Thus says the Lord: “Let not the wise man boast in his
wisdom, let not the mighty man boast in his might, let not the rich man boast
in his riches, but let him who boasts boast in this, that he understands and
knows me, that I am the Lord who practices steadfast love, justice, and
righteousness in the earth. For in these things I delight, declares the Lord.” Jeremiah 9:23-24
The life of the preacher is a
life of study, and it has been so from the very beginning. The Apostle Paul
instructed Timothy to study so that he could present himself to God as an
approved worker, “a worker who has no need to be ashamed” [2 Timothy 2:15].
This instruction came within the context of Timothy’s call as a preacher and
teacher of God’s Word, and Paul’s instruction to Timothy is our Lord’s
instruction to all who would preach and teach the Word of God.
A word of honesty is
necessary at this point. Any honest assessment of the contemporary church would
indicate that vast numbers of ministers serving Christ’s church are derelict in
this duty. They are intellectually lazy, biblically illiterate, slothful in
their study habits, and they often steal the learning of others in order to
hide their own disobedience. This is a scandal that robs the congregation of
the learned and faithful ministry the people of God so desperately need and
deserve.
The preacher’s lifetime of
study begins with the moment of his call and properly ends only when the
preacher breathes his last breath. Between the call and the grave lies a long
and rewarding journey of learning – learning that will be put at the disposal
of the congregation until we see our Lord face to face. On that day, we dare
not be ashamed of our lack of study.
Thomas Murphy, once of the
great faithful pastors of the nineteenth century, described the minister’s
calling of study with these words: “The pastor must study, study, study, or he
will not grow, or even live, as a true workman for Christ.” The minister’s life
is “one of incessant study,” Murphy explained, and “mere genius” will not
suffice – this is a life of constant and rewarding study.
Knowing God
The preacher’s first task is
to know God – personally. The Bible has no conception of an unconverted
ministry. The preacher is first of all a man who has come to know God through
faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, and who find his greatest fulfillment in knowing
God personally and redemptively.
God told the prophet
Jeremiah, “let him who boasts boast in
this, that he understands and knows me” [Jeremiah 9:24]. Our fundamental
knowledge is a knowledge of God, and this is the central goal of all true
theological education and ministry preparation. The preacher must be one who
sets his sight on a vibrant personal knowledge of God. Otherwise, theological
knowledge becomes a ground for personal pride and intellectual pretentiousness.
As J. I. Packer reminds us,
“To be preoccupied with getting theological knowledge as an end in itself, to
approach Bible study with no higher a motive than a desire to know all the
answers, is the direct route to a state of self-satisfied self-deception. We
need to guard our hearts against such an attitude, and pray to be kept from
it.”
Furthermore, Packer correctly
reminds us that we are indeed to be urgently concerned for theological
orthodoxy and biblical truth, but “not as ends in themselves, but as a means to
the further ends of life and godliness.” In other words: “Our aim in studying
the Godhead must be to know God himself better. Our concern must be to enlarge
our acquaintance, not simply with the doctrine of God’s attributes, but with
the living God whose attributes they are.”
This approach to the
minister’s life of study brings a godly sense of balance. Our central aim is to
know God, and the aim of our ministry is to lead our people to know God also.
The other aspects of knowledge are useful only in so far as they lead us into a
deeper knowledge of God. A healthy theological education inculcates a deeper
love for God, even as the minister grows in the knowledge of God’s Word and the
comprehensiveness of God’s truth.
Studying God’s Word
Paul’s instruction to Timothy
was very clear. The young minister was to study in order that he would be found
“rightly handling the word of truth”
[2 Timothy 2:15]. A deep and growing knowledge of God’s Word is the
indispensable ground of all other true knowledge.
Put simply, the preacher is
to be a devoted and skillful student of the Scriptures. This is the most
important field of knowledge for the preacher, for his primary task is to
preach the Word “in season and out of
season,” [2 Timothy 4:2] and to teach God’s people from God’s Word.
Clearly, this strategic call
represents a stewardship of truth, of souls, and of calling. Failure in this
task is beyond tragedy, and the consequences are eternal. God has given us his
Word and has commanded that we preach the Bible with skill, even as Ezra was “a scribe skilled in the Law of Moses”
[Ezra 7:6].
