Global media secularists are alarmed at the rise of religio-political movements and the increasing incidence of religious agitation and violence - while absolving themselves of any responsibility.

foreign media montage 171203 They see the religious and their religious-driven confrontations missing the ‘globalisation boat’ - and with it development, education, technology and healthcare left to the more secular and privileged classes.

To the secularist religious confrontations - may it be Bulgaria’s Christian extremists, Indonesia’s Muslim Bali Bombers or India’s Bajrang Dal Hindu militants from the Bharatiya Janata Party - are indicative of the ‘primitive’ tendencies of their movements.

An Australian professor suggests that secularists should perhaps look closer at themselves and secularism - particularly its modern, militant forms - as contributors to these confrontations.

Speaking last week at a programme in Jakarta for Asia-Pacific journalists on ‘Journalism at the Intersection of Politics, Religion and Culture’, Griffith University professor Michael Wesley said those in the media industry should acknowledge their role in creating and perpetuating the hostile environment - in which the debates and discussions are held over the issues of religious conflicts, values and practices.

‘Secularism is a messianic religion’

Secularists, Wesley said further, have failed to acknowledge that among the main stimuli to the rise of religious activism is, in fact, "the steady advance of an increasingly demanding and intolerant secularism".

aghan women wearing burqa 070305 "Secularism has itself become a messianic religion, convinced of its own infallibility, hostile towards dissent, and determined to place strict limits on how all other systems of faith and belief in society are practiced.

"The high priests of secularism are the educated middle classes, who use their dominance of politics, media, education and law to proselytise their secular values.

"They identify with and promote the causes of the like-minded in other countries, convinced that the only answer to religious confrontation is a more complete domination of secular values," said Wesley in his speech entitled, provocatively, ‘The New Crusades’.

Wesley - who heads his university’s Griffith Asia Pacific Research Institute and specialises in modern religious movements and military-security issues - was speaking to the audience of about forty mid-career and senior journalists who came from all around the region.

Heckles naturally arose in the conference room where the three-day forum was held, as most of the journalists, while holding secular values and outlook, also claimed to be inclusivists and tolerant of divergent views.

Addressing their indignation, Wesley said that his target was not the ‘moderate’ secularists and secularism that espouse religious syncretism and toleration, the separation of religion and politics, and the equal treatment of religions.

iraq refugees 080507 father and child While this form of secularism can be found repeatedly throughout history and across cultures and civilisations, Wesley said the secularism he was referring to is the ‘modern, militant’ sort that is found predominantly in the west but has also found expression in news media of countries elsewhere.

Recounting the rise of the mass media since the 19th century, Wesley reminded the audience that its development was instrumental in the rise of modern secularism, democratic politics, secular nationalism, and the creation of ‘mass society’.

The media was the vehicle through which it was hoped that "pluralist, rational debate" would occur, and it structured itself more towards critiquing, rather than constructing and maintaining, authority, Wesley said.

"It (the mass media) took up the spirit of scientific method, gleefully subjecting to criticism all dogmas it saw as not supported by solid reasoning."

In the interests of commercial gain, media guided while presenting to readers how they should think and feel about news - and when to be outraged.

Authority figures were increasingly subjected to "forensic, public question", and the media came to see - and project - itself in the role of the fourth estate as "society's mechanism for holding all figures and institutions of authority continuously accountable."

Pornography, gays and lesbians

Each advance in the mass media, however, reinforced its marriage to secularism, said Wesley, and along the way, it became the platform for the contest of a series of "culture wars" contested between conservatives and liberals over such issues as that of pornography, gays and lesbians.

gay lesbian parade 240605 hot young studs "These became contests between religion and secularism, and secularism inevitably won. Often it has been the winners from these battles who take up the cause of secularism and, paradoxically, heighten its intolerance of other ways of thinking and practice."

In time, followers of the new religious movements came to reject what they viewed as "the global campaign of the secularist elite" and campaigned around concerns about the moral effects on society of the marginalisation of religion.

"The only possible response to those who oppose secularism is a form of faith-based, literalist religious observance. This is because secularism and religion confront each other as antipathetic ideologies, each insisting on its own absolutist standards," said Wesley.

"(The religious movements) object to the relentless and articulate hostility to their basic beliefs conveyed through the mainstream media. They watch with alarm as their children are educated in an atmosphere that ridicules, attacks or ignores their parents' core values.

"But even as they react in opposition to secularism, the patterns of their religiosity, observance and activism are deeply imbued with secularist conceptions, yielding a much more dynamic and unpredictable type of religious movement."

