Reading the News with Jesus
If you've been reading this blog for the last couple of months, you'll know that we've been in an extended series about 500-year upheavals and their role in reforming the Western Church. It has been and continues to be a long journey through a lot of historical background and cultural analysis, the goal of which is to help us better understand and live as Christians in this current moment. My original goal with this blog was to do all that background work first and then begin to apply the knowledge we gained to the times were living. However, I've lately come to realize that the background work is taking longer than I originally anticipated, and, in the meantime, we are missing opportunities to discuss our world and how we can live in it in ways that are authentically and distinctly Christian. So, without abandoning the original project, I will be launching a second series on this blog. It's called: Reading the News with Jesus.
The title is fairly self-explanatory, but for the sake of clarity, here's the big idea. Every time we sit down and read, watch, or listen to the news, we are inundated with voices. How many and what kind of voices depends very much on your chosen news outlets. In the best cases, the voices you'll hear will be knowledgeable, measured, and as free from bias as possible. However, such news outlets are increasingly few and far between. In today's world, more and more people are consuming news from sources that are decidedly less scrupulous. In other words, the voices we are most often hearing are ignorant, malicious, and dripping with preconception and ulterior motive. In fact, for the first time in the history of this country (and I would imagine it is happening across the world), a majority of Americans are turning to social media as their primary news source. This is the worse-case scenario. Not only do the voices on social media tend to be uninformed, antagonistic, and biased, they are also frequently untrue (to say nothing of the fact that, in this age of A.I., sometimes they are not even human). And perhaps most worrisome of all, the algorithms that govern social media have only one objective, to feed us content that appeals to us. That is to say, the news we are consuming on social media is carefully curated to satisfy our appetites. Where news used to exist to shape our worldviews by informing and challenging us, our worldviews now shape the news, as the algorithm feeds us only what we want to see in the ways we want to see it. And this, in turn, shapes us, not into thoughtful, informed, nuanced, engaged human beings (which, I believe is the aim of good news) but into cynical, combative, prejudiced, self-absorbed people.
This is why I strongly believe that the way in which Christian consume news is a discipleship issue. In other words, I believe Jesus has something to say about the voices we're listening to, and going a step farther, I believe he can teach us to read the news in such a way that we become more like him in the process. He can use the news to transform our minds so that we see and engage with the world as he would if he were us. But this will only happen if we are careful to prioritize his voice above all other voices. That's the big idea for this blog series. We want to read the news with Jesus. Every time we open our chosen news source (and I'll be speaking about how we choose a news source in a bit), we need to learn how to invite Jesus to join us. Like an elderly couple reading the newspaper together over breakfast, calling each other's attention to noteworthy stories, sharing thoughts and opinions with one another, lamenting together the state of the world, this is how we want to be with Jesus. We want to learn to make our reading of the news an opportunity to be with him, to hear from him, to learn from him, and to become more like him.
That's the big idea behind this blog series: let's practice together reading the news with Jesus. Each week, I will select a different story from that week's headlines and practice reading it with Jesus. Then, I will share that experience with you all. My hope is that, together, we can practice and grow in this habit until it becomes second nature, until it is the normal way we read the news. And beyond that, I hope that this practice will help to equip us as individual Jesus-followers and as a community to think and act like Jesus as we live in and engage with this world that he loves so much.
Now, before we jump into the stories, it's important to share a few thoughts on methodology, that is, on how we read the news with Jesus, because I have a feeling that first thing Jesus will do when we invite him to read with us will be to change what and how we're reading.
