(253)S11E5/4: The False Prophet of Media
Welcome back to the Fourth Way podcast. I've been banging my head against the wall about this episode for some time now. So far this season, the problem for me has generally been that there's so much content, I have a difficult time whittling the field down to a singular focus. But for this episode, I've actually been having the opposite problem. When talking about the false prophet of media, how the church has been a catalyst for and purveyor of untruth in the media, nothing was really clicking for me.
Derek:Sure. There's a lot of religious sensationalism that has occurred in the media over the last century, but nothing really stood out to me as a big idea to run with. Then I came across Marvin Alaski's article about him leaving the Christian news outlet, the World Magazine. After reading that piece, which I highly recommend you go and do as well, a path started to form in my mind for this episode. And now what I'm about to lay out in this episode seems to perfectly exemplify exactly what it is that I've been hoping to show you in our section on media propaganda.
Derek:So let's go ahead and dive in. A big hang up for me initially was that I felt like I was looking for something huge when it came to media propaganda and the false prophet. I mean and just think about the other false prophet episodes that I've done on abortion and racism, on fostering abuse and harboring abusers, and doing a complete one eighty on wealth and materialism. Those are some heavy hitters. It only made sense in my mind that the false prophet of media ought to be even bigger than what we've discussed.
Derek:Right? Or at least no less massive in scale. Yet when I thought about this episode with that view towards the massive, I just couldn't come up with anything. What Alasky's article did for me here is it reminded me of two things that I've been trying to hammer home to you listeners, but which I apparently needed hammered home to me as well. First, propaganda is formative over time, often in small increments.
Derek:Propaganda's power isn't that it's massive and destructive, though it often grows into such an entity. Propaganda's power is often, rather, that it seems inconsequential and small, which makes one able to consume it frequently and in whole. It's not that five pound $30 challenge burger at your local burger joint that you try to eat every year on your birthday, where if you eat the whole thing in one sitting, you get it for free. It's not that jumbo burger that's going to give you your heart attack. It's the bag of chips that you eat every day that's gonna kill you.
Derek:Americans don't do so well with comprehending and preparing for these types of incremental long term issues. Not only does that mean we're indulgent in the moment, but it also means that we often fail to accurately assess the toxicity of any act or substance. Propaganda forms us over time, and it's in this subtlety that much of its power lies. The second thing I was reminded of in Olasky's article was that my main focus on the media's power has been its use of silence. Yes.
Derek:There are forms of propaganda that the media wields other than silence, but much of its power lies in its implementation of silence. That's why muckraking and investigative journalism have been and still are really popular. They seek to give us something that we want, which is information about that which has been silenced and hidden. We like to be privy to that kind of information. But more often than not, the media obscures and hides with silence.
Derek:Just like the magician uses action and motion to draw your attention away from where the real magic or Legardemain is happening, so it is with media propaganda. You can definitely learn some things from what the media tells you, but you can learn as much, if not more, from what they choose not to tell you. So there are two very important ideas to keep in mind for this episode. Small is big, and silence is deafening. So where does the false prophet, the church gone astray, fit in with media propaganda?
Derek:Well, the media, as we think of it, is fairly young, but the principle of what the media is supposed to do goes back at least to Moses. While the Bible doesn't at all tell us about the media, it does tell us about prophets, which I'm gonna argue here for this episode that prophets are functionally similar to the media outlets. The job of both a prophet and the media is to convey truth. And even more than that, they are to convey the most important truths. Of course, as media goes, this is most true in regard to the news media as opposed to Hollywood media.
Derek:But even if we wanna include Hollywood media in this, I would argue that the media ought to be a truth telling institution. And I think that Hollywood often sees themselves as a truth telling institution just as much as news media. While Marvel movies may not be true in the sense that they are depicting fiction rather than historical reality, they do convey to us ideas, philosophical and moral ideas, like good and evil, the importance of good prevailing, the beauty of courage, all those kinds of wonderful things. Hollywood may not seek to always or to often tell us true things about current events, but they do seek to tell us what is true or what they think is true about the framework through which life, the world, and current events ought to be interpreted. When you recognize what the media's role actually is to convey truth to us, then it's easy to see how this role would align with the role of a prophet.
Derek:Some people may still have a hang up in that when they think of a prophet, they're thinking of someone who tells the future. That's a common misconception. If you think of prophecy that way, then the media doesn't really seem like it's prophetic. But prophecy in the Bible, while it may sometimes involve foretelling, is actually quite often rather a fourth telling. It's not a predicting of the future, but it's declaring of the present.
