Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 21:3 (Sep 1978)
Article: Christ And The Media
Author: Malcolm Muggeridge

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JETS 21:3 (September 1978) p. 193

Christ And The Media

Malcolm Muggeridge*

I am, of course, greatly complimented that you should have asked an old superannuated journalist like myself to come and speak to you on “Christ and the Media,” a subject that is by the nature of the case of transcendent importance to religious broadcasting. Let me say, straight away, that I have no qualification for holding forth on such a subject other than that of having come belatedly and reluctantly to see in Christ the only reality in a world increasingly given over to fantasy and of having worked in the media, man and boy, for something like half a century past—the whole gamut from sonorous editorials to scurvy little gossip paragraphs, from news stories from our special correspondents here, there and everywhere to book reviews, theater notices, feature articles and obituaries, and taking in the somber experience of being editor of the ostensibly humorous magazine, Punch, required in that capacity to essay the impossible task of making my fellow countrymen laugh.

Now otherwise, apart from these fifty misspent years, I am not at all versed in the sociological, psychological, ideological, metaphysical or any other aspect of the media. And if I have had occasion to review some work on a subject—as has happened—it has been, I regret to say, on the basis of a very cursory turning over of its pages, comforting myself all the while with a statement I once read by the great Dr. Johnson of the novels of Congreve, that he would sooner praise them than read them. The fact is that, in my experience, experts on communication can very rarely communicate with any degree of skill or clarity. This might seem surprising until one reflects that marriage counselors have usually been divorced, dietary experts are usually chronic dyspectics, extollers of potency—like D. H. Lawrence—are usually impotent, and the roads to private and public bankruptcy are paved with economists.

Such essays in irony are part, for me at any rate, of God’s glory and mercy. Besides the golden string that Blake writes of, leading to heaven’s gate, there is another, making connection with the earth. As in radio and TV sets, both are needed—and in cathedrals too, that have their steeples climbing into the sky and their gargoyles grinning downwards. It is a fancy of mine, as a passionate lover of laughter and believer in laughter, as representing the earthic equivalent of men’s most sublime mystical transports—it is a fancy of mine that when the gates of heaven swing open, besides the sound of celestial choirs there is the unmistakable sound of laughter. May I say to you, is not the fall of man itself a cosmic version of the banana-skin joke? So in talking to you about Christ and the media it is merely as an old practitioner, not as an...

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