19s only a matter of time before it becomes mainstream within the popular culture. 1D

If the combination of neglect of serious news about religion and denigration of those Christians who are featured in the media is not countered by American Christians, and it persuades some politicians and regulators that they can safely ignore the objections of Christians (and, for that matter, orthodox Jews) to their laws and regulations, Cupp argues that by the time Christians wake up to the fact that their beliefs have been legally marginalized by government, it will be too late to speak up.

If Judeo-Christian beliefs are being marginalized in all areas of society, Cupp focuses primarily on the media albeit with some mention of how the changes in the law more and more discourage public religious expression both in public schools and the public square. She jumps right into the specific hot-button issues of public policy over which many Christians 19 views have been demonized by the media: gay marriage, evolution, values-based businesses, entertainment and education, including sex education. Cupp makes the point, for example, that while the media tends to accuse opponents of gay marriage of hating gays and not wanting them to have any rights, many opponents of gay marriage are quite willing to recognize domestic partnerships; to characterize that as hate is extreme rhetoric.

Occasionally, Cupp hits her targets with unfairness of her own. When Lisa Miller, 1CNewsweek 19s 1D religion columnist 14who does seem to be ambivalent about her subject 14suggests that the president does not have to add 1Cso help me God 1D at the end of his oath of office and that his inauguration would make a good opportunity to show the world that America has a tradition of 1Cpluralism, moderation 14and the separation of church and state, 1D at a time when 1Cthe greatest threats to our safety come 26 from religious fundamentalists abroad, 1D Cupp infers as the reason for this that Miller is afraid that too much God-talk at the inauguration 1Cmight make the terrorists angry. 1D That is not at all what Miller said, however. If anything, Miller is trying to define the United States in contrast to the backers of Muslim theocracy, setting an example of a purely secular state against the Islamic notion that the state must be ruled by God 19s law. Miller misses the point, however, that the United States is the most religious of the Western nations precisely because all religions are allowed into the free marketplace of spiritual ideas. I am surprised that Cupp did not zero in on what Miller does say: 1CObama wants to say 18so help me God 19 14and by all means, he should do so. The public prayers by two Christian ministers are more problematic. 1D Miller is arguing for changing the tradition of having clergymen pray at the inauguration of our president. Yet it was in recognition of true plurality 14rather than honoring religion 19s place in American life more in the breech than in the observance 14that, as Miller mentions, President Dwight Eisenhower invited three Christian clergymen and a rabbi to pray at his second inauguration.

Chapter IV, 1CThou Shalt Evolve, 1D was the most problematic chapter for me. She makes one valid point. In the 2005 federal case, Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, which was fought over evolution versus intelligent design, Cupp notes that both sides in the case received death threats, but the press only covered those against the evolutionists. Otherwise, her case for the rights of advocates of intelligent design or creationism is dismal. She mentions that while a poll showed that only 39 percent of Americans believe in evolution as set out by Darwin, the same poll suggested that some of the rest believe that God 1Cguided human evolution over a long period of time. 1D She also alludes to the fact that the Catholic Church has made peace with the idea of evolution. These facts show that the faithful are not necessarily asking for intelligent design or creationism to be taught in their schools.

Cupp, who says that she personally accepts the theory of evolution, takes the position that intelligent design and creationism are popularly held alternative views and that the teaching of science should be amenable to them. Perhaps, but only if they have a scientific basis. A public opinion poll is not evidence that a claim has scientific merit. Cupp keeps making me think that there is an aspect of this issue that she just doesn 19t get. For example, she keeps referring to evolution as an 1Cexplanation of human development 1D or a 1Cscientific explanation of human existence, 1D but evolution is not concerned only with humans or with human existence; it is about all living things. (In Darwin 19s orginal book, 1COn the Origin of Species, 1D virtually nothing is said about apes or humans.)

Cupp 19s own most unfair cuts are concentrated in this chapter. She puts words in the mouth of National Geographic writer David Quammen who says that Americans have not embraced Darwinism due to 1Chonest confusion and ignorance. 1D Cupp translates this into 1Cgood old-fashioned stupidity 1D and keeps repeating that stupidity is Quammen 19s assessment when he said no such thing. Cupp argues that evolution has had plenty of opportunity to be accepted because it has been taught exclusively in public schools since the 1980s (she does not specifically cite McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education, 1982, but that must be what she means). She asserts that after thirty years (twenty-nine, actually) 1Cmost American adults have in fact 18taken a biology course that dealt with evolution 19. 1D 1CMost 1D would really be more like 52 percent, if you consider that most Americans now over 45 might have missed the effect of that Supreme Court ruling. Further, there is no certainty that most students over the past three decades actually got the mandated education. Cupp goes to lengths to argue that this issue is comparable to other scientific questions such as the existence of atoms which most Americans believe to exist, but the issue is not the same. Evolution has not been thoroughly accepted because there is a competing ideology. Two memes cannot occupy the same mental space at the same time, not at least without some sort of accommodation.