Derek:Prophets often express what they say the mind of God is right now, and the hearer's job is to heed that information and to apply it. So when an Israelite king wants to make an alliance with some other nation, the prophet might say, hey. Don't do that. God wants you to trust in him and not make foolish alliances. Don't you remember that we were slaves in Egypt?
Derek:Why would you go running back to them? It'd be blasphemous to trust them over God. And that's not so much a prediction of the future as it is a declaration of the present. It's a call to action through the foretelling of some information or truth. This idea of prophets and prophecy is extremely important to the Bible.
Derek:God would frequently raise up prophets in Israel, not so much to tell them about the future, but to call them to repentance now. The prophets were to tell the people the truth. This meant that the prophets weren't usually very popular. Many, many, many prophets were killed because the people hated what they had to say, with Jesus being the culmination of the slain prophets, truth itself crucified for the comfort of the people. At the same time, there's a horizontal strand running through the Bible where we see that there are also many so called prophets who are not only not being persecuted and killed, but who end up living comfortable lives protected by the king himself.
Derek:These prophets, however, are what the Bible calls false prophets because what they declare is an opposition to reality. They produce a message made for those that the book of Timothy calls people with itching ears. False prophets tell the people and the king what they want to hear. They declare peace when in reality, there's only impending destruction. Certainly, some of the power and allure of these false prophets comes from declaring information that's untrue, information which the people want to hear.
Derek:They wanna hear these untruths about prosperity and such. But a huge component of being a false prophet is, conversely, not telling people the things that they don't wanna hear. It's not always saying something false that's the problem, but also silencing what is true, silencing a call to action. If we combine these ideas, the idea that prophecy is often foretelling and that silencing information can be as potent and malicious as declaring false information, I think we arrive at what is going to be the crux of my argument for this episode. The media as we know it is very young on the stage of world history, but its intended role to prophesy to society, to be an institution which engages in forth telling truth, this institution is at least as ancient as written history.
Derek:And in the Christian religion in particular, prophecy plays a central role. Those who place their faith in Yahweh, a good God who is love and truth, are to both accept only that which is true and to declare only that which is true. Even if that means going against the grain, speaking truth to power, and getting persecuted or killed for it, the truth matters. If you look at evangelical Christian culture in The States right now, you might get the impression that this is exactly what the church is doing. It's at least what the church thinks they're doing.
Derek:Growing up saturated in evangelical Christian culture, I was constantly fed the idea that Christians in The States were being persecuted for living out this prophetic role. We were speaking truth to power in our society. We were being persecuted for declaring the truth about things like the evil of abortion. More recently, we see books like Rod Dreher's Live Not by Lies, which essentially looks at how the left ruined Eastern Europe and persecuted Christians, and how Christians in The States are already seeing the dominoes fall in regard to their own persecution. My Christian group loves to tell ourselves that we are being persecuted.
Derek:We tell ourselves this story because we know that Jesus promised us cross and that the servant isn't greater than our master. We know that the good guys in the Bible tended to be the persecuted ones, so we just so happen to find that we are constantly under persecution behind the walls of our gated communities somehow. We do this because if we weren't persecuted, that would be indicative that we were not living the right kind of Christian life. A few things helped to snap me out of this fiction of a specific persecution against American Christians. One was listening to an atheist podcast, Reasonable Doubts.
Derek:They would frequently highlight cases that were going on at the time in which Christians were persecuting other religious groups or atheists. It was sobering to hear all the instances of other groups being persecuted by my group and realizing that such a thing wasn't a rare occurrence because Christians historically and even currently, though it is waning, have had a lot of power. Christians in The States have been very heavy handed towards opposing viewpoints. The second thing that helped me to change my perspective was learning about some of the cases which had always been portrayed to me as Christian persecution. Take probably the most famous of these, the Engel v Vitale case of 1962.
Derek:The famous case which, according to my group, made prayer in school illegal. I'm serious. I grew up thinking that kids weren't allowed to pray or carry a Bible into public schools. I believe that because that's what the Christian adults in my life taught me. Yet when you look at the case, you realize that the plaintiffs were simply arguing that there shouldn't be school sponsored prayers occurring in schools.
Derek:Think about that. Up until, schools could literally force students in classes to be involved as reciters or listeners or whatever they wanted to a prayer, even if it wasn't to their god. Just imagine if there were school sponsored prayers in schools that were Muslim prayers. Christians would be up in arms. All Engel v Vitale did was say that the school shouldn't sponsor such a thing and force kids to be participants in that.