I think he might start with how much news we're consuming, that is to say, I think he might ask us to consume less. Between 24-hour news stations, "breaking news" notifications on our smartphones, podcasts, and the social media revolution, we are relentlessly inundated with news. And while there are certainly benefits to having greater access to global news than ever before, we are learning that there is such a thing as too much access. It is no coincidence that many of the dysfunctions we are seeing in society have grown alongside this "Information Age." We are discovering that information in itself does not make better people (for, information and wisdom are not the same thing). Instead, it seems that greater access to information has led to increases in anxiety, apathy, and antagonism. In other words, the vast reservoirs of news to which we now have 24-hour access have not made us wiser, sturdier, more informed, more connected, more compassionate people but have had the opposite effect. The world is now more foolish, fearful, ignorant, disconnected, and violent than ever before. Part of the solution, I believe, is less news.
There was a day not so long ago, where the average person consumed their news like a meal, in small doses, at set times of day, newspapers at the breakfast table, 30-minute nightly news right after dinner. This was healthy and normal. We consumed what we needed for sustenance. Now, in the 24-hour news age, we binge constantly not what we need but what we want, we are no longer looking to sustain or better ourselves with information but to entertain ourselves with it. We have become news gluttons. And I believe Jesus wants to free us from it.
So, as we dedicate ourselves to the practice of reading the news with Jesus, let's start by committing ourselves to intentionally limiting our news consumption to no more than 60-90 minutes per day and to only certain times of day. (I recommend morning, not first thing in the morning, and evening, but I leave that to you and Jesus to work out together). There will, of course, be exceptions, extraordinary moments during which we will want to be, even need to be, glued to the news, but these should be the exception and not the rule.
As a general rule of thumb, if we spend more time with the news than we do with Jesus, our priorities need to be examined and reordered. The sad truth, in this Information Age, is that the overwhelming majority of people spend far more time reading the news, listening to pundits, and doomscrolling on social media than they do reading their Bibles, praying, and worshipping in Christian community. Again, this is a discipleship issue. Our minds and souls are being shaped by these forces more than they are being shaped by Jesus. We are being conformed to the pattern of this world and are in desperate need of the transform, mind-renewing power of the Holy Spirit. But he will not force himself on us. Remember, in Romans 12, Paul commands us to, "Be transformed." This is a fascinating grammatical construction, a passive imperative. The imperative means that there is something we must do, while the passive means that something must be done to us. So, which is it? Both. We cannot transform ourselves. Only the Holy Spirit can do this. However, he will not do it without our invitation and cooperation. We must want to "be" transformed. As Augustine put it, "Without God, we cannot; without us, God will not." If we do not prioritize his presence and his voice above all other, then we will not be transformed into his image but will be conformed to the shape of whatever occupies our attention. As William Blake reminds us, "We become what we behold."
With this in mind, our priority in reading the news with Jesus ought not be the first part, "reading the news," but the second part, "with Jesus."
If our aim here is to read the news with Jesus, we must first be with Jesus. The secret power of the elderly couple reading the newspaper together is that it is an extension of a deep, decades-long intimacy. The years they have spent building and nurturing their relationship bears fruit in these breakfast table moments, as they effortlessly interact over the newspaper. In fact, this time, for them, is only secondarily about the news; it is, to a much greater extent, about their relationship. It is just another expression of their friendship, another venue for intimacy.
The same should be true of us as we seek to read the news with Jesus. This reading of the news should be an extension of a life fully shared him, another part of ourselves that we are opening up to him, and another opportunity for us to spend time with him. If we don't already have a relationship with Jesus, if we have not developed rhythms and habits of sitting in his presence and hearing his voice, we might have a hard time doing so when it comes to reading the news. Reading the Bible, prayer, silence and solitude, Christian community: all these are essential parts of our discipleship to Jesus, and if we are not practicing these in relationship with him, we may very well miss him in our efforts to read the news with him.