Worst of all, Cupp parodies the arguments made in favor of evolution by the media, which, to be fair, are already parodies since the media does not really understand evolution even though they are in favor of it. In the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover case, Cupp allows that the trial itself was fair even if the press coverage was not; yet she scoffs at the ruling that 1Crequiring teachers to read the disclaimer about the gaps in evolutionary theory was unconstitutional. 1D During the fair trial, however, the evolutionists had satisfied the judge that there are no 1Cgaps. 1D Cupp persists in defending the right to insist that Biblical literalism dictates that creationism/intelligent design must be recognized as an alternative way of approaching science.

Part of the problem is that evolution as it is portrayed in the popular imagination and even in some science classrooms is a caricature. 1CIs it possible we 19ve evolved past Darwin? 1D Cupp asks at one point. Yes, actually, scientists have long since evolved past him. No one is really a Darwinian anymore. Darwin did not know that traits are passed down through Mendelian genetics and he did not know that the earth is billions 14not thousands or even millions 14of years old. This is why modern biology sometimes uses the term neo-Darwinism. There is a case to be made that no scientific theory is final and, as Cupp notes, 1C[S]crutiny and healthy debate form the basis of scientific inquiry itself, 1D but Cupp uses some bloody-minded rather than healthy arguments to make her case against evolution. She actually falls back on the old saw that evolution is a theory and that in common parlance a theory is a guess. In scientific terminology, of course, a guess is more properly referred to as a hypothesis whereas a scientific theory must have ample evidence to back it up.

Cupp makes the common error of challenging the notion that evolution is widely accepted by confusing the meaning of 1Cwidely 1D and 1Ccommonly 1D: an idea can be widely accepted if it is held by scientists in the United States and Mexico and France, but it would not be commonly accepted if only twenty percent of the combined populations of those three countries believe in it. Cupp argues that evolution is not time-honored just because the Supreme Court has only enforced it in our schools since 1982, but that is not what is meant by time-honored. Darwinism has been debated in the scientific community for a century and a half. It is in the scientific community that the debate counts, not in courts of law or even in high school classrooms. That is, of course, an argument that has a double edge. Debates within science continue about how evolution works. Undoubtedly, evolution in 2112 will be taught differently from how it is being taught now; but it is unlikely that in the next century God will have been proven to exist by some purely rational argument, and science is exclusively about rational arguments. If one hopes, eventually, to bring all metaphysical questions into the realm of scientific inquiry, then questions of God 19s existence or action or inaction in the universe will come last. (Science is only beginning to admit to the validity of scientific inquiry into 1Cless difficult 1D metaphysical questions such as the nature of consciousness.)

The aim of evolution is not to disprove the existence of God but to demonstrate that the existence of life 14one of the most remarkable aspects of the universe 14can be at least partly comprehended without resort to God. This is precisely what disturbs the faithful about evolution, but it is the whole point of science. God necessarily refers us to what we do not and perhaps cannot know or understand; whereas science is only about what we can understand. This purpose is unfortunately mistaken by the religious for hubris or know-it-all-ism, even though it is rather that the scientist 19s calling is not to contemplate the mysteries he cannot resolve but rather to find the ones he can.

There is much fear on the part of some religious Americans about the encroachment of secular thinking on their spiritual turf. But this fear is not so much unsupported as misplaced. The problem is not that God is not taught in science class but rather that God is kept out of other classrooms where He certainly should be mentioned. Instead of trying to sneak God into science class, Christians should be asking why religion is almost completely ignored in the teaching of history which has always been bound up with religion. And why are there few if any courses in our high schools that treat world religions? (Unreasoning fear of religion is the answer.)

Cupp is at her best when she examines the outright hostility toward Christianity of many in the media. Her chapter "Thou shalt Fall Spectacularly From Grace" examines the media's warped concept of what hypocrisy means. Someone who says that adultery is wrong but who then commits adultery is only a hypocrite if he denies that he has done wrong. If he admits that he did not live up to his ideals, he is a sinner, but not a hypocrite. "He is essentially the majority of people on this planet." The effect of the media's misconception about hypocrisy is that Republican adulterers are crucified while Democrats guilty of the same behavior are given a pass. "For having values Republicans are hypocrites, and for having none Democrats are merely 'representative'."

She warns both Christian and non-Christian readers that it would be better to speak up now against the media culture that is shaping or, perhaps more accurately, reflecting and reinforcing the mindset of those politicians, judges and regulators who are actively discouraging and even banning public religious expression. Ironically, one of Cupp 19s recommendations is for Christians to reverse their abandonment of mainstream media and start watching and listening so that they know what is being said and not being said. Only in this way will they be able to see and respond to specific instances of inaccuracy, bias and incivility and ensure that their point of view will be recognized and respected as the vital part of the mainstream that it is.
… (mere)
 
Markeret
MilesFowler | 2 andre anmeldelser | Jul 16, 2023 |
I don't recommend this book. It's just a run-of-the-mill political screed, anti-Democrat diatribe that makes the faithful angry and the opposition roll their eyes. There is nothing in here really new.

The sound bite version is that the Religious of America are the majority, but you wouldn't know that from the mainstream media and others who vilify religion in every day life. The author has extra credibility because she herself is an atheist.


I checked it out because a technology writer I follow, Farhood Manjoo, tweeted about her as an old friend from college who "is trying to destroy America".
… (mere)
 
Markeret
richardSprague | 2 andre anmeldelser | Mar 22, 2020 |

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