Why do I continue to be surprised by the infantile speculations of the mass media?

By Reverend Peter Mullen, c/o the Daily Mail 26 Sept 2011

Why do I continue to be surprised by the infantile speculations of the mass media? Is a journalist someone uniquely appointed to his job entirely on account of his profound ignorance of contemporary affairs? For example, there has been a great deal of press conjecture about the reasons behind the rapid growth of Christianity in China – one item in particular in that frivolous girls’ magazine called The Times. Could it be, as the airhead bimbo who wrote the piece opined, a result of the progress of capitalism in China? Or might it have something to do with the Hegelian dialectic? You could be tempted by her baroque phraseology to take her half-seriously: until you realise with a shudder that this is the same Madchen who writes The Times’ regular columns on knicker elastic and of who’s going up and down in the celebrity ratings.

Perhaps – I don’t know, but perhaps – the rapid rise of Christianity in China has something to do with its appeal to hearts and minds: to the intuition that this thing called the Christian faith has the ring of truth about it? It doesn’t sound, on the face of it, to be an implausible thought with which to start.

The mass media perpetrates a universal disinformation about the status of Christianity in the modern world. For fifty years, they have been telling us it’s dying out: that we are in the grip of a relentless and irreversible process of secularisation. It simply turns out that this is the opposite of the truth. Take China, for instance. How committed to the solemn abuse of the Law of Non-Contradiction are these same journalists who tell us that Christianity is dying out, but that it’s colossally booming in China, the most populous country in the world?

Christianity is booming not just in China, but worldwide – with a singular exception, that I will come to in due course. Christianity is doing especially well in Africa where, thanks be to God, it seems to have escaped the influence of the Archbishop of Canterbury. The faith is doing well particularly in places where it is under the most cruel persecution – as Our Lord promised it would: Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Coptic Christians in Egypt and indeed across the whole of North Africa.

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