This requires skill in the
tasks of biblical interpretation, hermeneutics, exegesis, biblical languages,
and the history of interpretation. This is a demanding calling, but nothing
less than the most serious life of study will do. Those who can gain access to
Bible colleges and theological seminaries that are biblically and theologically
orthodox and faithful should take full advantage of these opportunities—knowing
that this is a matter of faithfulness to our calling. At the same time, we must
remember that many faithful preachers never had access to formal theological
education. Yet, if they were faithful, they were no less studious or committed
to a life of godly learning.
The centrality of the Bible
is essential. As Charles Spurgeon encouraged his students: “Study the Bible,
dear brethren, through and through, with all the helps that you can possibly
obtain: remember that the appliances now within the reach of ordinary
Christians are much more extensive than they were in our fathers’ days, and
therefore you must be greater biblical scholars if you would keep in front of
your hearers. Intermeddle with all knowledge, but above all things meditate day
and night in the law of the Lord.”
If this was true in Spurgeon’s
time, it is even more so in ours. The preacher must be more knowledgeable and
more skilled than his congregation. Spurgeon’s other emphasis—that the
knowledge of the Bible exceeds all other forms of knowledge in importance—also
takes on a new urgency in our times. While there are many fields of knowledge
and intellectual stimulation to which we could give our attention, we must keep
ourselves first and foremost students of the Bible.
Learning God’s Truth
A true theological education
stands on the unquestioned authority and truthfulness of the Bible and then
moves to display that truth in all its comprehensiveness and to apply that
truth to every dimension of life. Thus, the fields of systematic theology,
historical theology, ethics, church history, and other theological disciplines
all play their part in the preparation of the preacher.
A resistance to systematic
theology reflects a lack of discipline or a lack of confidence in the
consistency of God’s Word. We are to set out the great doctrines of the faith
as revealed in the Bible—and do so in a way that helps to bring all of God’s
truth into a comprehensive focus. The preacher must be ready to answer the
great questions of his age from the authoritative treasury of God’s truth, and
to teach, defend, and proclaim the faith “once
for all delivered to the saints” [Jude 3].
Serving God’s People
Ultimately, the preacher’s
calling is a call to serve the people of God. That’s why a consideration of the
call should include a careful analysis of the man’s ability to preach, to
teach, and to love the church for whom Christ died.
Once that is established, the
preacher is set on a lifetime of studying in order to improve his preaching, to
teach with even greater effectiveness, and to serve with even greater
faithfulness.
This is no easy task. That’s
surely why Paul used the metaphors of the soldier, the athlete, and the farmer
as he described this calling to Timothy [2 Timothy 2:3-7]. We are called to the
obedience of the soldier, the discipline of the athlete, and the patient
endurance of the farmer.
We should note carefully that
Paul describes the ministry this way just before commanding Timothy to study in
order to show himself faithful. May we, like Timothy, do our best to present
ourselves to God as workers who have no need to be ashamed.
==============================
[KH: exactly the title of
John Stott’s book on the Sermon on the Mount]
Throughout the centuries,
Christians have faced the vexing question: How are we to live as Christians in
the midst of a secular culture? This question reaches to the heart of Christian
discipleship and the meaning of the Gospel—and challenges the church of the
twenty-first century no less than the earliest disciples.
Called out from the world as
a “peculiar people” and charged to be salt and light in a dark and rebellious
world, the church has perpetually struggled with the command to be “in the
world but not of it.” Sadly, the world has often appeared to influence the
church more than the church has influenced the world. Furthermore, the secular
transformation of the society appears to have created a great chasm between the
church and the world. How can Christians hope to transform a culture?
The reality of our calling
and the revolutionary character of the Christian faith are nowhere more evident
than in the Sermon on the Mount. Addressing his disciples, Jesus spoke with
directness and candor and established the rule of the Kingdom of God in the
midst of a rebellious and ungodly culture. This is a message directly addressed
to the church, not to the world. The principles of the Sermon on the Mount are
counter-intuitive, and make sense only when an affirmation of the Lordship of
Jesus Christ stands at the foundation.
Christians have struggled
with the meaning of the Sermon on the Mount ever since those first disciples
heard their Lord present these teachings on that pastoral hillside. The
struggle basically comes down to this: Is there any way to escape the plain
meaning of the sermon? Do those who lust in their hearts really commit
adultery? Are we really to pluck out offending eyes and cut off sinful hands?
Must we always turn the other cheek and walk the extra mile, love our enemies
and bless those who curse us?
Jesus’ words cut like a
surgeon’s scalpel into the soft underbelly of Christian discipleship. We have
the live like this?
