Absolute Truth as Pure Craziness
His guest column followed on the heels of a Times editorial restating the newspaper's unwavering support for abortion rights, which, in turn, underscored a page-one news story about the Kopp arrest.
This three-punch combination several weeks ago indicated that the principalities and powers at the Times wanted newsmakers and opinion shapers to know that this was more than just a news story about abortion.
No, this was a parable about the very meaning of life and truth. An earlier profile of the anti-abortion extremist in the newspaper's Sunday magazine had made that absolutely clear.
“The question of Kopp's innocence or guilt is finally less absorbing than the consequences of his search for a higher good, sure and unchanging, to sustain him in a fallen world,” wrote David Samuels, as he neared the conclusion of his essay.
“It is a shared if unspoken premise of the world that most of us inhabit that absolutes do not exist and that people who claim to have found them are crazy. …Perhaps sacrifice in the name of a higher good — God, Marx, freedom or whatever the good of the moment happens to be — is admirable only as long as you support the cause. Or perhaps, in the absence of absolutes, we must judge beliefs not by their inherent righteousness but by their visible consequences.”
Take that, Pope John Paul II. And you too, Billy Graham. And if anyone inside the Beltway is actually listening to any of the crazy people who believe in absolute truth, then this message is for you, too.
It's Own Set of Absolute Truths
This remarkable credo in the Sunday New York Times was more than a statement of one journalist's convictions, said William Proctor, a Harvard Law School graduate and former legal-affairs reporter for the New York Daily News. Surely, the “world that most of us inhabit” cited by Samuels is, in fact, the culture of the New York Times and the faithful who draw inspiration from its sacred pages.
“It is rare to see a journalist openly state what so many people at the Times seem to think,” said Proctor, whose book The Gospel According to the New York Times analyzes themes in more than 6,000 articles from the past 25 years.
“But it's true. They really are convinced that the millions of people out in Middle America who believe that some things are absolutely true and some things are absolutely false are crazy and probably dangerous, to boot.”
Proctor, meanwhile, is absolutely convinced that this affects the newspaper's work on moral and theological issues, ranging from abortion to the environment, from moral education to free speech, from the human rights of unpopular religious minorities to efforts to redefine controversial terms such as “marriage” and “family.”
But critics are wrong if they claim that the New York Times is a bastion of secularism, he stressed. In its own way, the newspaper is on a crusade to reform society and even to convert wayward “fundamentalists.”
Thus, when listing the “deadly sins” that are opposed by the Times, he deliberately did not claim that it rejects religious faith. Instead, he said the world's most influential newspaper condemns “the sin of religious certainty.”
“Yet here's the irony of it all. The agenda the Times advocates is based on a set of absolute truths,” said Proctor.
Instead of being true relativists, the newspaper's leaders are “absolutely sure that the religious groups they consider intolerant and judgmental are absolutely wrong, especially traditional Roman Catholics, evangelicals and most Orthodox Jews. And they are just as convinced that the religious groups that they consider tolerant and progressive are absolutely right.”
Naturally, believers in the flocks that are ignored or attacked tend to get mad and many try to ignore the Times and, often, the news media in general.
This is understandable, said Proctor, but precisely the opposite of what they should do. In his book, he urges critics of the New York Times to pay even closer attention to what it reports, while contrasting its coverage with that of a variety of other wire services and publications — across the political and cultural spectrum.
Popular Culture's High Church
Trying to avoid the New York Times is like fighting gravity, said Proctor.
The Times is the high church, the magisterium, for the artists, journalists, and thinkers who shape popular culture. The result is what Proctor calls “culture creep,” in which people soak up the worldview of the Times even if they do not read it.
The ultimate irony is that many cultural conservatives who try to ignore the Times show no such reticence when it comes to consuming the products of Hollywood and the entertainment complex. Thus, they remain plugged in to one of the only powerful forces in the culture that is to the left of the Times and the news media.
It is better to read the news for yourself rather than remain a passive consumer, he said.
“If people tune all that out, how are they going to know how to defend their own beliefs? People need information and they need discernment,” said Proctor. “The first part of that statement is just as important as the second part. …What are you going to do, try to pretend that news and information don't matter?”
(Terry Mattingly is a senior fellow for journalism at the Council For Christian Colleges and Universities and a member of Holy Cross Orthodox Church in Linthicum, MD. An earlier version of this article was distributed as the author's weekly “On Religion” column for the Scripps Howard News Service.)
