Dan Walker, Creationism, and the witch-hunt against bible-believing Christians

Feb 14, 2016 by Jill

By Archbishop Cranmer:

Dan Walker is the Bible-believing son of a Baptist minister. He is a TV and radio sports presenter who has just been appointed to front the BBC Breakfast programme following the retirement of Bill Turnbull, who wants to spend more time with his bees. Those are the facts. The media furore surrounding Dan Walker’s appointment has been quite extraordinary. That is another fact.

One expects it from the Guardian. They carry a sneery piece today by Catherine Bennett – ‘Dan Walker: it’s tricky to trust a presenter who feels God got him the job‘ – which is replete with religious illiteracy, derision, caricature and snooty barbs against the Bible-believer: how cananyone be so moronic as to believe that God – God! – has a plan for his life? “Walker is the kind of media disciple who, if he lacks the official authority of, say, a Rev Richard Coles, our own Rev Giles Fraser, or their colleague, HSBC’s Rev Stephen Green, more than compensates for this lay status with assertions of inflexible faith,” she writes, with all the hyper-flexible journalistic tolerance of Richard Dawkins on dogma-enhancing steroids. There’s nothing so insidiously hypocritical as someone who is absolutely right lampooning those who are absolutely right.

So much for the Guardian; now to the Telegraph. They published a piece a few days ago entitled ‘Dan Walker’s creationism is an affront to reason, science and logic‘, with the strap line: “The BBC has done nothing to explain how someone who believes in the literal truth of Genesis can present the news accurately.” Seriously? Does the BBC really have to explain why religious belief ought not to be a bar to employment by a public body?

The article is written by Rupert Myers, who happens also to be a barrister. With that, you might expect intellectual rigour, sound judgment, impeccable integrity and the ability to ascertain crucial facts and present complex matters succinctly and fairly. But what you actually get is a sub-Guardian – even sub-GCSE – level of religious literacy, derision and caricature. It is such a diatribe of anti-Bible-believing-Christian prejudice that it is incredible (quite literally) that the Telegraph, which is owned by devout Roman Catholics, saw fit to publish it.

Read here