Alan Bloom on Christian Journalism

Best-selling author, speaker, and advocate for Christian apologetics, Dr. Alex McFarland.

Best-selling author and apologist, Dylan Burrows. Together, bringing you truth. For a new generation, this is TNG Radio. Proverbs 1, verse 7 says that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.

The Bible also tells us not only to seek wisdom, but to pursue truth. And so, on today's edition of the program, we're going to talk about truth and wisdom, and we're going to talk about worldview as it relates to media. This is Alex McFarland with Dylan Burrows. And Dylan, it's great to be back with you, brother. Welcome back to Truth For A New Generation Radio. Great to be with you as always, Alex. And I'm excited about our guest today.

We have quite a show for you here. And Alex, why don't you introduce our listeners to Mr. Alan Bloom today? Well, I'm really excited, folks, because this guest that we're going to talk with now is somebody I've respected for years. Alan Bloom is known to many people around the nation as the editor of the biblical recorder.

Not only the newspaper, but the website, a paragon of Christian journalism. But he's been a pastor for many years. He was pastor of a great church in our nation, Mount Vernon Baptist Church. And I've got to say this as we bring Alan Bloom to the microphone. I'm very indebted because more than two decades ago, the first time ever, the first time ever that I had anything in print, he printed an article I wrote for a publication that he was editor of. And so on so many levels, I appreciate this, dear brother. But he is also a great partner in Truth For A New Generation.

We have for years very successfully advertised in the biblical recorder, and I read his website daily to keep up with world news and current events from a Christian perspective. So with all that said, we welcome to the program our colleague and friend, Alan Bloom. Welcome, brother.

Thank you very much, Alex. It's an honor to be with you guys today. Well, I know you're busy with your staff in the newsroom there. What headlines do you have on the press coming up? Well, actually, there's some things pending that we can't talk about right now because we hear rumors every now and then that something's happening and that may be coming. And so we're in the news business, not the rumor business.

So we have to kind of sit on it and sit on it. And then we can't always announce what we know. But recently, like last week, it was a very busy week for us because two men in Southern Baptist life, actually both of them from North Carolina, stepped forward to announce their candidacy as president of the Southern Baptist Convention. And we got the news before anybody else on those and was kind of sitting on it and waiting to break it. So this week slowed down a little bit.

Last week was a busy week for us. Sure. Well, let me ask you a twofold question. Number one, how did you get into journalism? And then the follow-up question that you can address, what is the importance of worldview in journalism? And the media that we ingest?

But first of all, a little bit of your journey, Alan. Well, as a pastor, I've always been interested in keeping up with just what's going on in the world around me. But in Southern Baptist life, as many people know, about 30 years ago, a new direction started to emerge for Southern Baptists who many Southern Baptists felt like the convention was going in the wrong direction theologically. And there were many who were concerned and took some steps to start leading the convention back to our biblical roots.

And I was one of those involved in that. And we started a newspaper in North Carolina that was actually intended to be an alternate paper to the one that I'm now editor of. We began publishing what was called the conservative record because there was so much dissatisfaction among conservatives about the biblical recorder where I serve now.

And so we published that. And actually, during the conservative resurgence of Southern Baptists, there was somewhere around 10 or 12 alternate newspapers that sprang up across Southern Baptist Convention. The one that I and a number of other key conservatives in the state put together was actually the longest running.

We ran for almost 20 years, and it was on record as the longest running of all the alternate papers. And so then the biblical recorder began to take a conservative direction by electing board members who were more biblically focused. And so when that happened, it turns out they called me, which I honestly was not interested. I was a pastor. I felt like I would spend the rest of my ministry and life in pastorate. And I actually declined and sort of laughed it off. But the short story is that after a number of very, very clear messages from the Lord about this, I said, okay, I'll consider it and pray about it. And then in a short while they asked me to step up and be the editor. So it was just one of those out of the blue, complete surprises for me.

But God has a way of surprising us often when we think we've got our life already planned out for him, you know? Indeed, indeed. Well, you know, I want to say thanks, because you really have been a leader in defending the faith, defending biblical orthodoxy, and really setting a standard for good, solid journalism, but from a Christian perspective.

