Christian Post reveals “true” horrors of Russia-Georgia conflict

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Christian Post reveals “true” horrors of Russia-Georgia conflict

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Chris Ray - August 12th, 2008 in Commentary 0 votes Vote Up! Vote Down!

I have several guilty pleasures pertaining to religion. I collect religious propaganda the same way others collect stamps, I always try to make visits from Mormons and evangelists into memorable conversations (my most recent such encounter was derailed by my Out Campaign t-shirt), and, most pertinent to this story, I obsessively troll religious news media. I read Christian news sites, I subscribe to a half-dozen Muslim and Jewish action alerts and aggregators, and I frequently peruse the websites of large local churches for any interesting goings-on.

For this reason, when I say that the Christian Post has reached a new low for religious media, I say it with something at least plausibly mistakable for expertise. As many of us are aware, Russia has recently been flexing its bruised post-Soviet muscles over a once-insubstantial secessionist spat on its border with the tiny country of Georgia (one reporter describes Georgia as “an apple-shaped blob hanging off the Russian tree”). Thousands have been killed, and so, when you imagine what the religious coverage of such a catastrophe would be, you would imagine calls to charity, condemnations of violence, peals of “mercy!” on behalf of the victims…

Not so the Christian Post:

Yes, that’s right, the magnetic north of the Christian Post’s moral compass is not the human cost of the conflict, or moral outrage, or an uplifting story of courage or relief efforts, it is a lament for well-stacked heaps of wood and probably too-expensive curtains called churches. The story is not even about “historic churches,” or “world-recognized cathedrals,” no, this is about “Three evangelical churches.” The relief efforts are an HTML aside stowed away beneath the Christian Post’s real concern.

Imagine if the conservative press had reported in the aftermath of 9/11 that “1,500 Republicans” were killed in the attacks, instead of “3,000 Americans.” This is not merely concern over the in-group being expressed in some innocuous story about demographics or some interdenominational spat, this is a war whose toll is being measured in evangelical churches. This story takes religious partisanship to epically ridiculous levels.

Sickening. Truly sickening. And these are the people who tell us our values are misplaced.