In all honesty, the church
cannot relegate the Sermon on the Mount to some later age, limit its
application to the first disciples, or evade its teachings by allegory and
anxious explanation. Like frantic litigators looking for loopholes in a
contract, some Christians have attempted to find a way to lessen the impact of
the Sermon and establish a more comfortable mode of discipleship—”Christianity
Lite.”
But twist as we may, there is
no escaping the Sermon on the Mount, for we have but one Lord, and the Sermon
is His manifesto for the church—His bride and body.
The Sermon must be taken as a
whole, and its several sections must not be ripped from their context. Jesus
begins with blessings—the Beatitudes—moves into moral imperatives, and then
teaches us the Lord’s Prayer and aspects of discipleship in the church.
Jesus was not imparting a new
legalism. Salvation is all of grace, and the Sermon on the Mount is not a
catalogue of moral qualities to make one worthy of salvation. Jesus did not
replace the legalism of the Pharisees with yet another. Rather, Jesus was
establishing the rule of the Kingdom of God and making plain the transforming
moral vision to be held by citizens of that realm of the redeemed.
He was not painting a vivid
picture of a distant reality, however. Though the Kingdom is not yet here in
fullness, it is here in part and in truth through the person and work of Jesus
Christ. Our fulfillment of the moral imperatives and lifestyle of the Sermon
is, like salvation itself, a matter of grace, and not of human faithfulness.
Yet we are called all the same, and given our marching orders. As R. T. France
comments: “The teaching of the Sermon on the Mount is not to be admired but
obeyed.”
The secular world sees the
Sermon on the Mount as an ethereal vision of a utopian morality. Jesus is
admired as a great moral teacher, but his precepts are taken as lofty goals for
moral contemplation. The Sermon on the Mount is granted a token respect, but
the secular world is not about to change its basic rules and commitments. Too
much is at stake, after all.
On the other hand, the Church
is God’s Christian counter-culture. The Sermon on the Mount is thus Christ’s
call to a Christian counter-revolution. No force on earth can match the
influence of Christian disciples bearing witness to salvation in Jesus Christ
and exhibiting lifestyles which befit citizens of the Kingdom.
This is how Christians wage a
culture war. Not with armaments and artillery, not with the sword but with the
Spirit—not with worldly power but with the Gospel. Important battles must be
fought in the courts, in the schools, and in the marketplace of ideas. But the
Church must fight its battles with character and not with cowardice, and with
truth rather than technique. God’s moral counter-revolutionaries bear the mark
of the crucified and resurrected Christ and order their lives by the precepts
of the eternal Kingdom. Christians cannot avoid political engagement, but the
concern of the Church is never merely political.
The principles revealed in
the Sermon on the Mount cannot be reduced to pithy precepts. Christians rightly
struggle with how these teachings of the Savior are to be applied in our times.
The church must give itself anew in every generation to the task of mature
Christian reflection on the Sermon on the Mount and the totality of the
biblical revelation. The Sermon on the Mount, like all biblical texts, must be
interpreted in light of the total context of Scripture. This Sermon demands a
lifetime of study and struggle.
One important factor in the
Sermon on the Mount is Christ’s amplification and internalization of the Law.
In the famous but I say unto you passages, Jesus not only sustains the Law’s
intention, He amplifies it. Avoidance of adultery is not enough—the Christian
must avoid lust. Failure to murder is not enough—the Christian must not hate.
Never has the world stood in
such need of the Christian counter-revolution. Living out the Sermon on the
Mount, the church must show the world how to live a different way—a way for
which the only explanation is the unconditional lordship of Jesus Christ.
Standing in the narrow passage between the old year and the new, this is a good
time to remember how a Christian counter-revolution would really look.
==============================
“Bishop Spong is the leading
voice within modern progressive Christianity, attempting to make Christianity
relevant to today’s world,” said Dixon Sutherland, director of Stetson
University’s Institute for Christian Ethics. He went on to declare, “The
exposure of students to probably the most formative leader of progressive thinking
within Christianity today is an important part of our educational mission.” [KH:
Spong is a heretic.]
That fascinating little piece
of advertising is found at the website of Stetson University, a private
university located in DeLand, Florida.
Of course, that introduction
of retired Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong is a bit understated, since the
bishop is known throughout the world for having denied virtually every major
doctrine of the Christian faith, and has become something of a parody of theological
liberalism.
