Certainly other foreign stories are filed in America s major newspapers despite reporting difficulties. The New York Times managed to get its reporters out to survey battles on the Sudan-Uganda border in the past year. I t may be at last a simple lack of understanding and interest, rather than logistical difficulties, that keeps foreign correspondents off the story of persecuted Christians. Though the topic sparks obvious interest in huge segments of the American public, the national press corps has a reputation within Christian circles for being irreligious or even anti religious. And it is at least true as a number of studies have documented that journalists are less likely to be practicing believers of any religion than the general public.
Anecdotal evidence points in the same direction.
In many conversations over the years, I have often been struck by how confused and ill-informed many journalists are on religious issues. A foreign editor at one major magazine, while acknowledging that the campaign to publicize the plight of persecuted Christians has importance as part of the political debate in Washington, indicated that he considered the campaign itself as mainly a strategy for repressing the culture of Third World an attempt to force Muslim countries to allow proselytizing by American Christian missionaries. Though Middle East Bureau Chief for his magazine and aware of Egypt s six million Copts, he was barely conscious of the persecutions they suffered, just as he did not seem to know of Pakistan s large indigenous Christian community and the violence it endures under that country s draconian blasphemy laws. Like other journalists I have spoken to, he labored under the prejudice that Christianity is a white man s religion and a tool of Western imperialism. It is quite difficult for many journalists to accept that Christians are the victims rather than the victimizers.