By Uwe Siemon-Netto
Next Monday, Nov. 21, the Issues etc. program of station KFUO in St. Louis will begin its new series of interviews on lay vocation. Once a week I will discuss God’s many callings to service in the secular realm, which Lutherans call the left-hand kingdom. Returning to Luther’s Berufslehre, or doctrine in vocation, seems a sound remedy against the postmodern “Me” culture, whose disastrous consequences we sense increasingly throughout the Western world. Against its selfishness we posit the biblical view that by exercising our secular professions conscientiously – and out of love for our neighbors -- we render, as Martin Luther said, the highest service to God.
In Luther’s day, there existed relatively few worldly vocations, chiefly crafts. In our complicated world their number has multiplied to thousands, perhaps tens of thousands. In Germany with its well-ordered system of apprenticeships, technical schools and institutions of higher learning some 700 Ausbildungsberufe with a total of approximately 25,000 specialized subgroups exist. These are professions for which you acquire skills either on the job and in vocational schools or at colleges and universities. We can assume comparable figures in the United States.
We live in a media-driven culture. Its roots go back to 15th-century Germany when Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press, and to the 16th-century Reformation, which would not have succeeded had it not been for the Reformers’ tracts printed on Gutenberg presses and disseminated in great numbers throughout Europe.
From this evolved our media society over four centuries. In this society a journalist’s proper sense of calling is of paramount significance. This is why on Monday the new Issues etc. series will begin with an analysis of the vocation of media workers. What, then, is their calling? In the Lutheran sense of the word journalists, like all others, are called to engage the world to the best of their abilities – out of love for their neighbors.
I was delighted to learn from Rabbi Carl Feit that orthodox Jews share our Lutheran view that there is no higher service to God than the service to our fellow man. Feit, a leading figure in the growing dialogue between faith and the sciences, serves concurrently in what Lutherans call the two kingdoms: in the spiritual realm where he teaches the Talmud at Yeshiva College, New York, and in the secular where he chairs the biology department at Yeshiva University.
Neither Jew nor Lutheran would expect a reporter to write the pious poppycock some aspiring journalists with God in their heart feel they have to produce. In the last years I taught journalism students at several evangelical colleges. When I asked them what they considered the calling of a Christian in the secular press, many replied, “To report the news from God’s perspective.” Which made me wonder, who could presume to know God’s perspective on urban planning? What military strategy does God prefer? What is his position on a given Broadway show? Which sports team does he favor?
The reality is that journalists serve their neighbors most conscientiously when they provide them with balanced news accounts and solid, well-informed analyses of current events. Moreover, they also serve their audiences by amusing them with colorful tidbits from the curious world in which we live. In the former case, they provide their clients with information and thought on which to base political, economic and personal decisions, a particularly important aspect of democracy where each voting citizen is an integral part of the collective sovereign. In the latter case, they might simply make their readers and listeners smile, which we know from the Old Testament is also pleasing to God. It is blasphemous to assume that the God of Israel wishes to inflict on us the permanent state of deadly earnestness.
Either way, though, good journalists act as what the apostle Paul calls leitourgoi gar theou, God’s servants, or as Luther would say: God’s cooperators, or simply as members of the priesthood of all believers doing ministry in the very world into which God has placed us.
Viewed from this perspective, recent American newspaper articles and newscasts about the riots in France sent me into fits of despair. They reinforced my conviction that so many of my fellow media workers, regardless of political persuasion, suffer from deficiencies in the vocation department. “Why are the French such racists?” a foreign editor, who happens to be a committed Christian, asked me as we were discussing the riots in the suburbs around Paris, Lyons and other cities.
In a recent front-page article in the New York Times I read the following complaint of an African immigrant: “I was born in Senegal when it was part of France. I speak French. My wife is French and I was educated in France. The problem is the French don’t think I am French.” Fair enough. What irked me, though, was the subsequent ludicrous statement by the New York Times reporter: “That, in a nutshell, is what lies at he heart of the unrest that has swept France in the past two weeks: millions of French citizens, whether immigrants or the offspring of immigrants, feel rejected by traditional French society… Put simply, being French, for many people, remains a baguette-and-beret affair.”
