Christian Broadcasting And The Fairness Doctrine

Over twenty years ago, the Federal Communications Commission deep-sixed a policy on its books which required message-oriented broadcasters to make air time available to people with opposing viewpoints. As much of an irritant as it was, it never amounted to a lot as policy. For one thing, it did not carry the full force of law. For another, it provided less than the equal time that its own "fairness" principle seemed to demand. And finally, with the expansion of broadcasting outlets, more opportunities for communicating diverse opinions weakened interest in enforcing the thing at all. I guess this is why I will never get my chance to try and demonstrate to all and sundry, on his own program, why Rush Limbaugh should never have called himself a Doctor of Democracy.

Lately, a number of Christian broadcasters around the country have been voicing concern over the possibility that the FCC's long departed Fairness Doctrine may soon be resuscitated, to the detriment of their efforts to evangelize people in Jesus' name with a take no prisoners approach to anyone and everyone whose relationship or non-relationship with the Deity is mediated by someone or something else. (Fairness requires me to acknowledge that I may not be playing entirely fair at the moment with this wing of Christendom.) Imagine, they cry: here we are, marshalling all the resources at our command to put across with every convincing argument we can that there is only one way to heaven, ours, and some disgruntled bunch of non-believers (that is, everybody who disagrees with us) is going to put in for equal time to stick it to God's only Son all over again.

It is true that Christian broadcasters as a group have considerable power to influence social policies in this country. For instance, immigration reform may have stalled out in Congress because they inspired enough voters to rise up against the only reasonable approach to it, a comprehensive one. And so, it is also true that people who vehemently disagree with their typically archly-conservative take on the gospel message, or for that matter with purveying the gospel message in any form, might be open to consider making it more difficult for them to practice their profession under the guise of exercising their calling. At first glance, reinstating the Fairness Doctrine might be one way to go about it.

It may have been that first glance that lay behind House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's recent saber-rattling support of reviving the so-called Fairness Doctrine. But surely it was only that. Ms. Pelosi is too able a legislator not to glance longer and much more intently at the First Amendment. Personally, I think that most Christian Broadcasting represents a not so thrilling return to the days of yesteryear, when Catholics and Protestants were always at each others' throats, Protestants were always at each others' exegeses, all of them were always at their constituents' wallets, and genuine inquirers were at the point of giving up on religion altogether. Nevertheless, I think Christian broadcasters have as much right to pollute our radios, televisions, fancy cell phones, and computers as house-flippers, hip-hoppers, game show hosts, and self-indulgent political commentators do, and as much right as I have to recommend to all and sundry that we would all be better off just saying "No" to the whole gaggle of programs. Respect for religious freedom runs deep in this society, and if push should in fact come to shove over bringing the Fairness Doctrine back in broadcasting, the most likely scenario is that our passion to protect this freedom will trump it.

In a word, and the word is "incredible," the paranoia among at least some Christian broadcasters over the return of the Fairness Doctrine is full of it. But so is the view that in order to be counted as a true believer, one must think only in black and white, either-or, our-way-is-the-only-way terms and that those for whom truth is often to be found in the gray areas in between the extremes must be deemed instruments of Satan. Well, ok: go to it, guys. And I promise to stand with you in opposition to any policy aimed at giving me "equal time" to rebut you. But while I take my own sweet time trying to correct your seriously misguided theology, forgive me if I choose not to provide you any space at all in this blog for you to respond. E-mail me directly instead, and our disputes can be just between us. Perhaps we might begin with your telling me just why you think your understanding of faith escapes contamination from the sinfulness that you ascribe to all the rest of us.

The Serenity Prayer

Who would have thought that people could get out of sorts over the authorship of a prayer? Particularly a prayer as magnificent as this one: "God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other." But out of sorts some are, ironically over who should get the credit for an eloquent composition about serenity.

In all likelihood this is currently the best known prayer in the English language, with the obvious exception of the Lord's Prayer. Reinhold Niebuhr, a much appreciated Protestant moral theologian of the last century, was long thought to have composed it, sometime during the Second World War. Lately, his authorship has been cast into doubt by discoveries from new databases suggesting that the prayer was already in circulation --- with slightly different phrasings and from very different sources --- as early as 1936.

Although Niebuhr frequently referred to himself as the prayer's author, he also was open to the possibility that he simply assimilated its basic ideas from earlier, forgotten sources. However, Niebuhr's daughter, Elisabeth Sifton, is more protective of her father's authorship; in fact, she wrote a whole book about the prayer as embracing the vital center of his thought. (The Serenity Prayer: Faith and Politics in Times of Peace and War). In subsequent interviews, she has tended to get a little testy with her questioners.

I hope that this "controversy" resists going anywhere. The prayer stands on its own, whoever its author may have been, and with all due respect to Ms. Sifton, Niebuhr's reputation has hardly anything to do with his uses of it. The goings-on, however, have gotten me thinking again about some of the many things that I have learned from reading and listening to Reinhold Niebuhr, this time with the Serenity Prayer in mind. One thing that Ms. Sifton is surely right about is that the context for this prayer and for her father's writings was something very different from "the prevailing self-congratulatory cheeriness" of twentieth-century American Protestantism.

The sad truth is that this attitude is still the norm in most American organizations today, from the proliferation of restaurant franchises all the way to the construction of taller and taller skyscrapers and church steeples. More is better, and there is no reason why people everywhere should not be enjoying still more. The Kingdom of God in America, to borrow a reference from Reinhold Niebuhr's brother, Richard, is still a kingdom primarily for the up-beat, for whom only growth should count, only profit should matter, and only optimists should flourish. It is a kingdom whose truly faithful members, in the phrasing of one University president for whom I once worked, never retreat (he hated the idea of pre-school year "Retreats") but only advance. They never flinch from grabbing greater market share, other churches' members, and other countries' resources and even their sovereignty. They never waver in their conviction that in the eyes of God, the good life is there for the taking and that every day, in every way, the world should be getting better and better.

For Reinhold Niebuhr, serenity, courage, and wisdom are anything but there for the taking. All three are threatened with compromise from moment to moment by the self-centeredness of a culture that has become even more narcissistic than it was when Christopher Lasch first diagnosed it with this term, and by the co-opting of social organizations and governments for purely selfish purposes by people --- religious people included --- who are absolutely certain that divine and natural laws are cooperating fully with their every venture. From this perspective, serenity means only satiation; courage means only aggression; and wisdom means only calculatedness.

If Niebuhr did not in fact pen the Serenity Prayer, it would still be true to say that no one understood better than he did why it has to begin the way it does. It is a petition to God to grant to us, not because we deserve them, but because God is gracious and merciful, virtues that we do not in fact have and can never develop wholly on our own. Left to our own devices, we are more likely to seek serenity from a bottle, courage from Swift-Boating super-patriots, and wisdom from anyone and everyone who never disagrees with us about anything. As Niebuhr knew only too well, it is by grace alone that we have any real hope of seeing these virtues as God does, and developing them in ourselves as God wants.