MINITER: Media mock religious, not secular end-of-world predictions

It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine. — R.E.M.

The strangest thing about Rev. Harold Camping’s prediction that the world was going to end this past Saturday was the media’s gleeful and enthusiastic coverage.

The press reaction reveals a shocking intolerance and spotlights a dangerous blind spot in our national security.

Why was the Rev. Camping’s prediction newsworthy at all? He has been wrong before. In a 1992 book he had predicted that Jesus Christ would return on Sept. 6, 1994. Nor was he the leader of a large Christian domination. He wasn’t, say, the pope or the head of the Southern Baptist Convention. He hosts a program on the Family Radio station group that he owns and presides over a church with a few thousand congregants. He speaks for no one save his tiny flock.

Nor are predictions of the world’s end particularly unique among the world’s three major monotheistic religions. The early Christians believed that Jesus would return in their lifetimes and, 20 centuries later, ministers still warn that it is best to reform your life as soon as possible because judgment day or your own death could catch you unprepared. Rarely are Christians specific. But, then again, neither are Jews and Muslims, who have similar end-times beliefs. Where’s the news here?

The media’s main interest was simply to mock Christian beliefs – jeering at several hundred million believers for the faulty predictions of a lone preacher. Juvenile, isn’t it?

This level of vitriol against Christians would have been unimaginable before the 1960s, and now it is common. It reveals the cultural power wielded by the tenured radicals in our universities who, like President Barack Obama, think of religion as a crutch for the weak-minded.

The bigness of this prejudice is illuminated by the faulty end-of-the-world predictions that they do not mock.

New papers released from the Nixon Presidential Library show that Daniel Patrick Moynihan warned the president that carbon dioxide and global warming would raise sea levels “by 10 feet” by 2000, meaning, he said, “Goodbye, New York. Goodbye, Washington, for that matter.” It didn’t happen, and no one laughed.

In 1967 Paul Erlich predicted that what he called the “population bomb” would mean mass starvation in America by 1975 and wars driven by shortages of food and water by the 1980s. That didn’t happen, and no one laughed.

Rachel Carson, in her book “Silent Spring,” predicted that pesticides would eliminate all song birds from America’s skies by 1970. That didn’t happen, and no one laughed.

Radical environmentalists predicted that the world would run out of oil, and our modern society would grind to a halt. That didn’t happen, and no one laughed.

Al Gore, in an “Inconvenient Truth,” predicted that global warming’s tidal waves would wash away tiny Pacific islands like Tuvalu. That didn’t happen, and few laughed.

When what amounts to a religion that worships Mother Earth makes dire predictions that the world will end unless it’s costly catechism is immediately adopted, and the world doesn’t end, no one laughs. Why are some end-of-the-world predictions treated differently than others?

A longstanding bias against Christianity, and religious belief in general, infected the educated classes since the French revolution. In the early 1800s, a German scholar Friedrich Schleiermacher sought to defend religion from its “learned despisers” but found few who wanted to engage in debate. They preferred to mock and belittle. Bill Mahrer is not an original; he’s a cliché about 150 years old.

This prejudice, and it is a prejudice, led many scholars to believe that religion would simply wither away in the face of science, schooling, technology and television. As a result, professors — and their students who became diplomats, generals, intelligence analysts, journalists and senators — tended to ignore or dismiss the role of religion in human affairs.

Because of this blind spot, the educated elite is constantly surprised when religion crowds thousands into Cairo’s Tahrir Square or makes men hijack planes.

They also miss Christianity’s powerful hand in world affairs. Thirty-six of the 48 nation-states (from Portugal and Poland) that have become democracies since 1970 were transformed by the “Catholic wave.” Churches provided a vital intellectual vocabulary for fighting totalitarianism (individual accountability, natural law, human rights) as well as a physical place where dissidents could meet far from the glare of the secret police. Most important, a belief in God gave men the courage to risk their lives for the greater good.

The media’s mockery of Rev. Camping shows that it wants to dismiss what it refuses to understand. The media should grow up. What our dangerous world needs now, more than ever, is a more subtle understanding of religion and human nature.

Gazette columnist Richard Miniter is the author of “Mastermind: The Many Faces of the 9-11 Architect, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.”