[ad_1]
Believing for years that she would become a concert pianist, covering religion for one of the country’s largest news networks was not really on her radar.
Lauren Green, who grew up in a Christian household and is now chief religion correspondent for Fox News, told Faithwire that she had developed an affinity for church history – and religion more broadly – all of which while studying music in college, noting even today that she understands a lot about faith through this lens.
“Music is my way of understanding the world,” she said. “And when I became a journalist, it was like trying to translate into another language, from the world of music to the world of words. So faith, for me, was this bringing these two worlds together.
Green, 63, said she never doubted the existence of God, but had to grapple with her own understanding of who God is and what such a deep truth means regarding human existence – a tricky question, no doubt. This was especially important to Green because, as she pointed out, she grew up in a culture so steeped in Christian tradition that asking questions about her was a foreign concept to many people.
There was a time, she recalls, when her two worlds collided when music deeply informed her view of God.
It was in 2007 that Green accompanied the Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York, one of the oldest African-American congregations in the United States, on his pilgrimage to Ethiopia. She recalled being in her hotel room in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, performing a harmonic analysis of the Alleluia choir of Handel’s “Messiah” and a kind of “ revelation ”happened for the reporter.
“It was like a revelation that hit me when I realized that I had seen the 10 Commandments truly displayed in the Harmonic Analysis of the Hallelujah Choir, and it just struck me: ‘This cannot be a mistake, ”Green said.
Now, many years later, after covering so many different issues – spanning 9/11 and the Charleston Church shooting to the coronavirus pandemic and the collapse of Afghanistan – Green has suggested that she couldn’t imagine how much more broken the world would be without God.
While facing such heavy topics can be intimidating at times, as a Christian, Green said she never shies away from asking a question that’s too difficult for God to answer.
“I know there is no question you could ask that would destroy God,” she explained.
In October 1971, John Lennon made his debut with his famous song “Imagine”. At the time, said Green, she didn’t think much of the line: “Imagine there’s no country / It’s not hard to do / Nothing to kill or die / And no religion too.”
Now, however, she sees it differently.
“It hits me so hard today because he was so wrong,” she said. “You will always love something. The human condition is that we are going to worship something. And if you don’t make a decision on what to worship, something else will come in there as a default idol, and that’s what the Bible warns against.
There are so few in the media landscape, however, who seem to truly understand these theological nuances of religion, and in particular of Christianity, which is why Green was so quick to acknowledge that there was “absolutely” one. prejudice against faith among many in the mainstream media. .
In the Western world, there is a push towards pluralism which suggests that all religions are the same. Many journalists, Green argued, operate on this false premise.
“This is absolutely not theologically true,” Green said of the assumption that all religions are “equal” to each other. “For anyone who truly believes in their faith – and I don’t care if you are a Christian, a Muslim or a Jew, a Buddhist or whatever – you believe your faith to be the truth. So they cannot all be equal.
“One of the big mistakes of the mainstream media is that they fail to understand the nature of most religions and they try to project a secular humanist understanding of religions, that is, all religions are basically the same, ”she added.
While all major faiths advocate greater morality, it is the motivations behind this advocacy – the “means of salvation,” as Green called it – that differ greatly.
“I think this is where most of the mainstream media don’t understand the nature of religions,” she said.
As Fox News celebrates its 25th anniversary, Faithwire asked Green to reflect on the stories that have personally touched her. You can see his answer to this question and more in the full interview above.
[ad_2]
Source link
