Blockage Of Perceptions And Purposes

Here is a quick test to judge the news values and career potential of young journalists. The facts:

On Sunday, Nov. 16, about 8 million Americans gathered in about 50,000 Protestant and Roman Catholic churches across the country to do two things. One was to pray for Christians around the world who are persecuted for trying to worship in freedom. The other was to pledge themselves to continue to struggle against the persecution and to effect change.

Now, the test question: Is that a story worth printing or putting on the air?

If your answer is no, you may have a fine career ahead of you, because that was the decision of most editors in charge of the major newspapers and TV programs that day. If your answer is yes, please don’t go away - we need you.

That weekend the press gave appropriate heavy coverage to the release by the Chinese of Wei Jingsheng, the great Chinese dissident.

Journalistically, the release of one famous political dissident should have heightened, not blacked out, the news value of a story that millions of Americans were paying devoted attention to other dissidents still imprisoned. The stories might have mentioned Peter Xu, the Protestant leader recently sentenced to 10 years - or the Roman Catholic Bishops Su Zhemin, An Shuxin and Zeng Jingmu, in their cells, somewhere.

Like Wei, these Christians, and thousands of others, were incarcerated in China’s meanest prisons only for what they believed. In their case it was their belief in the duty to worship how and where their religion taught them, not as China’s Communist Party dictated.

American journalism, except for some local papers, failed to report the Day of Prayer because it had not paid nearly enough attention to what led up to it. That was the increasing American awareness of religious persecution abroad and the new conservative-liberal coalition against it.

The coalition is growing in Congress, unions and churches. It will get bigger and more influential. But it is not yet as strong as the lobbies of U.S. companies that do business with the persecuting dictatorships. With the help of the Clinton administration, the lobbies have stalled but not defeated Congressional legislation that would monitor and mildly penalize religious persecution of Christians and other minorities in China and about a dozen Muslim countries.

We know why the lobbies block action against persecution - money. But why are many Americans of good heart, journalists among them, so aloof from the coalition against religious persecution?

History, for one thing. American Christians find it difficult to grasp that Christians are being persecuted. Christians? It is a mental block growing out of their own history of freedom and safety in America.

American politics and social passions also become barriers. When U.S. Jews and Christians worked to get Jews out of the Soviet Union, they took help from all Americans willing to give it. But I have found that among some Christians and Jews there is nervousness that the right to abortion or the separation of church and schools will suffer because conservative Christians are part of the coalition against religious persecution abroad. I think the coalition should and does exclude racial and religious bigots; end of litmus test.

American journalists and human rights activists have blocks of their own. Most of them are secular in education, upbringing and attitudes. They are usually at least as opposed to religious persecution and eager to fight it as Americans drawn to religion and shaped by it.

But from what I have seen and heard, it is more difficult for the secular in American journalism and human rights movements to accept the good faith and cooperation of the American religious-minded against persecution than the other way around. Maybe it is a matter of self-confidence; I don’t know.

I do know that 8 million people in 50,000 churches pledging themselves against persecution will help the bishops and the Weis still in the Chinese gulag. That’s a story.

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