And Alan, let me throw this question to you. How much does worldview influence journalists and those who bring us the news? Well, it's everything. It drives the news. And sadly, journalism in recent decades has become fairly activist. You know, sometimes we talk about activist judges at some of our court systems who are kind of making laws up from the bench, at least that's perception. Well, it's kind of like that in journalism. A lot of news has surfaced that is activist news. It's intended to shape the thinking of the public rather than actually reporting what's going on. And the worldview of the reporters is important. And of course, worldview is simply how you see things. And I know that there are what we call bubbles. We sort of use that nomenclature to identify that people are in a certain thought pattern.

Like we say, there's a Washington, D.C. bubble inside the Beltline and people there think in a certain way there's a certain bubble in every city and in every culture. It shapes the way we think. We see things through the eyes of those who have begun to tell us that certain things are true.

You know, even the way you see issues of life. You know, we call ourselves, for example, people who believe in the value of human life and sanctity of it. We say we are pro-life.

But you won't see that in the news. You'll see us called anti-abortion people. So that's the news trying to say that we are negative. We are anti-something.

Of course, I'm proud to be against the death of children. Amen, brother. Thank you for joining us here to Truth for a New Generation. We'll be right back.

Stick with us. 1 Peter 3.15 tells us to be ready always to give an answer for the hope we have. We're instructed to be prepared to defend our faith. This is Alex McFarland for the Life Answers Teams, students we train at North Greenville University, a leading Christian college in South Carolina. The Life Answers Teams are made up of students who will inspire and equip your congregation. These apologetics teams we train speak in churches to youth groups and train Christians of all ages to address key issues of our times from a biblical perspective. Like, is there a God?

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So excited about our conversation with Alan Bloom. He's the editor of the biblical recorder. And also one of the Christian news sites that I urge you to follow, I do. Their website is brnow.org. And if you go there, I am very proud to say you will probably see a banner for Truth For A New Generation. TNG 2018 is coming up pretty soon, March 23-24.

We're so excited. People from around the nation are signing up to convene on Greensboro, North Carolina, March 23-24. Speakers will include from Fox News, Todd Starnes, Lauren Greene, who you probably see every weekend doing the news on Fox, and Josh McDowell, legendary apologist will be there, Josh McDowell. The counterculture mom from many television shows, Tina Marie Griffin, she's making a lot of waves talking about the way Hollywood influences our kids. Also former Islamic terrorist, literally a jihadist, Kamal Saleem, who found Christ, and his testimony is amazing.

J. Warner Wallace, cold case Christianity, a great leader in the apologetics world right now. The theme is Save A Nation. The date's March 23-24. The place, Greensboro, North Carolina. I hope you will pray, promote, and plan to attend this edition of the TNG apologetics conference. We hope to see you there. Right now we want to continue our conversation with just a beloved colleague and friend, Alan Bloom.

And give people contact info about the biblical recorder, would you? Well, our printed paper has been around since 1833. We just celebrated our 185th anniversary on January the 17th. So it's been around a while.

Just a new kid on the block. Yeah. And it's still in print.

We'll have a circulation primarily across North Carolina, but it does go around the world. And we also have a digital version of that print that's available online in the PDF. So you can actually flip the PDF pages online and view those.

And we have online a subscribe tab on the front page of brnow.org. And if you look at that subscribe tab, it'll give you the options of subscribing to the print and digital or just one. But you can actually bundle the print and digital for $15.99 a year. But we have some deals for churches that have group plans that are less than that. That's just $11.50 a year per subscription. And so we would send those in bulk when they come out every two weeks to a church. Or a church can actually have what we call a family plan for $12.50, where a church gives us the name and addresses of families in their church. And then they're mailed individually to the mailbox or the home of each of those families. The digital is $5.99 a year.

So if you just want to have it on your tablet, your phone, your laptop, whatever, you can subscribe only to the digital. And then it has back issues on there going back to about 2011. And we're always adding more back issues. So the point, Alex, is that we are trying our best to support the ministry of the local church and the pastor who's preaching the word week by week, who sometimes is standing up on Sunday morning and addressing a congregation who has been brainwashed in a sense through the week with news that is not entirely accurate or is negative toward the church and toward scriptures and toward pastors. And so he has to sort of try to regain ground every week because his people have been fed the wrong things. But if they'll take the biblical recorder and visit our website and let that be a news source that they feed on, they will see a biblical worldview and they will be able to not lose ground during the week in their thinking of what is true and what's not true and what's important for Christians to know. Because we're not slamming Christians, we're supporting the biblical worldview with the news that we provide, thereby supporting the great commission call of local churches and the biblical preaching of pastors. So that all pairs together and helps the church move forward rather than backward.

