The Christian roots of journalism are only now being studied

(OPINION) It is popularly believed that the Church suppressed freedom of thought until the Enlightenment, and that journalism emerged as the Church lost its power.

But in fact, the work on identifying in precise detail how journalism emerged from culture has never been done.

The closest study was started by Elizabeth Eisenstein in 1968. She spent 10 years researching to uncover the impacts of the print revolution from its beginnings in Renaissance Germany to the French Revolution. Eisenstein is now credited with founding a whole new field of study: print culture studies. 

Still at the end of her research, she made the astonishing assertion, still unchallenged, that “the story of the rise of a ‘fourth estate’ remains to be told.”

That means no one has done the hard yards on how it was that journalism emerged in Christendom, and nowhere else, as part of the expansion of the so-called “Republic of Letters” – until now.

Marvin Olasky, editor in chief at the Christian publication WORLD magazine, and author of Central Ideas in the Development of American Journalism and Transforming Journalism says journalists in both the U.S. and the U.K. want politicians to respect press freedom, but few know why we have it.

“Christians and secular journalists often criticize each other, yet if both learn about their common heritage they could work together,” Olasky said.

The U.K, whose print culture the U.S. built upon, does not divide Christian from secular journalists in the same way U.S. media often does.  For example, former BBC news veteran Robin Aitken is joining me to teach a new journalism course at the Margaret Beaufort Institute (see below for more).

Aitken’s book about bias at the BBC, The Noble Liar, is going into its second printing just one year since its release. He plans to help students unravel the muddle about facts and truth. The BBC, he said, always insists they have their facts correct and employs fact checkers in their news rooms, but that doesn’t prevent bias.

"Fake news is not a question of getting your facts wrong, it's a question of what you exclude,” he said at a recent London meeting to promote his book.

The Western genesis of newspapers

To be considered journalism, a publication has to be publicly distributed in multiple copies and on a regular basis, in a “fixed” way that permits running stories, and none of that could happen until a press for movable type was invented. 

Print workshops staffed by artisans and thinkers began to form all over Europe once Johannes Gutenberg’s invention took off from around 1450.  This was new. 

Printers underwrote the hugely risky investment in paper required for Bible printing largely by printing “indulgences” – notes of pardon sold by the Catholic Church to congregants to raise money for its projects (primarily the fight against the Ottoman Turks who sacked Constantinople in 1453).

That the motivation to invent the press was a passion to disseminate the Gospel in vernacular languages, despite the enormous financial and personal risks, is known. 

That that passion sparked a revolution that set up the freedoms the news industry today relies on is largely forgotten.

Newspapers late to reach Confucian China, Islamic societies

The story could have been so different.  In Confucian China, the first woodblock print of a Buddhist text is dated 868AD.  And paper was invented there. 

But the enormous potential for a free press petered out as China’s elites deliberately obscured access to knowledge with an impenetrable script, wanting to control knowledge rather than disseminate it.

The imperial family system monopolized publication until missionaries – who were also Sinologists -- brought the first movable type press with them in 1800 and set up the first proper Chinese language newspaper.

Saudi Arabia, the heart of Islam, did not get its first newspaper until 1920. 

Eisenstein herself said in 2007, in an interview looking back on her work: “The enthusiastic reception of printing by Western churchmen seen in tandem with the prolonged rejection of printing by Islamic authorities is just one of many intriguing contrasts that are worth further exploration.”

Scholars argue about who exactly the first journalist was and there is not the room to discuss it here. 

But Eisenstein, building on work by Rosalie Colie, says that in the 17th century, Protestant Huguenot pastors, expelled from Catholic France in 1685, “established intellectual journalism.” 

The experience of exile went together with that of forced secularization.  Trained as pastors but barred from their pulpits, the new immigrants turned to the printed word to address scattered congregations from afar.

“Although their cupboards were often bare,” Colie wrote, “they established intellectual journalism as a respectable profession for highly trained men who in an earlier era would have automatically made the pulpit their chief organ.”

What about the Catholic Church’s suppression of dissent?

The medieval Church was anything but an incubator of the truth, most people think.  Galileo’s trial, Pope Innocent’s banning of Bible translation in 1229 in France, and further bans on translation in England from 1408 all rightly dominate the narrative.

Tyndale’s execution at the stake in Antwerp in 1536 for his Bible translation further confounds the church’s reputation.

But few journalists know anything of the pre-Enlightenment zeal and bravery of individual Christians who broke ranks with Rome for the sake of the truth.

John Stubbs had his right hand cut off in 1579 for “seditious writing” against Queen Elizabeth’s proposed marriage to a French Catholic duke who would have commandeered the country’s Protestant faith.  He promptly removed his hat with his left hand and cried “God save the Queen” before fainting.

Even worse, John Twynn “out of principle” in 1663 was hanged until almost dead, then with a hook had his intestines pulled out before being cut into four pieces which were sent around the kingdom as a warning, rather than divulge the name of the “treasonable pamphleteer” whose work he had printed.

Now the West is squandering its heritage of indomitable perseverance and deathly sacrifice in a mist of half-truth and lies.

Even Alan Rusbridger, for 20 years editor of the Guardian, says in his recent autobiography: “The fundamental importance to any community of reliable, unfettered news was one of the most important Enlightenment values.”

Though factually true, his statement overlooks the earlier story of faith, struggle and heroics.

And those values could be about to change.

Fortunately, at least two institutions in Cambridge are now working to recover the history of journalism.

Polish philosopher Dr. Anna Abram, principal of Margaret Beaufort Institute (MBI), has set up a pioneering journalism component to her Ethics in Professional Context module in the Contemporary Ethics M.A. launching next summer. She was inspired in part by work on journalism ethics established in March 2019 at the Kirby Laing Institute at Tyndale House in Cambridge.

And as its first Fellow in Media Communication and Journalism, I am digging up material that shows that journalism’s origins need proper study.