Religion in the City – Defeatist Faith

What has happened to NPR? There used to be nothing like listening to Prairie Home Companion, Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me and This American Life on long car rides or while cleaning my room on a Saturday morning. Yet, as of late, all I hear when I turn on NPR, all I see when I turn on the TV news or open up a newspaper is depressing, defeatist messages.

Jim Morrison of the Doors once said in his song, Unknown Soldier, “Whatever controls the media, controls the mind”. I feel like sometimes our media would be happy to have us lock ourselves in our homes and throw away the key. Seeking sensationalism, each news story seems to be geared around making us more and more fearful of our neighbors, community and the world around us. Day in and day out, the media his saturating us with Chicken Little stories that “the sky is falling!” Stories seem to be designed to build barriers, with –us against them— themes.

First, the entertainment pieces are designed to remind us that money and power are the most important things we have as Americans! Then, the news stories are followed up with tales of panic that we are about to lose the very thing the media just told us was so important! You cannot turn on the TV or radio without hearing about impending job losses, crime and murder. We are inundated with the idea that someone wants our stuff! Someone is going to take your stuff! You better guard your stuff and yourself! The premise is, arm yourself, hide your money and trust no one!

Karl Marx once said “religion is the opiate of the people”; I wonder as of late if media has not become the new opiate of the people? The truth is I think the media has saturated our hearts and minds with such fear and anxiety that it has polluted even our churches, attempting to break our spirits, and supersede our individual faith in God’s loving creation.

Unfortunately, I also believe that this defeatist imagery is not only the fault of our media, it is also the fault of the churches’ sermons, theologies and religion we are taught. It is so much easier to tell a congregation that their job losses, broken families and dreams are the result of either their sin or a devil which is out to get them. That message is so much easier than talking to a congregation about the realities of a generation and a world which has sought to live above its means for too long. Could it be that the USA has ramped divorce and broken family values because religion and society has taught their congregations to marry out of tradition rather than love?

What if our Mosques, Temples and Churches taught people on their Sabbath days, to live into the abundance that they have, the gifts that God has already given them? I fear at this point that our faith communities, like our media, want to focus on our brokenness, focus on some end time to come. With meditations that constantly irradiating a future time when their people can be one-with-God’s love.

Keeping in mind that Jello Biafra once said “Don’t hate the media, become the media.” I commend to you these questions: what if God’s loving purpose for you is unfolding right now? What if the message in Church Sunday was not an apoplectic one, warning you to fear the evil and sin in your neighbor and self? What if the message instead focused on the social justice of “loving thy neighbor as self”?

Our faith communities often take Jesus expression or Buddha’s intent of “being in the world and not of the world” and make it into a eschatological message to isolate, be fearful and remove one’s self from worldly problems and people. It would seem that both our religion and media want us to think that the world is going to get worse and worse until a Christ, a Nirvana or even the Muslim idea of a Sunnah and Quran justice comes to save them.

What if instead of justice in the future and fear in the present we were to focus our spirits and prayers on grace in the future and hopefulness in this very day? Would it allow NPR, our TV news as well as our Churches, Synagogues and Mosques to still tell us stories of injustice but yet simultaneously also unite people around hope? The messages of injustice could help break through poverty, racism, sexism and crime. The new message could be “respect, not fear, your neighbor!” The challenge is to not let either the defeatist media or a despondent religious message isolate you in fear.

As Gandhi said, “be the change you want to see in the world.”