The media do not treat religion fairly because they routinely give preferential treatment to religion, exempting it from the critical scrutiny that all other institutions receive (or are supposed to receive) from a free press in our society. Religious skepticism, by contrast, is either treated negatively or, more commonly, omitted altogether from stories about religious issues.

The underlying pro-faith bias of the media reflects and reinforces the underlying bias of American society. It goes something like this: religion per se is a wonderful thing, so anything bad connected with religion is a perverse exception to the rule that God is Great and that most of God's messengers on earth are also great (though less great than God himself).

It takes a scandal of truly massive proportions, such as the long-term pedophilia coverup by the Catholic Church hierarchy, for the press to abandon its traditional posture of genuflection toward religious institutions. If the pedophilia story had not originally been broken by courageous journalists, most of them Catholics, at The National Catholic Reporter and The Boston Globe, I doubt that the rest of the press--sensitive to accusations of "anti-Catholicism"--would have had the guts to follow up.

This week's cover story in Time magazine, titled, "The Case for Teaching the Bible," exemplifies the way in which the mainstream media display obeisance toward religion. The story was obviously inspired by Stephen Prothero's new book, Religious Literacy, which I reviewed favorably in The Washington Post of March 4.

I did, however, have one important reservation about the book, which chronicles the ignorance of Americans about the religion (and the Bible) that they claim to revere. I believe that Prothero's proposal to remedy this ignorance with public school classes about the Bible, as well as about non-Christian traditions, is ill-advised and unworkable--on both an educational and a political level.

I am opposed to such courses not because they violate the First Amendment's establishment clause. They do not. The First Amendment prohibits preaching, not teaching about religion. My objection--and I might as well quote from my own review--is that "given the failure of so many schools to inculcate the most elementary facts about American history, it is hard to imagine that most teachers would be up to the task of explaining, say, the subtleties of biblical arguments for and against slavery. Furthermore, a curriculum that would meet with the approval of Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, Protestant and nonreligious parents would probably be a worthless set of platitudes."

The Time article, which presents an overwhelmingly (about 95 per cent) favorable picture of teaching about the Bible in public schools, does not pay the slightest attention to the educational objection I raised. It does quote two secularists who raise constitutional objections to such teaching, and what they have to say makes up about 2 per cent of the total text. Fair? Hardly.

The point is not whether public school teaching about the Bible is a good or a bad idea but that a complex, controversial, and many-faceted (not two-sided) subject was treated in a one-sided fashion. "The Case for Teaching the Bible," is, as its title clearly states, an argument--with a few straw secularists included as a gesture to "objectivity"--for teaching the Bible in public school. It reminded me of nothing so much as the one-sided treatment of issues involving Communism that permeated the pages of Time under Henry Luce.

A conspiracy against secularism? No. Such stories simply reflect the inherent pro-religious bias in all press coverage of such issues in the United States. The most insidious aspect of this kind of bias is its unconscious nature.

At least Time interviewed someone with a secular viewpoint. More commonly, any secular perspective is invisible. In television panels on religion and politics, participants run the gamut from A to B--A being right-wing fundamentalists and B being liberal Protestants, Catholics or Jews who want more religion in public life as long as it is liberal or "moderate" and not conservative religion. Those who stand up for secularism are almost never represented. One of the worst offenders is NBC's powerful Meet the Press, hosted by Tim Russert. Russert repeatedly assembles panels on religious issues in public life without including any secular voice.

People opposed to all religion are generally treated as extremists and crackpots. Astonishingly, even liberal Muslims and atheists raised as Muslims have been criticized in the press (mainly in reviews and opinion columns) for being too hard on Islam. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the author of Infidel, has actually been taken to task for her tough-minded, uncompromising views on the position of women within Islam. Apparently American multiculturalist commentators think they know more about Muslim women than a woman who has actually endured subjugation, including attempts to force her into an arranged marriage, within a traditionalist Muslim family.

Hirsi Ali would be more acceptable if she covered her head and professed respect for the "real" Islam--instead of calling attention to the "unreal" and extremely powerful factions of Islam that sanction honor killings and punish women for being raped.

Hirsi Ali's atheism has also been described as suspect because it is based on her negative personal experiences with Islamists. It is certainly true that people whose lives have been threatened by religious fanatics tend to have a less than sunny outlook concerning blind faith. How intolerant of Hirsi Ali to think that she has the right to speak out against a particular religion without risking her life!

The American press never suggests that anyone's religious faith is suspect because it is based on personal experience. Quite the contrary. The media routinely run stories about the transformative effects of being "born again" on various politicians.

That said, the quality of religion coverage in the print media--especially in major newspapers--has improved during the past 20 years. Most of this coverage comes from religion reporters, who are better educated than their colleagues about all religious traditions.

But too many political reporters, who also cover religious issues in public life, are as ignorant about religion as the rest of the public. These are the journalists who repeatedly refer to "Catholics" and "Jews" and "evangelicals" as if they all think alike and vote alike. Such reporters are equally ignorant about the role of free thought in American history, and their stereotypical views of atheists are as ill-informed as their views of religious believers. The difference is that the stereotype of believers is positive and the stereotype of atheists is negative.

Here's a modest proposal. Instead of teaching about the Bible in public schools, make every political reporter and editor, in print and television media, read both the Bible and the collected works of the once-famous 19th-century orator Robert Green Ingersoll, who was known as "the Great Agnostic." Then administer a RAT (Religious Aptitude Test) requiring at least one essay question. I volunteer my services as proctor. No Wikipedia citations permitted.

Of course, television is a more powerful source of stereotypes than the print media. The quality of religion coverage on television is simply abysmal and reflects an obligatory piety that is apparently one of the conditions for keeping an FCC license. TV reporters are particularly fond of interviewing lucky people whose houses have been left standing after a tornado and who inevitably say, "God was looking out for us." Why God wasn't looking out for their neighbors, whose houses were blown away, is an un-askable question on American commercial television.

A particularly nauseating (and quite recent) practice is the tendency of network anchors to intone, "Our prayers are with you" whenever they interview victims of hurricane, tsunami, child molestation or cancer.

That television should cover religion badly is a given; television covers almost every complex topic badly. That television personalities should confuse themselves with the clergy is a mind-boggling example of the sanctimony that pervades the video public square.

As a people, Americans are ignorant about both their religious and secular traditions. The media reflect and contribute to that ignorance. Shame on us.