ABSTRACT
A serious lack of curiosity in the media for the religious underpinnings of a seventeen-year war in northern Uganda, together with the writing of bishop and theologian Lesslie Newbigin, gave rise to Lapido Media. For every Christian source, there must be a Muslim or National Secular Society one. Journalists generally have required little idea about differences between and within religions; and what influences, interpretation mechanisms and disciplines they subject themselves to. The evolutionary thrust of predictions, by Oxford professor Bryan Wilson and others who took up Weber’s thesis, made religion’s irrelevancy seem inevitable. The hermeneutic of suspicion has another manifestation which may be even more dangerous: reinterpretation, in particular the reinterpretation of religious motivation. Post-Christian western culture was premised upon – and journalists had internalised as ‘fact’ – that ‘religion was dead’. In Britain there has been a marked sobering up among journalists about religion.