What makes the Stetson
University announcement all the more interesting is the fact that Bishop Spong
was invited to the university in order to deliver a lecture on human sexuality
and then to serve as the major speaker for the university’s “Twentieth Annual
Florida Winter Pastors’ School.” According to the on-line registration form for
the conference, the event sold out.
The bishop’s visit to Florida
caught the attention of the Orlando
Sentinel. In an article written by reporter Loraine O’Connell, Spong is
quoted as stating: “Sex without any sort of loving relationship is always
wrong. It’s appropriate only inside commitment. What’s the level of commitment?
For me, it’s marriage.” The reporter was fully aware that this might sound like
Bishop Spong was abandoning his endorsement of pre-marital sex, so she quickly
corrected any misunderstanding. “Spong’s fans needn’t fear that he’s
backpedaling. Although marriage is his preferred level of commitment, he says,
expecting young people to remain celibate until marriage isn’t realistic.
Teaching them to treat sexuality with respect is.”
Over the last twenty years or
so, the Right Reverend John Shelby Spong has served as a minstrel for
postmodern Christianity. After serving from 1976 to 2000 as bishop of the
Episcopal Diocese of Newark, New Jersey, Spong hit the lecture circuit and has
become a media personality and provocateur. His books garner immediate media
attention, though his methodology of theological sensationalism is running out
of steam. Now that he has denied virtually every imaginable doctrine revealed
in the Bible, there must be very little room for further denial.
In successive books, Spong
has denied the incarnation, the miracles as recorded in Scripture, the virgin
birth of Christ, a salvific purpose for the crucifixion, the bodily
resurrection, and an entire series of truths long cherished by the church. He
sees the Bible as an essentially human book that is filled with foibles and
faults, and thus argues that it is not to be taken seriously as God’s
authoritative message to the church.
“The God I know is not
concrete or specific,” Spong has written. “This God is rather shrouded in
mystery, wonder, and awe. The deeper I journey into this divine presence, the
less any literalized phrases, including the phrases of the Christian creed,
seem relevant. The God I know can only be pointed to; this God can never be
enclosed by propositional statements.”
Thus, Spong denies the
authority and truthfulness of the historic Christian creeds and has been about
the task of revising, remodeling, and transforming Christianity into an
entirely new system of faith and meaning.
Biblical Christianity simply
makes no sense to Bishop Spong. “The biblical account of Jesus’ return to
heaven was based upon the ancient idea that the sky was the abode of God and
that it was ‘up.’ A literal ascension makes no sense to those of us who live on
this side of Copernicus, Galileo, and the space age. Indeed, the very word up
is a meaningless concept in our time.”
In Spong’s view, God is
largely a human construct. He has abandoned theism—the basic belief in a
personal God—and has moved “beyond theism” to embrace “new God images.” In Why
Christianity Must Change or Die, the bishop explained: “There is no God
external to life. God, rather, is the inescapable depth and center of all that
is. God is not a being superior to all other beings. God is the Ground of Being
itself. And much flows from this starting place. The artifacts of the faith of
the past must be understood in a new way if they are to accompany us beyond the
exile, and those that cannot be understood differently will have to be laid
aside. Time will inform us as to which is which.”
Just before the end of last
year, I debated Bishop Spong on Lee Strobel’s program, “Faith Under Fire,”
broadcast on PAX television. In that context, Bishop Spong presented his
understanding clearly. “There is no human being that can know the reality of
God. There is no inerrant Bible. There is no true Church. There is no corner on
the market of salvation. There is no faith once delivered to the saints. Those
are all human attempts to minister to the human security-need to believe that
we possess the truth. It’s only those people who believe they possess the truth
that want to have inquisitions or do heresy hunts or start religious wars or
persecute people who disagree with them. I think that’s the dark and demonic
side of religion, and I think we would do well to be rid of that.”
Most Americans are probably
aware of Bishop Spong as an advocate for sexual revolution. His 1988 book,
Living in Sin?: A Bishop Rethinks Sexuality, was a declaration of war upon the
church’s historic understanding of human sexuality. Spong pulled no punches,
rejecting the Bible as an adequate guide to human sexuality and insisting that
the ancient Scriptures are simply too out of date to be relevant in today’s
world. The bishop simply takes the sexual revolution as a fact and insists that
Christianity must change its sexual ethic or be consigned to the dustbin of
cultural history.
