Media burns a hole In Religion- Part Two

    The Media Versus  Religion- Continued


     Just near the McGill University student ghetto in the mid-1960's, there was a Catholic Chrurch that I often walked by  in the early morning. On Sunday mornings I sometimes peeked into it just to look at the crowd there. It was very crowded when I took a look into it in about 1965.
     Yet about ten years later I walked past the church again, took another look in to the Sunday crowd and realized that the congregation had really shrunk in size.
     "God is dead," some  pundits said in the 1960's. Yet this was premature. Religion is still going strong in many places around the world. If someone had asked me why back in the 1960's why religious belief was getting weaker I probably would have replied, "Because of the rise of science." Now I see that that answer was wrong. To-day I would say, "Because of the media."
     In the distant past if you wanted to hear music and you were just one of the ordinary people you went to a mosque or a church or a synagogue. Religious bodies ran schools. So if you wanted to learn to read or write you had to go to school staffed by mullahs, nuns, rabbis or priests.
     Yet about 100 years ago, this started to change. The spread of gramophones, radios, dance halls, movies, mass magazines and spectator sports loosened the hold of religion on people's minds. So too did the spread of government-run schools. The media was undermining religious faith.
      This is the theme of John Updike's four generational tale called "In The Beauty of the Lilies'. Updike was one of America's most talented novelists of the 20th centyry.
      The novel opens in New Jersey in about 1910. Here, as movies are being filmed nearby, the reverend Clarence Wilmot loses his religious faith. The clergyman suffers anguish and loneliness from this loss. Still, he carries on. He has a son Teddy who finds contentment as a mailman. Teddy is obviously Updike's favourite person in thisnovel.
     Teddy's daughter Esther becomes a famous Hollywood movie star and a contemporary of Clark Gable and other movie stars of the 1940's and 1950's. Yet her son Clark leads a troubled life and joins a a Christian cult. He dies near the novel's end in a Waco-style shootout.
    When 1960's people claimed that God was dying they had it wrong. The well-known First Nations theologian Vine Deloria junior probably got it more correct when he said," God is Red."  In fact religious belief is much stronger among people of colour . And also as Updike's novel makes clear the religions that survive and grow are ones that preach an orthodox and maybe a fanatical creed. But for the rest of us Saturday and Sunday mornings as well as Friday nights are just times to stay home, sleep in or watch television and surf the Internet.
      "I don't go to church," one young man told me. "It's for old people." Then this young man pulled out an i-phone and began to scroll down its screen. So the media is still chipping away at religion and will continue to, especially in rich western countries.