Well, this reporter is was not only an unimaginative cliché-monger but also plain wrong. What we are witnessing in France is not a Gallic version of Jim Crow. The issue is not racism reminiscent of the state of affairs in the American South in the days of Bull Connor back in the 1960s. And Nicolas Sarkozy, the hard-nosed French interior minister, is not some kind of an upper-class French George Wallace with a Magyar name.
In fact, nobody in the French government has worked more diligently to promote the integration of Muslim immigrants and their offspring than this son of a Hungarian immigrant. Don’t blame him if this is not common knowledge in the United States, where the media have long stopped covering foreign and European affairs continuously. They have paid little attention to Sarkozy’s (and his predecessors’) valiant efforts to merge the diverse Islamic groups into a Muslim equivalent of the Catholic Church or the Protestant and Jewish Federations, with whom the authorities can interact fruitfully.
So don’t hold Sarkozy responsible for the failure so far of his attempt to create, together with French Muslim leaders, a seminary that would train imams to preach in French on the Koran instead of spreading hate messages in Arabic, as do thousands of preachers infiltrated from abroad. As the eminent German weekly Die Zeit, surely no hard-right rag, put it, it simply doesn’t do anymore to rattle off like a prayer mill the clichés about poverty and discrimination as causes for the unrest in the immigrants’ ghettos.
“Nowhere has the integration (of Muslim minorities) truly succeeded,” the liberal Die Zeit went on, “regardless of which route (European nations) have opted for, whether they chose a secularist, color-blind assimilation as in France, where not concessions to the cultural distinctions of the immigrants were made, or whether one trod for a long time the path of multiculturalism, as did Holland, Great Britain and Germany, all of which tried to be so ‘sensitive’ that they neglected to insist that the newcomers adapt to the value systems of their new homelands.”
It takes the kind of “liberal” lockstep thinking so common in the U.S. elite media to ignore the red thread linking the violence in the French ghettos, the terrorist acts committed by the sons of well-to-do Muslim families in Britain and the ritual murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh. Is it blindness or intellectual cowardice that keep prompting reporters to overlook the fact that other groups of immigrants from faraway continents, though they definitely do not look like Gauls or Teutons, have had no problems becoming good Europeans. Indians are not blowing up London buses; Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians are not rioting in Aubervilliers outside Paris, neither do African Christians.
As Die Zeit wrote, 40 percent of all Muslims in Britain and France live on state support. Add to that one fascinating statistic from Germany: Though 75 percent of all Turkish teenagers living in Germany were born in that country, a mere 40 percent speak German adequately. This corresponds to the situation in the French suburbs: Half of their young inhabitants of Maghreb and black African descent are school dropouts and, though they are second- and third-generation residents of France, do not speak the language of Baudelaire but instead a gibberish that makes it nearly impossible for them to obtain jobs. So how do they pass their time? According to several sociological studies, they spend most of the day watching videos of a violent or pornographic nature.
So who is at fault -- European racism, as the New York Times insinuates? Or are we confronted here with the much darker phenomenon that these kids were raised in a hate-filled environment where the West is considered inferior, and where Islam as a universal faith is seen as the only viable alternative to such a moribund civilization?
What does all this have to do with the calling of a journalist? Well, unless you pursue the truth, horrible though it might be, you will not serve your neighbors but please yourself by having fellow multiculturalists nod in lockstep with you. Need I stress the hypocrisy of this stance in the light of the suffering Muslim intolerance and anti-Western hatred are inflicting on Muslim women in Europe, just to name one example? I doubt that many U.S. journalists have ever bothered to speak to young girls of Maghreb descent hiding among French Catholics and Protestants from their own fathers’, brothers’ and uncles’ wrath. And I have yet to see in the so-called “liberal” media a story about the 40 or more so-called “honor murders” in Berlin – cases where Muslim men killed female relatives for the “crime” of assimilating into German society.
The harsh fact is, that with their goofy linear approach to what looks like a calamity of historical proportions, U.S. journalist are mindlessly chanting the politically correct mantra that Samuel Huntington was wrong by warning the world of a clash of cultures. Ironically, in doing so they are contributing heavily to the danger that this clash will definitely happen and could well ravage the West.
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