Furthermore, he insists that
the church’s sole concern in this time of revolutionary sexuality is to
“witness the expansion of that gray area bounded by promiscuity on the one side
and sex only inside marriage on the other.” As he expanded, “Most people will
live inside this area of relativity, of uncertainty, of various levels of
commitment and various kinds of sexual practices. It will be in the gray area
that new values will need to be formulated.”
Accordingly, the bishop
argued for the full acceptance and normalization of homosexual behavior.
“Contemporary research is today uncovering new facts that are producing a
rising conviction that homosexuality, far from being a sickness, sin,
perversion, or unnatural act, is a healthy, natural, and affirming form of
human sexuality for some people.”
What about the Bible’s clear
statements about the sinfulness of homosexuality? “Certainly there are biblical
passages that seem quite specific in their condemnation of homosexual
activity,” the bishop conceded. Nevertheless, he employed a postmodern
relativizing of the text to get around that awkward reality. When Paul
condemned homosexuality in Romans chapter one, “It was an unnatural act for a
heterosexual person to engage in homosexual behavior, he [Paul] argued. He did
not or perhaps could not imagine a life in which the affections of a male might
be naturally directed to another male.”
Had the Apostle Paul been
“enlightened” by modern notions of sexual orientation, Spong implies that he
certainly would have changed his position. On the other hand, Spong elsewhere
has argued that the Apostle Paul’s clear condemnation of homosexuality
indicates that he may indeed have been a closeted homosexual himself.
Once Spong argued that the
Bible’s condemnation of homosexuality could be overcome, it was a short jump to
argue that homosexuals should be eagerly welcomed into the church and its
ministry, and that liturgical rites for the blessing of same sex unions should
be developed and embraced. “Once the naturalness of majority and minority
orientations is established, and the expectation of celibacy for gay and
lesbian people is removed, the question of the moment will then become,” Spong
insists, “How does a gay or lesbian person lead a responsible sexual life?”
Celibacy, he argues, is simply too much to ask.
Spong clearly revels in his
role as provocateur and lightning rod for controversy. “I am not likely to be
burned at the stake,” he has commented, insisting that he is confident the
church will inevitably move in his direction.
Meanwhile, this directs even
greater attention to the fact that Stetson University invited Spong to be a
major speaker at an event that was presumably intended to equip and inspire
Christian pastors. The school’s Continuing Education department acknowledged
the fact that the bishop had both admirers and detractors. “His admirers
acclaim his legacy as a teaching bishop who makes contemporary theology
accessible to the ordinary layperson—he’s considered a champion of an inclusive
faith by many both inside and outside the Christian church.” On the other hand,
“His challenges to the church have also made Bishop Spong the most vilified of
modern clergymen. The target of hostility, fear, and death threats, he has been
called anti-Christ, hypocrite and the devil incarnate.”
Nevertheless, the university
obviously thought that Bishop Spong would be an absolutely appropriate speaker
for its Pastors’ School, along with Marcus J. Borg, a member of the infamous
“Jesus Seminar,” who has denied the bodily resurrection, miracles, and the
historicity of the New Testament.
According to the university’s
website, “A bright mind is never happy on the sidelines. A bright mind is meant
to be wide open to all the intellectual adventures and encounters.”
Participants in Stetson University’s Pastors’ School are certain to encounter
an intellectual adventure—but it will be an adventure in subverting and
undermining the Christian faith.
The irony and tragedy in all
this becomes apparent when it is realized that Stetson University was founded
and nurtured by Baptists in the state of Florida, and championed at one time as
“the state institution of the Florida Baptists.”
But, as they say, that was
then and this is now. Now, Stetson is simply another private university that
sells itself as “a comprehensive university committed to academic excellence
and distinctive, values-centered programs.” Elsewhere at the same site, the
school describes itself as “a non-sectarian, comprehensive, private
university.”
That is light years away from
the university’s motto, “Pro Deo et Veritate” [“For God and Truth”].
The bottom line in all this
is that Stetson University—formerly related to the Florida Baptist
Convention—has invited a retired Episcopal bishop—now known for his notorious
denials of Christian truth—to be the speaker at an event intended to equip
Christian pastors. This is all done in the name of academic inquiry, no doubt.
But who speaks for orthodox Christianity?
Oddly enough, the best
response to Bishop Spong’s visit came from a local Episcopal rector who
declined to attend the lectures. Spong is “on the fringe of the tradition,”
said the Reverend Don Lyon, rector of St. Barnabas Episcopal Church in DeLand.
