The June 2006 issue of The American Enterprise includes a brief commentary on the culture war politicization of National Geographic magazine, once a trusted mainstay of middle American households. As evidence, TAE notes the magazine’s fawning over hyper-Darwinist E.O. Wilson and regarding Prince Charles’s proposals for state-engineered organic farming and the like. TAE points out the latest downgrade of National Geographic with its recent cover-story on the Gospel of Judas:
Speaking of Iron Age scribes, there was a pathetically hyped story on the “Gospel of Judas,” packaged for rubes as if there was something fresh and authoritative in finding a deviant manuscript written by Gnostics, who have long been known to have fed parasitically on Christianity (and other religions as well), distorting and mixing and rewriting at will, centuries after the original events described. What was found in this case was basically a very old New Age novel written by a fourth-century Egyptian equivalent of a cross between Marianne Williamson and Ward Churchill. Yet National Geo essentially announced on the basis of this single chunk of papyrus that moldy old Christianity is going to have to overturn much of what it believes to be true. This betrays either cluelessness on the complexities of religious scholarship, or shamelessness in preferring splashy subversion to accuracy.
I suppose National Geographic has always had a bit of a subversive edge to it. Every American neighborhood had the kid who passed around copies of his parents’ National Geographic, giggling over the photographs of scantily-clad exotic women.
Wonder if the coming generation will find eight year-old boys saying to their friends: “Psst, come check out this ancient Gnostic text?” or “Hey, don’t tell your folks, but you’ve gotta see the plans Prince Charles has for Belgian Endive in the UK”?
