Holiday jeers from the establishment press.

Have you ever gotten the impression that reading one major newsweekly is like reading another? Of course! But the establishment echo chamber is usually not as obvious as it was this past Christmas season, when the December 22 issues of Time and U.S. News & World Report devoted their cover stories to supposedly scholarly attacks on the Christian faith. So perfectly in sync were the publications that they featured the same cover illustration--an adaptation of "The Saviour of the World" by the Dutch master Anthony van Dyck.

Both Time and U.S. News & World Report used the celebration of Jesus's birth to extol Gnosticism--a once-rejected rival of Christianity that is supposedly enjoying a contemporary revival. Both publications cite the recent bestseller The Da Vinci Code, a novel that re-packages several time-worn Gnostic myths, such as: Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, whom he chose as a successor; and the "Holy Grail" was in fact the sang real--royal bloodline--of Jesus's physical offspring, who supposedly became France's Merovingian dynasty.

Time points to the immensely successful Matrix films as an illustration of the way Gnostic ideas have "found their way into the most successful reaches of pop culture." And both journals portray the growth of neo-Gnosticism as an indictment of conventional Christianity, which the politically correct crowd considers to be insufficiently tolerant and diverse.

Easter has also provided the establishment press with a convenient new hook for attacking Christianity. The cover story for the April 8, 1996 Newsweek, "Rethinking the Resurrection," put the spotlight on scholars who seek "to replace the 'cultic' Jesus of Christian worship with the 'real' Jesus unearthed by academic research.... [B]y reconstructing the life of Jesus they hope to show that belief in the bodily resurrection of Jesus is a burden to the Christian faith and deflects attention from his role as social reformer."

Newsweek's March 27, 2000 cover story, "Visions of Jesus," chose the Easter season as an appropriate time to review "How Jews, Muslims and Buddhists View Him." While each of those religions claims as adherents millions of decent, honorable, generous people, whose beliefs should be respected, it's difficult at best to see why their views of Jesus are more newsworthy than those of people who acknowledge Him as Lord.

One supposes that the seasonal mockery of Christianity by the mainstream press is to be expected in an era when it's considered a borderline hate crime to wish someone a "merry Christmas" (as opposed to a happy generic "holiday").