Church in a spin

Religious journalists

Journalists are funny people. Stephen Bates of the Guardian keeps writing to me. Generally along the lines of ‘I’m no longer the Guardian’s Religious correspondent -please don’t send me any more of your religious press releases’ and then ‘As requested earlier, please remove me from your distribution list - send it to Riazat Butt instead’, followed by ‘Look I asked you before, I won't ask you again. I don't want any more religious stuff - I've had it up to here with religion’. Well, along those lines.

So yesterday I duly got round to amending my distribution list and sent Stephen an apologetic note. Imagine my surprise then, not ten minutes later, when I turned to page 3 of the said organ to read 'Former PM to be accepted into the Roman Catholic Church' by Stephen Bates. Call me old fashioned .....

To be honest I don’t know why I ever bothered in the first place. As far as I could make out the Guardian only ever had about four stories which it repeated every week. Obviously Tony Blair becoming a Catholic which has now been happening for at least eight years, yawn. Then there’s Gay clergy, women bishops and most important the Imminent Break up of The Worldwide Anglican Communion – a body which most of our parishioners don’t even know existed in the first place. The Guardian generally takes the stance that God doesn’t exist and the church is an irrelevant minority occupation by a few harmless old folk and the Anglican church a minority of a minority. Despite this Stephen somehow managed to convince his editors that this Imminent Break Up of the Worldwide Anglican Communion story was so important that they should let him end his religious tenure on a high note, paying for him to go to New Orleans and watch the US bishops eat the Archbishop of Canterbury for breakfast, carry out a few gay blessings and then split from the rest of the ‘stick in the mud’ Anglican communion for good. As it happens, none of the above took place. It must have been a terrible disappointment.

Oddly, if you asked him as we once did, why his stories where always so negative, his defence was that actually his wife was an evangelical Christian and he only had the good of the church in mind. Ho hmmm. You could imagine the conversations at home,‘Darling I’m back from my bible study at Doreen’s house’. SB,‘Any arguments? – any dissenting views?’ Mrs B ‘ No Doreen led a very good Bible study – and we all seemed to agree.’ SB ‘A woman leading a Bible study?! Do my ears deceive me?!! There must have been a few rumbles of discontent about that. Did anyone walk out? I need to phone the Vicar’ and so on…

But that’s journalists for you, and who can blame them. I took part in a visit to the new, and breathtaking, Daily Telegraph offices in Victoria last week with a group of church communicators and it was a superb day. Well organised and a chance to hear from some religious journalists including Jonathan Petre of the Daily and Jonathan Wynne-Jones of the Sunday Telegraph. I almost felt sorry for them. The way they have to convince their editors that they have a story so important and sensational that its got to be included, that if you include it newspapers will be flying out of the shops… and then spend hours working on it while watching it drop down the batting order until its finally kicked into touch. It’s no wonder that at every stage of this process the original story gets a little bit sexed up, a bit more sensationalised until black is white, day is night, the Worldwide Anglican Communion has become a huge and important and real er thing which is about to explode causing global warming and the end of the civilised world as we know it. Keep at it guys – it might still happen.

Labels: Anglican Communion, Archbishop, guardian, journalism, splits, tony blair

posted by John Carter @ 8:32 am