Telling a Truer Story

[This is the full text of a speech that Dr. Taylor gave to a Media-Project-sponsored gathering in Prague in 2008.]

I have been asked – and I quote – to “focus on the new religious reality with Islam and how Islam is challenging Europe in our coverage of religion”.

My credentials for doing so are presumably that I was a secular journalist covering race, who became a Christian, and did a PhD in Islamics at SOAS. When I became a Christian, my eyes were opened to the fact that religion, not race, was the real story.

I discovered how badly religion was being covered throughout the media – and how central it was to the way the world turns and is turning. With Interserve, an international Christian charity, I travelled and reported throughout the Muslim world – Brunei, Pakistan several times, Egypt, Tunisia – and saw who were the nation builders, and who were the nation destroyers. By that I mean, who was building hospitals for the poor – and who was knocking down the churches of those who built those hospitals, or preventing them from being built in the first place? Who was fighting for women’s rights in remote places? And who was preventing them? Who was punishing women for being raped? Who was fighting for freedom of conscience, and who was killing people for it? Michael Doran, head of counter-terrorism in the Pentagon, says, “al-Qa’eda builds nothing; it only destroys” [1].

But it’s not just al-Qaeda, and we cannot pretend it’s just the loony fringe of one religion that is responsible for so much of the evil we report. The West’s dismissive arrogance about religious belief has had repercussions all over the world. I’ve reported particularly in Africa where a war against children by the Lord’s Resistance Army was not taken seriously by international agencies who did not have the discourse to deal with it. Muslim thinkers often justify their rage against the West by reference to the apparent godlessness of the West. There is not the time to explore this view, but it is one with which I sympathise.

I have called this talk “Telling a Truer Story” because I believe there really is a truer story to be told about the deep-down reasons of the human heart that have been reduced by secular materialism to irrelevancy. As Christian journalists we have a unique responsibility to find ways of revealing the truth about how beliefs impact the big stories.

Let’s start with religious persecution. It was a huge story before the iron curtain came down. And yet there was only one reporter I’m aware of in Britain attempting to describe the near-obliteration of the Orthodox church in Russia during the Cold War, and that was the famous Malcolm Muggeridge (1903-1990). More than 200,000 priests were slaughtered by Stalin after the Russian Revolution according to former London KGB bureau chief, Oleg Gordievsky.[2] The persecution of Christians almost everywhere is still an untold story.

There was and is amazing ignorance about this in the West. For instance, Bernard Levin, our then greatest commentator, wrote in one of his famous columns for the Times during the early 1990s that the only people who had been persecuted for their faith since Roman times were the Jews. This despite the fact more Christians were martyred in the 20th century than all the preceding nineteen centuries put together.