“He’s basically an eastern mystical pantheist.”
As Lyon told the Orlando
Sentinel, “I’ve been a parish priest for 25 years, and for 25 years he has
sought to deconstruct the historic faith in ways that have been profoundly
damaging to the church.”
Reverend Lyon is right, of
course. The most tragic aspect of this entire episode is the damage that is
done to the church of the Lord Jesus Christ.
The state of liberal
Protestantism, of Stetson University and similar institutions, and the world of
increasingly post-Christian spirituality, is made readily apparent once we
recognize what it means that Bishop Spong, rather than Reverend Lyon, was asked
to address the attending pastors. But then, Bishop Spong must have offered the
kind of “intellectual adventure” those pastors would prefer. Let’s just leave
it at that.
==============================
Sometime ago,
comedian Jay Leno made the following announcement to his audience: “A group of
venture capitalists are in the process of developing their own liberal radio
network to counter conservative shows like Rush Limbaugh. They feel the liberal
viewpoint is not being heard—except on TV, in the movies, in music, by
comedians, in magazines and newspapers. Other than that, it’s not getting out!”
With his typical good timing, Leno delivered the joke masterfully and the
audience responded with laughter. Of course, the laugh was at the expense of
those who claim that the media shows no liberal bias.
Just over two
years ago, Bernard Goldberg rocked the media world with the release of his
book, Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the
Media Distort the News. Now, just two years later, Goldberg has released Arrogance: Rescuing America from the Media
Elite. Together, these two books pack a powerful punch and make an eloquent
argument. Goldberg puts to rest any claim that the elite media are politically
unbiased.
After
almost three decades of service as a CBS News correspondent, Goldberg is in a
unique position to evaluate and explain the origin and impact of liberal bias
in the newsroom. During his 28 years at CBS, Goldberg won 6
Emmy Awards and was one of the network’s most popular correspondents.
Nevertheless,
once Bias was released, Goldberg
found himself frozen out of newsrooms and shunned even by those who had been
his friends. Goldberg broke one of the cardinal rules
of the liberal media—never admit the existence of a liberal bias among those
who write, produce, and report the news. Once that secret oath was
broken, Goldberg became a pariah and the defense mechanisms of the elite media
went into overdrive.
In his first
book, Goldberg traced the development of liberal bias in the reporting and
packaging of news. He traced the origin of liberal
bias to the social context, educational experiences, and class consciousness of
liberal journalists. As he made clear, many of these media personalities
have convinced themselves that there is no liberal bias in themselves or their
peers. They just consider their own worldview to be
normative and anyone who disagrees with them to be lacking in either
intelligence or sophistication. Lacking any better way of understanding
this phenomenon, the trend-setters in the media just consider conservatives
backward and obstructionist.
In Arrogance,
Goldberg takes the next step, arguing for a 12-step recovery program that would
force the liberal media to deal with their political bias. First, Goldberg puts
the issue in perspective. The institutions of elite media deny liberal bias
because they cannot afford such an admission. Their worldview leads them to see
their own presuppositions as normal, and those who oppose them as backward.
Therefore, they consider themselves to be doing a public service when they
position conservatives as a radical fringe and establish liberal dogma as the
norm.
Liberal
reporters claim “objectivity” as their motto and standard. Goldberg pulls back
the veil of misinformation concerning that claim. “By in large, these are
people who see themselves as incredibly decent, even noble. They’re the good guys
trying to make the world a better place. That’s why many of them went into
journalism in the first place.” Therefore, Goldberg explains that bias “is
something the bad guys are guilty of.” This leads journalists to take a
defensive posture, denying the very possibility that they could be biased in
their own perspective: “So rather than look honestly at themselves and their
profession, they hang on for dear life to the ludicrous position, to the
completely absurd notion, that they, among all human beings, are unique—that
only they have the ability to set aside their personal feelings and their
beliefs and report the news free of any biases, ‘because we’re professionals,’
they say.”
How can this
be true? These are smart people who consider themselves quite qualified to spot
bias in others. How do they miss such bias in themselves? Goldberg answers:
“Well for starters, as I say, a lot of them truly don’t understand what the
fuss is all about, since they honestly believe that their views on all sorts of
divisive issues are not really controversial—or even liberal. After all, their
liberal friends in Manhattan and Georgetown share those same views, which
practically by definition make them moderate and mainstream.”