Derek:What the case did was not persecute Christians, but rather the reverse. It removed an aspect of Christian dominance that had been forcing itself upon children. In a sense, it was removing persecution by Christians. I mean, I don't know if I'd call enduring a prayer of another religion persecution per se, but when you're forced into it, it's certainly a form of being dominated. Anyway, evangelicals have done a fantastic job of whitewashing the dominance and persecution that Christians have foisted onto other groups and have actually turned instances of our loss of power and dominance into stories of us being persecuted.
Derek:It's like someone committing sexual assault, being resisted, and then pressing charges against the woman because he got a black eye in the process. In that sense, what Christians have been doing with our persecution complex is textbook one zero one from our propaganda section on abuse. That's because Christians have been in positions of power for much of American history and have liberally wielded the sword. We have often, mostly, been the abusive one. We're the abuser.
Derek:And just like we heard in our section on abuse, we know that the most dangerous time for the victim is when she tries to leave. What you see right now with the rise of nationalism and Christian militancy is the exact same thing you see from abusers when they lose control, this control that they're so accustomed to having. While it's the most dangerous time for the victim when the abuser raises his hand in desperation, it's also the moment when the abuser tips their hand to the world and shows what they truly are. Nevertheless, there is still some inner turmoil going on in evangelical Christianity. Plenty of people aren't ready to go the nationalism and dominion routes.
Derek:Some Christians still recognize that they need to be a persecuted group, not only to garner the sympathy of others, but also because that's what being good Christians entails. Yet by and large, Christians have scarcely been persecuted in The United States, and they have often been the ones forcing themselves upon others. When we discover that Christianity has historically wielded a lot of power in The United States, and when we see that it's scarcely been persecuted, that should clue us into a very important dynamic here. Christianity has almost certainly not been a true prophet, but rather, it's been a false prophet. The true prophets courted truth and defended the marginalized, and were therefore silenced with death.
Derek:The false prophets wielded power because they courted the government and created a symbiotic relationship where the prophets would tell the king and the people that they were blessed and were doing the will of God. By propping up the government, the prophet and his people received favor and security, while the government received the approval of the people and avoided revolt. Whereas true prophets stirred the pot, false prophets kept the status quo and their heads. Enter World Magazine. I learned about World about five years ago after I had several Christian friends recommend it to me.
Derek:They said that it was the best source of news because not only did it have a Christian perspective, but it did a really good job of covering relevant information, even if that information wasn't deemed convenient for the right. They seemed like they reported not only on true things, but on important things, and they didn't wield silence as a weapon. After starting to read some of what World was putting out, I was pretty happy with them and thought that they did a better job than most other media outlets. But about two years ago, Marvin Malaski, the editor in chief, as well as a number of other World's staff and key positions, they resigned. The issue, according to Alasky, was that the board of directors was being influenced by donors to selectively report, mum among some other significant issues.
Derek:Here's an extended quote from Malaski's article that gives you a glimpse of the issue. Quote, in 2020, '1 of our reporters learned that Madison Cawthorn, a young Republican running for Congress from Western North Carolina on a faith and family platform, had a history of harassing female students during his time at Patrick Henry College. That was a classic world story, and we ran it. But The New York Times last November reported that a world business executive criticized it. This year, from March 22 to May 17, the Washington Examiner ran 40 stories on Cawthorn's claims about Washington orgies and cocaine use, photos of him in lingerie, airport gun charges, etcetera.
Derek:During that two month period, World covered none of Cawthorn's dubious deeds and had a total of two sentences about him. One on his introducing legislation to stop sending aid to Ukraine, the other citing Trump's endorsement of him. Maybe the omissions were accidental, but when the wall of separation comes down, suspicion grows. Did World skip a story that would have disturbed donors? As editor, I almost never knew whether a letter writer was a big donor, and I didn't wanna know.
Derek:But when the CEO, who has such knowledge, is quarterback, publication needs to be transparent about donors and pressures they might apply. World's two top business executives now sit on an editorial council that decides policy concerns. That opens the door for questions about pay to play and editorial favoritism based on donor desires. The world has now gone the way of the world. And rather than make truth primary, they're willing to wield silence for cash.
Derek:Or at least, maybe they are. Probably they are. Almost certainly they are. They're doing it because that's what their base wants. The same thing we heard in the Southern Baptist Convention in regard to sexual abuse.