In addition to dealing with how much time we spend consuming news, I'm quite certain Jesus would also want to talk to us about our chosen news outlets and the kinds of news we're consuming. Unfortunately, much of the news that we consume (especially on social media) is the spiritual and intellectual equivalent of junk food. It is designed not for nourishment but for entertainment, and though it initially seems to satisfy our hunger, it will just leave us feeling sick and will, if consumed in great quantity over a long time, cause us serious harm. We need to be very careful and discerning about the news we consume. Here are a few recommendations about how to do that:
First, limit your news to one or two trusted sources. Just as you don't have more than a few friends who you trust to counsel you on the most important issues in your life, so too you don't want to invite more than a few trusted news sources to inform and shape your worldview.
Second, select sources that are as unbiased and reasonable as possible. In choosing our news outlets, we want to avoid both divisive partisanship and combative rhetoric. Now, I know what you might be thinking: there is no such thing as a completely unbiased news source. And that is true. However, there are news sources that are better than others, sources that seek to inform rather than entertain, sources that work to better humanity rather than playing to our baser instincts, sources that endeavor to serve their communities and the world rather than seeking to serve themselves and their insatiable appetite for ratings. I believe it is our responsibility as Jesus-followers to identify and stick to these better sources and avoid, like the plague, those that aim for edgy and salacious. There are tools that can assist us in this aim, such as this media bias chart (hint: stick to the top middle). For the purposes of this blog series, I will be using the AP as my primary news source because I have generally found it to be unbiased and reasonable. From time to time, I may also reference the BBC as I sometimes appreciate a more global approach to the news.
Third, be wary of any news sources that curate their content to your preferences. These include social media and Apple News. If we rely on these as our news sources, we will soon find ourselves viewing only the content that appeals to us, and the result will be an echo chamber of sorts, in which we are only hearing what we want to hear how we want to hear it. This is not beneficial either to our humanity or to our discipleship to Jesus. As humans, our objective in reading the news should be to be broadly informed about the world in which we are living, not narrowly informed about only the things that interest us. And, as disciples of Jesus, our truest desire should be to follow where he leads, and the places he's leading are quite often places we would not go on our own. By choosing news sources that are not curated to our preference, we expose ourselves to a much broader spectrum of news and give Jesus more opportunity to teach us about the world he loves. This is to say nothing of the fact that the news sources served to us on these curated platforms tend to fall well short of the standards of newsworthiness to which we should hold ourselves.
Finally, this is something of a reiteration, but as we read the news with Jesus, the voice that matters most must be his. In other words, we should begin to view this time not as reading the news but as prayer. Again, the news part is secondary. For this reason, we need to develop habits of prayer that envelope our reading.
Every time we sit to read the news, we should first invite Jesus into it. Ask him to be with us, to speak to us, to guide us.
Then, as we read, we want to be especially attentive to his voice speaking not only about the world but about us. We will likely find that he wants us to spend as much time on our own formation as he does on intercession. He will undoubtedly lead us to pray for the world but will also invite us to be aware of our own hearts and invite us to partner with the Holy Spirit as he intercedes for us. As we read the news, we will find all sorts of emotions stirring in us--anger, sadness, hope, jealousy, bitterness, schadenfreude--some of which are righteous and good, many of which are not. When, we notice these emotions, it's vital that we pause our reading and ask Jesus what he's feeling and what he wants us to feel, to align our hearts with his.
Finally, as we close our time of reading the news with Jesus, we want to end with a prayer of thanksgiving. Much of which we encounter in the news will be heavy and tragic, so at first glance, ending with thanksgiving might seem glib or inauthentic. But for us, thanksgiving is not about positive vibes or saccharine optimism. Instead, we give thanks because we believe that, even though the world is filled with evil, God is good and is working for good. His goodness, according to Genesis 1, is the center of the universe, the foundational truth of our existence. So, when we end our time with gratitude, we are refusing to be defined by evil, tragedy, and anxiety but are reorienting ourselves to that which is truest and best. God is good. His love endures forever.
Anyway, these are just a few preliminary thoughts on methodology as we begin this journey of reading the news with Jesus. I'm sure we'll discover more along the way. We'll dive into our first news story together next week. Stay tuned!
