When newspapers turn to God, they become as confused as churchmen
These days the media do not show much interest in God. On television He was long ago shunted into the backwaters, though it is true He retains a bailiwick on Radio Four. You could read a red-top tabloid for a year and not be aware that anyone had ever thought about God. But the tsunami has reawakened an interest in the divine from the Sunday Telegraph to the Daily Mirror. God has become big news again. Starting with Martin Kettle in the Guardian, columnist after columnist has asked how a loving God can permit such terrible things to happen, and most of them have concluded that it all goes to show that He does not exist. The biologist Richard Dawkins entered the fray in the Guardian in a rather predictable way, and in the same paper dear old Polly Toynbee took an equally predictable swipe at God, the idea of whom she seems to dislike as much as she does the editor of the Daily Mail. On television the Independent’s columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown asked whether God had been on holiday. Janet Daley in the Daily Telegraph and Melanie Phillips in the Daily Mail did speak up for God, but among pundits they were pretty lone voices in a sea of doubt and occasional vituperation.
Some newspapers have turned to Anglican bishops for an explanation, but few, if any, of these worthies has mounted a robust defence of God. Last weekend’s Sunday Telegraph ran the following headline over its front-page splash: ‘Archbishop of Canterbury: This has made me question God’s existence’. These sentiments, widely reported by other newspapers, must have caused consternation in many households. In fact, a careful reading of Dr Rowan Williams’s article in the newspaper did not quite bear out what he was supposed to have said. Two quotes had been spatchcocked together in the front-page account. Lambeth Palace issued a statement saying that the Archbishop did not doubt the existence of God, but the damage was done. On the whole he had only himself to blame, since his piece was ambiguous enough to allow the Sunday Telegraph to spin it as it did. The article certainly did not amount to the steely defence of God that many Christians will have hoped for. This episode confirms that in his dealings with the media Dr Williams acts as a child.
Newspapers have generally been more interested in sales than in theological truth. The journalist Peter McKay says that he saw an Evening Standard van speeding up Fleet Street one Friday afternoon 40 years ago with this advertisement on its side: ‘Is there life after death? See Monday’s Evening Standard’. The paper was perfectly happy to keep its readers waiting over the weekend. God, in the end, is just another story, whether He exists or not. All the same, I have been struck over the past few days by how unsophisticated most of the coverage has been. Having forgotten about God, the media now address the problem of belief and suffering as though it has arisen for the first time. It has troubled believers for thousands of years.
Let me, without any theological qualifications, have a shot. There are several valid reactions to the tsunami. (1) God does not exist and this an example of the powerful forces of nature at work. One day, with scientific advances, we may be able to control them. This is Richard Dawkins’s line. (2) God does exist but He does not — or cannot — intervene in the physical world. This was what Voltaire thought. (3) God does exist, and for some perverse reason enjoys unleashing natural disasters. (4) God does exist, and He is both loving and omnipotent. Since He is loving, it seems unlikely that He should deliberately visit punishments on people. On occasion He does intervene in the physical world, but throughout the greater part of history He has not. It is impossible for us to understand why He should allow such disasters to occur, yet we have the consolation (if we are Christian) of knowing that as God made man He accepted the most extreme suffering of the human condition. Most religious believers do not think that death marks the end, and those who died in the tsunami will live again.
Everyone must make a choice. What strikes me is not only that newspapers are so reluctant to put forth the point of view summarised in (4) but that most churchmen are as well. Christians have always had to struggle with the problem of suffering. Every day thousands of people die in car crashes, and tens of thousands of people, many of them children, die from starvation or cancer or some other illness, often in conditions of awful suffering. More people have died in such ways since the tsunami than in the tsunami itself. One can see why newspapers should have been so carried away, since it is their job to be so. It was a terrible event. But cleric after cleric has been drawn into treating the tsunami as the greatest natural disaster in human history, which as a matter of fact it is very far from being, and to addressing the problem of suffering as though it has only just arisen in so appalling a form. For a Christian there is no single definitive answer to the tsunami, but it is a question that has been asked many times before.
Some weeks ago Sir Max Hastings wrote a letter to this magazine which contained several inaccuracies about me. I did not bother to respond, and I do not suppose that I ever will. Let me instead praise the old rogue who, I must admit, does sometimes hit the nail smack on the head. His piece in Wednesday’s Daily Mail about the fatuity of the three-minute silence was magnificent. Here was a political stunt dreamed up by our political masters in Brussels, an orchestrated piece of public grieving. We observe as a nation for two minutes every year the fallen of two world wars. Can we not remember the victims of the tsunami as we choose?
Speaking of stunts, Wednesday’s Independent was the most egregious example of its purposely eye-catching and tendentious poster-like front pages. Simon Kelner, the paper’s editor, has been justly praised for taking it tabloid. But he has milked, and then milked again, the idea of having lists on the Independent’s front. Even his Christmas card this year follows the same form. Done once or twice or even three times, the device might have seemed novel and fresh. After about a hundred times it just seems stale and tired. On Wednesday the paper had a completely blank front page apart from the words, ‘To remember the Tsunami victims ... Silence’. This is not serious journalism.
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