Derek:Cover it up because the base isn't gonna like it if we air it. You give the base what they want. And who is world's base? Historically, it's been conservative Christians who were wanting more objectivity, even if it stung a little. So this is scary to me.
Derek:It seems like there is no middle anymore. Everyone is picking a pole and migrating there, even the people who used to be in the middle. Everyone wants to hear only that which is soothing to their ears. The few prophets who existed are now dwindling as Christianity more and more embraces false prophecy. We could dig deeper into this idea of hearing only what you wanna hear.
Derek:Fox News would be an easy discussion point, but it would also be low hanging fruit. And those who are tuned in to Fox as their trusted source wouldn't have the tools to evaluate their own propagandization anyway. You can't see it while you're in it. Forget the misinformation and lies. When you have a news source telling you only things you want to hear and being silent about the things that would upend your narrative, of course, you're going to keep coming back to the honeypot.
Derek:Of course, it's not only Fox News. I know that. But Fox is the particular harlot my group of Christians enjoys being with, and this is an episode on the harlot, on the false prophet. Like I said though, I don't really wanna get into Fox that much, but I will leave you with some links in the show notes if you want to delve into that a little bit more. It certainly seems like 2016 brought all of this moral and epistemological relativism to a head for our culture.
Derek:It certainly revealed the true face of much of conservative evangelical Christianity to me. But if we're being realistic here, we understand that the precipice which ends up being our downfall, it wasn't created in one cataclysmic moment just minutes ago. Rather, it took eons of weathering, the ebbing and flowing of waters and time. I'm sure you could trace the false prophet version of Christianity to a number of different locations. I really like Kevin Kruse's work, One Nation Under God, and his discussion of Christianity in the early to mid nineteen hundreds and its formation by corporate America.
Derek:But for this episode, I really want to mark 1969 as a turning point for American Christianity. In that year, Reinhold Niebuhr, a theologian that I don't very closely align with, nevertheless made an observation which I couldn't agree with more. Niebuhr had observed Christianity's relationship with the state growing more and more intimate. In the last decade and a half, he had seen in God we trust mandated on all currency, paper and metal, under God inserted into the pledge of allegiance, and presidential prayer breakfasts. He saw the allure of the king's court as a compromising temptation all too familiar to those who know their Bibles.
Derek:Yet American Christians, particularly the conservative ones, were falling into the trap hook, line, and sinker. They were crawling in bed with the politicians, and Niebuhr knew that this would ruin the Christian prophetic witness. It would produce an impotent religion. It'd create a state of de facto Erastianism, the church subservient to the state. Not long after Niebuhr uttered his own prophetic witness, political polarization began to grow within Christianity as the religious right and Christian political involvement in vehemence grew.
Derek:As we saw in our false prophet episode in our section on racism, Christianity's subservience to the state pushed the false prophet to a political action when its tax exempt status was threatened. That issue devolved into this idea of one party and one issue voting, which ultimately brought us to a climax of compromise in 2016. There was nothing conservative Christians wouldn't do or excuse so long as it was labeled Republican. And there's no good that could be done by anything labeled Democrat. As the false prophet, which Niebuhr prophesied was nurtured and grew from adolescence to adulthood, so did silencing.
Derek:There is now no more discussion. There is no more distinction. There is no more divergence. There is one voice, one party, one answer. That answer is not Jesus Christ and his dictates if following his lifestyle and his commands inhibits our political party's ability to win.
Derek:The American Jesus isn't a servant king. He's a servant to the king. In his name and for his name, we blaspheme his name. That's really all a false prophet is, isn't it? Someone who uses the name of God to declare the good they know he must want rather than the good God himself determines.
Derek:So to sum everything up, the Christian religion is a religion that revolves around prophecy, around a foretelling or an expounding of reality as it truly is. Christianity revolves around the things that we believe God ontologically is, things like love and truth. American Christianity, in particular, has been using certain truths about God as a cudgel for a long time. Burning, ostracizing, punishing heretics, pacifists, abolitionists, gays, or so called witches with the power of the state, or forcing prayer on kids in school. At the same time, American Christianity has been ignoring other inconvenient aspects of God, often marring the love of God.
Derek:But not only have we marred the love of God, we see that American Christianity has also marred the truth of God. Christians are content to be a true prophet when calling out pet injustices like abortion. Get our content to court silence in regard to issues of racism, poverty, violence, warfare, empire, and other forms of injustice. All truth is God's truth, but only some truth, the convenient kind, is that of American Christians. We scratch our ears with the truths we want to hear.
Derek:And the rest is just
