Review
Culture
Eating
Film & TV
Hospitality
3 min read

The hidden messages in Meghan Markle’s new Netflix show

How With Love, Meghan taps into ancient rituals

Jessica is a Formation Tutor at St Mellitus College, and completing a PhD in Pauline anthropology, 

A woman stands at a kitchen island with a chopping board on it.
Netflix.

It seems Netflix is ‘optimising its content for background viewing’. I rolled my eyes.  How depressing. Media companies know we are distracted, and they are altering the content of their shows to accommodate. It is true that “watching TV” no longer means “watching TV.” According to a 2023 YouGov study, 91 per cent of Americans check their phone at least once while watching TV. And now we are learning that TV content is being made so that viewers who have this playing on their screens in the background can actually follow along. Simple story lines, easy dialogue, you name it. I must admit, this is the context that led me to watch Meghan Markle’s new Netflix series, With Love, Meghan. While cooking dinner or tidying the house, I am prone to pop a TV show in the background. This is usually re-watching shows I know well - 24, Desperate Housewives, or Friends – but I thought I would give this new Netflix show a whirl.  

I’d seen some of the controversy about this show online and wanted to see what it was like. However, I didn’t want to give my own time to watch it, so it would be the perfect thing to partner with another task, in my case, cooking dinner. As I listened to it in the background, one thing struck me. The language sounded strangely familiar. 

I began to overhear terms familiar to me from church. Our time, Meghan told us, was “sacred,” our practices were “rituals,” we give an “offering” to those we love and care about, and we are “blessed” by their presence with us. Had I accidentally clicked on a YouTube sermon from [insert church name here]?   

The show kept drawing on language and themes deeply rooted in religion and spiritual traditions—particularly ritual. Frank Gorman once said, 

 “Ritual … becomes a means by which humans participate in the ongoing order of creation. Their existence is made meaningful as they participate in the never-ending drama of creation in ritual.”  

That’s exactly what seemed to be happening in With Love, Meghan. The show wasn’t just about hospitality or relationships but about finding meaning in the everyday through repeated, sacred actions. 

The language of sacred time, offerings, and blessings taps into something ancient and profound. In the Bible, God teaches people about His goodness through rituals—structured, embodied practices designed to help them understand who He is and who they are. The Israelites were not just learning ideas; they were instructed in these routine, regular practices that improved and enriched their lives.  

Rituals take what is ordinary and transform it into something sacred. They link our memory to the past, present, and future... 

Now in our modern world, we’ve largely lost this understanding of the power of ritual. Modern life is often fragmented and distracted—we chase peace but rarely stop long enough to experience it. Yet, in a strange way, shows like Love, Meghan seem to be reclaiming some of that language of ritual, even if unintentionally. Everything we do every day is, in some sense, a ritual. It is sacred. The way we make coffee in the morning, sit down with a friend, and even watch a show while preparing a meal are all embodied practices that shape our inner attitudes toward life. We know that our time is precious, so celebrating and savouring the everyday moments might be key in this deep pursuit of peace. We are returning to rituals.  

Rituals take what is ordinary and transform it into something sacred. They link our memory to the past, present, and future, and for Christians, re-orientate us towards God. They make us pause and participate in something bigger than ourselves. Perhaps that’s why the language in With Love, Meghan stood out so much. It wasn’t just talking about hospitality—it was using the language of sacred connection, of a theology rooted in everyday life. 

It resonated with me, even as background noise. How can you teach people ritual? You do it through action. Embodied practices—living out meaning with our bodies—have always been central to faith and human connection. Even modern media, designed for distracted consumption, can’t help but borrow from these ancient patterns. If we seek true connection, we have to return to the rituals that shape our everyday lives and, ultimately, remind us that we are a part of something much bigger than ourselves. This is what is truly sacred.  

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Article
Culture
Digital
Freedom of Belief
4 min read

Failure to report Nigeria’s massacres reflects a wider media evolution

The new reporters and the struggle to tell the truth.

Chris Wadibia is an academic advising on faith-based challenges. His research includes political Pentecostalism, global Christianity, and development. 

A man reads a newspaper called The Punch.
Muhammad-Taha Ibrahim on Unsplash.

The large-scale slaughter of any religious group deserves robust, stubborn media coverage. Merciless persecution of Christians in Nigeria is the most overlooked and yet most newsworthy story in the country’s media landscape. This violence requires immediate and significantly expanded attention from local media. So why is it not making headlines?  