The culmination of the secularists-media march towards what has been perceived as an attempt to stamp out the irrational and unprogressive ideas and behaviour of the religious movements found extreme culmination in the media in such controversies as the Danish newspaper's cartoon depictions of Prophet Mohammed.

pas youth anti dutch film protest 040408 02 Consider also, said Wesley, Theo van Gogh's film (Submission) projecting verses from the Koran onto the naked bodies of women.

"These," said Wesley, "were attempts to provoke violent reactions from Muslim communities, thus demonstrating to the wider Danish or Dutch audience that Muslim communities don't belong, because they do not accept secularism's dictates of how they may profess their faith.

"In secular Europe, where less and less is held sacred from either exploitation or ridicule, minority cultures are expected to conform immediately to the same boundaries of the sacred and the profane.

"Secularism, in other words, has been stretched to advance a nasty, exclusionist form of right-wing politics," said Wesley.

Needless to say, Wesley’s presentation did not go down well with a large number of the journalists present at the forum.

‘Secular compact’

One senior journalist noted that, far from retreating from the advance of "secular elites" imposing their views on Indonesia’s Muslim majority, the religious movements and such institutions as the mosque in Indonesia plays a pivotal role in politics.

The challenge is in preventing the religious extremists from seeking to dominate the public space and dictating Indonesia’s policies, said the journalist.

internet media and print media "If we’re going to blame secularism’s tolerance for the religious conflicts, we’re going to have a bit of a problem," he added.

The chief editor of another newspaper, similarly, cited the struggle in India to prevent any one religious group from making inroads into the country’s "secular compact".

With numerous religious minorities eying nervously the growing aggressiveness of India’s Hindu majority as well as its increasingly assertive Muslim minority, Wesley’s secularist "straw man" that may exist in US and Europe cannot be applied to India, he said.

President George W Bush and his unilateralist policies derive not from his secular convictions but his Christian fundamentalist motivations, he added.

"In India’s secularism, there is equal respect given to all religions.

"What is worrying is that secularism is eroding, and that has dangers for all of India’s minorities unless we enforce that secularism."

Secularism has a role

Wesley, however, said all of the above objections to his thesis do not detract from the thrust of his point, which "is not to demonise secularism- even less is it to advocate the reformation of politics and the state around communities of religious belief."

"My target is the belief that secularism is the ultimate answer to our age of religious confrontations.

malaysia people rakyat "I have tried to argue that secularism is a major element in explaining the rise of assertive forms of religious politics.

"A consequence of this is that the further, dogged campaign to spread secularist norms will not bring an end to this style of politics: it will intensify it," he reiterated.

Focusing his sights on the media, Wesley said it plays a central role in the dynamic within the secular vs religious debate, most notably by the manner in which it portrays that debate and its participants.

"It is in the media that religion is portrayed as the fulcrum of conservatism versus change, or reaction versus progression. In so many of the contemporary controversies over religion, it is the media which chooses who will speak for each side, rather than the religious communities themselves.

"The media often cannot resist the urge to portray conflict in stark, simplified terms - as "progressives" versus "fundamentalists". The media has always had dual, and partially contradictory, roles: as a representer of public opinion and a shaper of public opinion.

"In the years ahead, the media will play a central role in how this current age of religious confrontation evolves, and hopefully, resolves. It must be attentive to how it represents, and as a consequence shapes, public opinion," said Wesley.

"Experience shows that the presentation of confrontations between stark positions and moral absolutes only serves to sharpen conflict and heighten defensive reactions."

vk lingam tape inquiry 210108 media He concluded by noting that while ‘the media’ is not a "monolithic entity", the common tendency of most media is to project issues as if they were simple contrasts between or categorisations of what is "modern" versus what is "traditionalist", ‘enlightened’ versus ‘atavistic’, ‘rational’ versus what is ‘fanatical’, ‘uniting’ versus ‘divisive, ‘progressive’ versus ‘backward’ and ‘liberating’ as opposed to continued subjugation.

It is the responsibility of the media to look beyond such simple categorisations, said Wesley.

"Because on closer examination, so much of what we assume to be traditionalist, atavistic and fanatical is in fact very modern; as modern as the secularist ideals we espouse.

"And it is only by confronting these complexities, that we can begin to see a way past these absolutist antipathies - not only between religions, but between religion and secularism."

This reporter was among 44 other journalists from various countries in Asia Pacific who attended the three-day forum in Jakarta, which sponsored and jointly-organised by the governments of New Zealand and Norway, the European Union and the Indonesian Press Council.

The forum was followed by a one-day workshop on ‘The Role of Media in Muslim-Western Relations’ organised by the United Nations’ affiliated groups Search for Common Ground and Alliance of Civilisations.