Thus, those
who stand outside what passes as “mainstream” in the salons of Manhattan and
the political parlors of Georgetown show up on the radar screen of the liberal
media as cranks, kooks, and extremists.
The
insularity of the liberal newsroom was perhaps most graphically displayed when
film critic Pauline Kael of the New Yorker expressed shock at the landslide
election of Richard Nixon over George McGovern in the 1972 Presidential race.
“How can that be?,” she asked. “No one I know voted for Nixon.” That statement
revealed that Pauline Kael was in no position to know anything about what
mainstream America is like in the first place. Her friends and associates were
the luminaries of the artsy New York scene, not the kind of people who sell
insurance, manage grocery stores, change diapers and ferry the kids to Little
League. George McGovern carried only Massachusetts and the District of
Columbia—not even New York. Nevertheless, Pauline Kael lived in a world where
George McGovern, not Richard Nixon, would have won in a landslide.
Because the
media elite see themselves as fair and objective, they refuse to consider
charges of liberal bias. “Better to cast conservatives as a bunch of loonies,”
explains Goldberg, “who see conspiracies under every bed, around every corner,
behind every tree, and, most important of all, in every newsroom.”
The rise of
alternative media has transformed the equation to some extent. Fox News is now
an alternative to the more liberal bent of CNN, even as conservative talk radio
increasingly dominates the free-wheeling airwaves. This has put the elite media
into a panic mode. Recent reports indicate that several liberal foundations and
philanthropists are looking to set up an alternative system of liberal talk
radio to compete with dominating conservatives like Rush Limbaugh and Sean
Hannity. Of course, liberals also have to explain why it is that their shows
are failing while conservative programs continue to grow.
Goldberg has
an explanation for this, too. “The Left, self-servingly, says it’s because
conservatives (unlike civilized liberals, of course) are loud and angry and
make complex political and social issues moronically simple for their
moronically simple listeners, many of whom, of course, live in simple-minded
Red State country.” Goldberg’s not buying it—”Here’s another theory: Maybe
liberal talk shows keep failing because the American people don’t think they
need yet one more media megaphone coming from left field.”
Goldberg
offers a sophisticated analysis of this perplexing phenomenon. The very smart
and very sophisticated leaders of the liberal media simply do not understand
how distant they are from the lives of ordinary Americans. They consider
themselves smarter, more informed, more analytical, and more broad-minded than
the population at large.
Conservatives
sometimes reduce this to a problem of partisan loyalties. While it is true that
Democrats vastly out number Republicans in the media elite, the pattern of bias
does not fall simply along party lines. To the contrary, the division is far
more cultural and ideological than merely political.
Writing in
the Wall Street Journal, David W.
Brady and Jonathan Ma recently reported on their study of media bias that
focused on the description of liberal and conservative members of the U.S.
Senate. As Brady and Ma detail, the media are far more
likely to describe a conservative in negative terms than a liberal under
similar circumstances. Furthermore, the very word “liberal” is used far
more sparingly than the label “conservative,” and the latter word is often
joined by other negative terms. Reviewing coverage of the 102nd Congress, Brady
and Ma describe a pattern in which Massachusetts Democrat Edward M. Kennedy is
described as “a liberal spokesman” and “the party’s old-school liberal” in The New York Times. The same paper
described North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms as “the most unyielding
conservative,” “the unyielding conservative Republican,” “the contentious
conservative,” and “the Republican arch-conservative.” Senator Tom Harkin was
described as “a liberal intellectual,” while Senator Don Nickles was called “a
fierce conservative.” And these people consider themselves free from bias!
Goldberg
understands that this form of bias is deeply rooted in experience and
perspective. “What media bias is mainly about are the fundamental assumptions
and beliefs and values that are the stuff of everyday life. The reason why so
many American’s who are pro-life or anti-affirmative action or who support gun
rights detest the mainstream media is that day after day they fail to see in
the media any respect for their views. What they see
is a mainstream media seeming to legitimize one side (the one media elites
agree with) as valid and moral, while seeking to cast the other side as narrow,
small-minded, and bigoted.”
The
twelve-step recovery program Goldberg suggests is not likely to gain traction
in the liberal newsrooms anytime soon. Their denial of the problem is itself
the problem. Until the media elite comes to terms with its own blinders and
bias, it is sure to avoid dealing with this problem. Bernard Goldberg has
performed an important public service in his new book. The mainstream media
would perform an even more significant public service by taking it seriously.
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