From the Washington Post (link):
By instinct and training, we journalists are skeptics about religious activists. Their appeals are seen in newsrooms as special pleadings from organized interest groups. Editors reinforce reporters’ instincts to treat religion politely but suspiciously. Ours is a secular trade honoring information more than faith.
This professional dichotomy ran through my mind during a recent conversation here with Yu Jie, a Chinese writer who says his political opposition to the Beijing dictatorship is deeply rooted in Christian faith. Yu insisted to me that Christianity will play the decisive role in bringing to China the freedoms that political protesters died demanding in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
Yu made the same points two days later to President Bush in a White House meeting that suggested that even a faith-based president can also be uneasy with removing the walls between dissident politics and religious worship.
For more on Yu Jie’s meeting with President Bush, see this Reuters report (link). UPDATE: See also “CAA Releases Excerpts of the Talk Between US President and the Three Chinese House Church Intellectuals in the White House – China Aid Association” (link).
