Journalists Miss the Story    
        

   "The United States and the West 

may have stripped religious ideas 

from our education system, our 

textbooks and our political discourse. 

But the rest of the globe never got the memo."

   

   So said Mindy Belz, speaking at a 2019 State Department Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom.

   "The world was - and is - a religious place," she told her audience. 

   As a religiously-based journalist and war correspondent, Belz has seen up close the persecution and massacres resulting from religious oppression. Victims may be Christian; they may be others.

   She notes, "When journalists ignore religious attacks and persecution, we are ignoring a leading indicator, one that affects not only war but also politics, economics and daily life."

   This is a lady who chose to live with an Iraqi family in a Muslim neighborhood of Baghdad to get the real story. She also finds the faithful, in spite of...

   How about a remnant of believers worshiping in Sudan in 110-degree heat in a building where other Christians were burned to death. They had walked "home" from Ethiopia, one woman with a wrinkled Bible owing to a river they had to ford.

   Belz has seen perseverance so often she expects it. "Those who are willing to suffer and die for their beliefs have much to teach the rest of us, particularly from our comfortable remove in the USA," she says. "We journalists sometimes don't stick around for everyday life." 

   Maybe they should study religion and discover how that might drive politics, war, economics, power brokers and other authorities.   - Jimmy