Editing out a Biblical Reference

Last night a friend who is a world renown expert in water resource management told me he was asked to write a piece about the current California drought. He told me the he ended the piece with a comment about Elijah’s drought found in the book of Kings in the Bible. He also noted that the editors took the comment out of the piece.

My friend wasn’t trying to make a larger point that this drought is God’s judgment on California or anything. He’s a very measured man that usually pours water in the alarmism the media likes to sell papers with. He just noted that this drought wasn’t anything like he imagines that drought would have been.

Why did the editor remove the story? I don’t really know of course, but neither he nor I was surprised it was removed. The media market expects and enforces a degree of secularity.

The Secular Filter

Some stories do make it through the secular filter. There was an interesting story of demon possession in Indiana and a very interesting story about ghosts after the tsunami in Japan. These are risky stories of periodicals to publish and I get that. People aren’t suppose to talk about politics or religion in polite company but that doesn’t keep the media from talking about politics. Stories like these are data points. They are people’s accounts of things are worthy of reporting. A story doesn’t demand that you believe it, it simply asks that it be heard and considered. You are just as capable of deciding you don’t believe in ghosts are you are of deciding not to believe in large government or small government but why then the filter?

Avoiding Needless Offense and Religious Posture

Media in America is a market industry. Recently a story about camel usage in the ancient near east drew a lot of attention because of the suspicion that here at last the Bible is proven to be wrong. One headline which I saw repeated said something to the effect that the Bible isn’t as old as people think and full of errors. That would be like a birth announcement stating “woman has vagina and knows how to use it.” It’s click-bate. If it bleeds it leads. Gloss over the longer more technical conversation about evidence of camel usage. (You can have fun with the camel story too.)

A market sensitive news and entertainment media are of course sensitive to what turns people off so news and entertainment pieces that wish to attract as broad a group as possible will clip religious and political comment so as not to turn people off. What this means of course is that certain kinds of data will also be clipped.

Secular Pressure and Folk Religion

Evangelicals are a bit suspicious and reactive about bias against them. I tend to think their suspicions and reactivity is more a product of having lost a position of felt privilege from the cold war era. Editing out comments from experts who are also religious, however, might also reinforce the implicit filter that “experts” cannot be religious because religious people are uneducated and not responsible to manage things like public policy.

The filter ironically might also have the effect of strengthening folk religion. Ghost stories tend to occupy the TV cable channels majoring in crypto-zoology, floor cleaner and ways to solve male pattern baldness.

I’m not saying there is a pernicious motive behind all this. I think it is rather the slow drip of influence that reflects our biases and our market driven filters that in imperceptible ways influences and reinforces our biases and actually skews the data we are overly dependent upon the media to furnish to us.