Sure. I do want to jump in here, Alan, and mention a little bit how much the news headlines of our time touch on issues of faith. This is something that we see time and time again. We've had our own president at a national prayer breakfast.

You have a feature on your own website right now about Sarah Huckabee Sanders and her role as both a mother and for a spokesperson there at the White House. And time and time again, faith issues are coming up in our headlines, and people need to be informed of how this interacts with what they believe and how they live out their faith. Can you give us maybe a couple of examples of how you see faith intertwining with today's headlines and why that's important for us as believers to be aware of? Well, that's critical, because God's called us to touch this lost world, this dark world, and we're to shine the light of Jesus into this darkness.

And if we don't even know what's going on, then we're living in darkness. So we need to be aware of the challenges that are out there, which are so strong, you know, the pro-life issues, and the news is going to give you the wrong picture of that, issues of racial conflict, other kinds of family and liberty issues, the liberty issues, the religious liberty. You know, when the press reports on it, they do so negatively, or they don't do it at all.

Often they just won't tell you about some of the court cases that we're telling you about. Right now on our website at this moment, I'm looking at a story about how Ken Ham was cancelled from speaking at a university because an LGBT group opposed him, and he's a Christian apologist and creationist and his focus, but, you know, some group just pops up and says, we don't like him. And so the university says, okay, well, we won't let Christians speak here then. And that's a religious liberty issue, and Christians need to be aware. You know, another story we have right now on our website is about the Christian cake baker who the courts in California actually gave him a win, and the news doesn't always want to say anything about the wins that Christians have.

Right. Well, let me jump in there, Alan, if I could, and just say we'll be right back after this break, and I do want to hear more about this issue of media bias, how that influences how we see cultural issues, and how our faith should inform how we look at these topics. We'll be right back on Truth For A New Generation.

Stick with us. We're in a battle for the future of our nation, and I want to see you at Truth For A New Generation as we pray and get equipped to defend the faith, asking God to save our nation. Don't miss Truth For A New Generation, March 23 and 24, Greensboro, North Carolina.

You may register at truthforanewgeneration.com. If you're a Christian parent, you of course want to instill a biblical view of life in the hearts of your children. If you're a pastor, you want to offer ministry that draws young families to your church. This is Alex McFarland encouraging you to check out my new book and video curriculum, The 21 Toughest Questions Your Kids Will Ask About Christianity. Why do bad things happen? I interviewed hundreds of children, ages 5 to 12, and we address actual questions from actual children, the spiritual issues that are on the minds of your kids.

Did Jesus ever sin? The book and video lessons are great for groups of any size and was produced with the goal of equipping kids to stand strong for Christ in any situation. The 21 Toughest Questions Your Kids Will Ask, the book, study guide and video series. You'll find it at afastore.net. That's afastore.net. This is Dylan Burrows together with Alex McFarland on Truth For A New Generation radio, and we're speaking with Alan Bloom today, president of Biblical Recorder and brnow.org, and we're continuing our discussion on Christian journalism and also some of the topics we see today in our culture of media bias, where you may get one story from two different outlets and get two completely different perspectives, depending on whether the outlet is more progressive or more conservative, and that becomes more and more of an issue in today's media, doesn't it, Alan?

Oh yes. Yeah, there's a lot of media bias out there, and you know, it's probably well illustrated by the interview with Dan Cathy of Chick-fil-A. It's a classic, classic example of how media handles things. I interviewed Dan Cathy and wrote a story, and then the story published first in the Biblical Recorder, it was picked up by Baptist Press, which is our more national news agency, but within hours, the Huffington Post and some other papers picked it up, and they wanted to focus on the negative. The story was simply about Dan Cathy and Chick-fil-A's Biblical values, and the interesting thing was we ended up titling it, quote, guilty as charged, Dan Cathy says, Chick-fil-A's stand on faith, which is an exact word from Dan Cathy.

