The fundamental issue here is about the world view of the people involved. Secular people range from those who place faith issues low on their personal list of priorities to those who are outright hostile to any religious belief of any kind. They tend to view the world through the lens that God or Faith is unimportant, at least for day to day living, so those things can be ignored in favor of day to day issues of life.
Devout believers on the other hand, no matter what faith they follow try to focus not on the day to day existence but rather on the eternal. The more devout a believer is the more focused they are on the eternal and the less on day to day life, to the point where the most devout often eschew material comforts so that they can focus more on the faith that they follow.
Throughout history most people fall somewhere in the middle of the scale between totally Devout and completely Secular. Monks in monasteries and Nuns in convents are close to the devout end, while hedonists running brothels are about as far on the other end as you can get. Most people have a foot in each camp, for example a lot of people who grow up in the USA in a family that goes to church regularly become less and less involved after they enter adulthood. Some become Atheist, many become Agnostic and a few seek out other belief systems that they feel are more in line with the truth as they see it.
I am of the opinion that most news reporters and editors are thoroughly secular in their individual world view. Some of them went to church as kids because their parents made them, but a vanishingly small number of them attend church/synagogue/mosque/temple as free will adults going to reinforce their own faith.
I know that when my parents packed me off to Sunday school as a kid I resented the daylights out of it. I imagine many others who were forced to attend services instead of getting to goof off on Sunday/Saturday/Friday probably also resented it and because the USA is a predominantly Christian country most of them resented Church instead of one of the many other faiths that exist.
Projecting this resentment over some of the reporter and editor professionals goes a fair way to explain why stories about Christianity are frequently negative, while stories about faiths they don’t have personal experience with tend to be more neutral or even positive in slant. That doesn’t mean all reporters and editors hate Christianity, but if 80 percent are neutral and 5 percent are positive while the remaining 15 percent are negative then the negative stories are going to be the ones that stick out.
Mother Theresa usually got positive press coverage because she was so devoutly dedicated to charity it was hard to find fault with her. Unfortunately the Catholic faith as a whole has a legacy of accusations about pedophilia that it has done a very poor job of dealing with, so despite all the good Mother Theresa press the pedophile accusations greatly overwhelm that with negative press, and deservedly so.
However despite what some seem to think Catholicism is not the largest denomination in the USA. In fact based on PEW research surveys while over 70 percent of Americans call themselves Christians only 20 percent are members of the Catholic faith while the 46 percent are what are traditionally called Protestants.
According to the 2011 Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches, from which members in the United States are combined with Canadian members, and of the National Council of Churches, the five largest denominations are:
The Catholic Church, 68,503,456 members
The Southern Baptist Convention, 16,160,088 members
The United Methodist Church, 7,774,931 members
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 6,321,416 members
The Church of God in Christ, 5,499,875 members
For the Secular or Atheists looking in from the outside a couple of different opinions about those who are Devout are often expressed. On one hand I have heard several prominent members around here refer to all believers as ignorant, stupid or otherwise mentally disabled in some form or fashion. On the other hand I have heard it expressed that people of faith must just be in their faith for social reasons, they have friends there or they have a good ole boy network relationship with other members of like faith, as if the faith is nothing but a social club style organization.
The sad fact is the more devout a person is the less likely they are to be understood by a secular person, and vice versa. Secular people have no use for the eternal because they do not believe in it, or they believe they will be judged as okay because they are “a good person”. They simply do not give much if any thought to eternity. Devout believers in the Jewish/Christian/Islamic type of faiths on the other hand devote a lot of time thinking about eternity and the consequences to themselves in the afterlife. This radically different world view biases the Devout to see the Secular as all a bunch of Hedonists while going the other direction the Secular see the Devout as crazy people who don’t enjoy anything about life here on Earth. Neither view is fully correct, but most people would rather go through life with blinders on than do the hard work it takes to see people as complete individuals, not caricatures of themselves.
A devout Jew or Christian actually has more in common with a devout Muslim than they do with an Atheist who despises all faiths equally.
Islam compared to the other Abrahamic faiths is a relatively small portion of the American population. Pew research estimated that in 2010 there were 2,595,000 Muslims of all denominations and racial backgrounds in the USA or a little under 1 percent of the population. This makes Islam a very small minority compared to Christianity with its 213,000,000 claimants, or even the Jewish population with 6,800,000 members.
Being such a small population of the total most Americans do not personally know anyone who is a devout Muslim unless they live in a community where the two groups mingle frequently. When you do not know people of a group different than your own you tend to project either your hopes or your fears upon that group subconsciously. IOW you see them as angels or devils, not the combination of traits that all humans are actually made up of.
If you are a secular reporter who did not know any Muslims growing up and what you know about them is a mish mash of half forgotten European history lessons and modern press releases from groups like CAIR how are you likely to view them? Well you know they are a small minority, so their rights are in danger of being suppressed. With a few seconds googling you will know they are somewhere around 2.6 Million people in the USA but the number of attacks perpetrated by Muslims is very small. Yes radicalized Muslims attacked our country directly several times since 2001, however the vast majority of American Muslims have not done anything wrong. Even if a thousand of them did that would still be far less than 1 percent of the Muslim population.
While all of the above is true IMO and it goes a long way towards explaining why there is so much resistance to using the terminology of ‘radical islam’ it doesn’t explain everything.
Thoughts?
