Morality: Governed by the Media or the Church?

A couple of days ago The UK Guardian, an online news source, posted an article about morality in the media and the Christian Church.  It was written by N.T. Wright.  He was addressing the media's calling out the church for hypocrisy.

"The church claims it can tell people how to behave, so surely it has to live up to those standards itself?" 

The joke here is that it is usually the media that tell people how to behave. Yes, the church sometimes "speaks out". But if it's moralising you want, turn on the radio. Or pick up a newspaper. And the institution the media especially love to attack is of course the church. There is a logic to this. The media want to be the guardians of public morality, but some people still see the church that way. Very well, it must be pulled down from its perch to make way for its secular successor.

Don't be fooled when "religious affairs correspondents" look prim and solemn and shake their heads at the latest clerical scandal. They are enjoying every minute of it. It keeps them in a job (did anyone imagine that the real "religious affairs" of this country, the prayerful and self-sacrificial work that goes on under the radar every day of every year, would ever make headlines?).

I think Wright has a point.

Consider for a moment the movies we watch.

Happy Feet, a movie about Penguins for kids, ends with 20 minutes of moral teaching about ecological ethics.  Brave is all about how to be a modern woman.

Consider our news networks, or comedy shows.
Jon Stewart is a rhetorical master.  He teaches through jokes.

Ever been around somebody who watches too much Fox News?  It dictates what they call right and wrong.

Or what about our music?

But how many people do you run across in your daily life who are learning their values from the church?  As a religious studies major I've had several run-ins with professors who teach an atheistic perspective, because, they say, they're just trying to help these poor college students who've been indoctrinated by the Church.  Really?  Most people I run across on the college campus don't have a clue what the Church actually teaches.  But they know Jon Stewart.  Their orienting stories are not--and have not been for at least a decade--those told in the gospels and in Moses' Exodus, but they've been replaced by Fight Club, Brave, The Life of Pi, and the moral teachings of The Cartoon Network.

But the media still points the finger of hypocrisy at the church.  It may be subtle, but it's there.  And against the charges of hypocrisy, Wright wrote this about Christian virtue:

The Christian has a particular angle on virtue. Some Protestant traditions have frowned on it: doesn't it mean we are trying to earn salvation by "good works"? Answer: no – it is all based on God's grace. But God's grace doesn't work "automatically". Part of the "fruit of the spirit", along with faith, hope and love, is self-control. That doesn't come overnight, either; and while you're practising the moral scales and arpeggios, and playing wrong notes, you are being, technically speaking … a hypocrite. Christians don't (or at least shouldn't) claim to have "made it" yet. We claim to follow Jesus. The church is composed of prodigal children who have discovered, to their astonishment, that their father still loves them. It was the older brother who thought the whole thing was a sham.

 Thoughts?

Works Cited
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Wright, Tom. "The Church May Be Hypocritical about Sex, but Is No One Else Guilty?" The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 03 June 2013. Web. 08 Mar. 2013.