Nigeria, a charmingly vibrant and dynamic capital of the Christian world with nearly 100 million believers, is paradoxically the deadliest country in the world to be a Christian. NGO Open Doors estimates that 12 Nigerian Christians die every day because of their faith – one every two hours. Between October 2022 and September 2023, 4,118 people died in Nigeria simply for identifying as a Christian. These numbers seem more appropriate to the medieval world. The sad reality, however, is that gory, gruesome, and family-destroying violence against Christians is indeed occurring throughout contemporary Nigeria.   

Some new media voices, like Truth Nigeria courageously report on these sinister, lethal attacks. It’s a Nigeria-focussed media entity backed by Equipping the Persecuted, a US-based humanitarian non-profit organisation, devoted to exposing avoidable losses of life in Nigeria.  A disproportionate number of these nightmarish attacks deliberately target vulnerable Christians living in communities easily accessible to any of Nigeria's many Islamist terrorist sects. New media like Truth Nigeria are filling the coverage gaps created by legacy media inaction. Why are its peers in legacy media not reporting on them too?  

Who are the most trusted voices in the contemporary world? For perhaps the first time in modern history, legacy media no longer have seniority in the coliseum of global thought. Popular disenchantment with it is growing globally. Billions of people worldwide no longer perceive traditional legacy media as a trustworthy and legitimate arbiter of information.  

Few Nigeria-focused media voices (legacy or new) calculate it as in their interests to speak out against the abuses. 

A key reason for the growing disenchantment is the increasingly obvious and frustrating political capture of legacy media voices. Channels and publications were once trusted for their popularly perceived independence, objectivity, and nonpartisanship. Now those politically unbiased legacy media have become an endangered species nearing extinction.  

Such media evolution is especially pronounced in the US. An American media landscape once led by legacy media channels like CNN, ABC News, and Fox News now includes new-kid-on-the-block podcasters like Joe Rogan, Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson, and Candace Owens, whose shows attract millions of views and subscribers. Independent, personality-driven new media voices like these regularly outperform their legacy media counterparts, the latter of which are being increasingly deemed by critics as too establishmentarian, out of touch, and unappealing to younger viewers.     

In Nigeria, like in the US, popular public perception apprehends the relationship between media and the state to be too close for the media to operate autonomously and impartially. A relevant factor is the federal and state governments hold the lion’s share of power. They are able to shut down or severely damage the operational capacity of the media that does highlight the kleptocratic industrial complex reinforcing infamous world-leading levels of inequality. Few Nigeria-focused media voices (legacy or new) calculate it as in their interests to speak out against the abuses so entrenched in the social and historical fabrics of Nigerian society. Mass and violent persecution of Christians is perhaps the most significant of these abuses.  

Like many other countries, Nigeria has no shortage of newsworthy stories marked by great abuse and violence. However, the fact that the ongoing slaughter of Christians is taking place in one of the global capitals of Christianity, the religion most responsible for building the modern world, suggests the refusal of legacy media there to report on local massacres is driven by political factors. Ones that differentiate it from the dramatic changes in the media industry we are witnessing in countries like the US. 

Many influential media personalities in Nigeria went to Christian schools and universities, and worship in Christian churches. However, they refuse to use their positions of power to draw attention to fellow members of their global community of Christians who are violently killed every single day in the same sovereign land on which they sleep at night.   

What’s driving the reticence? 

One of the distinctive factors contributing to Nigerian legacy media reticence to cover such killings is that Nigeria is the only country in the world that is home to both world-leading numbers of Christians and Muslims. The country has the world’s sixth largest number of Christians and the world's fifth largest number of Muslims.  

Reports on killings of Christians, especially given that many Muslims also die from radical Islamist violence in Nigeria, could be perceived by viewers as religious bias fanning flames of sectarianism in a country already notorious for such violence. A second factor is that legacy media coverage of these slaughters implicates the disappointing response of Nigerian state agencies charged with maintaining security. Proud state personalities would likely react to negative media coverage of their performance by becoming even less engaged with the media.  

Either way, the Nigerian government has built for itself an infamous global reputation for being dysfunctional when trying to serve its citizens. And in contrast, only achieving a semblance of normal function when serving the interests of its kleptocrats and oligarchs. Vulnerable Christians living in regions affected by religiously motivated violence who live to see another day (unlike their less fortunate friends and family members) bear the brunt of a disinterested government and the politically captured media that fails to report it.