When I asked him, you have family values, he said, oh yes, guilty as charged, we have family values, and wrote about it. Well, the negative side of that, the press decided to say, aha, Dan Cathy is guilty of hatred, of bigotry, you know, and they go down that line of saying, oh, he hates gays, and Chick-fil-A is out to destroy the LGBT movement, it's destroyed our country, and they support all these family organizations and so forth, and so that made them take that and run with it in a negative way. I began to get calls from media outlets all over the country asking me, would I come on their program, like your program here, but to talk about this, and it turns out, once I got on, they found out that there was a positive story here, wasn't negative, and they were running with the wrong story. I even called one media outlet that is a religious news outlet, and I said, look, you just ran this story, and it is entirely wrong, you said the wrong thing, Dan Cathy didn't say that, I did the interview, I could play the audio for you, and sadly, even that religious leader got real quiet, and he said, well, we don't care about the original, we care about what the other media outlets are running, but here was the real clincher, I got a call, my secretary said, you have a call from this nationally known woman in media from Washington, DC, that I just not name her here, but she is a Christian, and she called, and she said, Mr. Bloom, I'm honored to speak with you, I'm wanting to get to the bottom of this, and I said, well, ma'am, I'm honored to speak to you, how can I help you? And here's the way the conversation went, she said, I want to know what Dan Cathy really said when you ask him about homosexuality, and I said, well, ma'am, that's easy, nothing, because we never, I never asked him that question, she said, really?

Well, then why did he bring it up? And I said, ma'am, he didn't bring it up, I could play the entire audio for you, and you will hear that homosexuality and gays were never in the conversation, period, it was never brought up, and she got real quiet, and she said, well, well, well, then what's all this hoopla about? I said, well, ma'am, you're gonna have to ask the rest of the secular media, because it was entirely generated based on what they wanted to say, rather than what Chick-fil-A and Dan Cathy was all about. Oh, my goodness, that's a powerful word. Yeah. And I was gonna say, you know, the firestorm that created, that was created out of all of that and the attention given to Chick-fil-A, all because one Christian ministry or media outlet like us writes a positive story, and the majority of media outlets run in the negative direction and say what was never said in the original story.

That's amazing. And you know, the term fake news has become kind of a buzzword nowadays. Is there any way that you could put a percentage of the news, you know, whether people are watching Fox or reading MSNBC, or they're watching CNN? I mean, what percentage of the news from secular media is fake news? Could you hazard a guess? Wow.

That would be difficult. I would just have to say, there's a lot of it that is just so wrong, and usually it's because as it's well known and documented in several books and articles, the overwhelming majority, somewhere between 80 to 90 percent of journalists, have a liberal leftist worldview. And many of them are aggressively promoting that, and they are in it to do it that way. Now, there are obviously some Christians in media who are trying to bring integrity and stability back, but I would say the overwhelming people involved in media are promoting a leftist or a liberal anti-Christian worldview. Well, let me jump in and say, you know, not only a media that leans left, but also public school and the universities, so many of which have a secular agenda. All the more reason that people need to read brnow.org and great conservative Christian journalists like yourself that bring the news of the day from a Christian perspective. We're just about out of time, and Dylan, isn't it a blessing that people are out there like Alan Bloom, that brings scholarship but a scriptural perspective to the table? It's refreshing to me to hear from Christians in journalism who are seeking to work with integrity and to stand for what is true.

And like he said, this is a minority in today's world. So we want to celebrate those who do and encourage those who are seeking or perhaps looking into the field of journalism from a Christian perspective to continue to do so. So thank you for being with us today, Alan. Thank you for joining us today, all of you who are listening, and we encourage you to go to TruthForANewGeneration.com, where you can get a copy of today's podcast and listen again.

Thanks so much for being with us. Truth For A New Generation, in association with Alex McFarland Evangelistic Ministries, exists to equip Christians with a biblical worldview through conferences and camps. For information about upcoming events, visit TruthForAnewGeneration.com, or give us a call at 877-YES-GOD-1. That's 877-YES-GOD and the number 1. TNG radio is made possible by the friends of Alex McFarland Evangelistic Ministries, P.O. Box 485, Pleasant Garden, North Carolina, 27313. That's P.O. Box 485, Pleasant Garden, North Carolina, 27313. Or give online at AlexMcFarland.com or TruthForAnewGeneration.com. Thanks for listening and join us again next time as we bring you more truth for a new generation on TNG radio.