Over the years Fox News has been properly criticized for its brazen political partisanship, rabid anti-Obama crusading, and support for a far-right, corporate-friendly, Tea Party agenda, but less has been mentioned about their religious bias for Christianity and open proselytizing.

Sure, we all remember the annual “War on Christmas” campaigns and the efforts to discriminate against Muslims who have the effrontery to want to build mosques so that they can practice their religion as the Constitution guarantees. But little notice has been paid to the increasingly televangelical tone of Fox’s programming. More and more, Fox broadcasts stories whose only purpose is to shore up faith in Christianity.

While Fox rarely reports on religious discrimination against other faiths, they have a hyper sensitivity to what they regard as slights to Christians. Host Todd Starnes seems to produce daily pieces about some imaginary suppression of the rights of Christian soldiers, which is usually just an example of them being required to be tolerant of non-Christians and gay Americans. Gretchen Carlson launched her new program by noting that she will feature stories that favor her faith. And Christian leaders like the Pope are a staple of Fox’s schedule, except when he advocates for the poor.

But an article on the Fox News web site takes real leaps of faith in promoting what they characterize as a miraculous conversion from a pagan Islamic belief to glorious Christianity. The headline preaches “Muslim man becomes Christian after recovering from brain aneurysm.” The story is one of hope for the salvation of infidels who suffer from not knowing Jesus. Of course, Fox never considers the possibility that having a serious brain defect might lead to delusional thoughts and behavior.

However, a more egregious deceit in the story is revealed as it unfolds. Rather than being a tale of a man who is transformed instantly into a beacon of faith due to a life-threatening illness, the conversion actually took more than twenty years to take effect. It began with questions about why he survived after waking from a month-long coma induced by the aneurysm.

“That question started Shamsi-Basha on a 20-year journey that he says led him to Jesus Christ. He began reading the Bible and was baptized in 1996, but he says it took another 10 years of challenges — including a divorce, his father’s death and becoming homeless — before he fully accepted becoming a Christian.”

So contrary to Fox’s portrayal of this incident as a miracle enacted by the waving of a magic wand over some poor soul, it is actually a story that has almost nothing to do with the illness from two decades prior, and more the result of relentless and prolonged hardship that is often the inspiration for people to grasp onto the notion of a higher power in their desperation for relief and peace of mind.

Regardless of what one chooses to believe about this man’s experience and spiritual conversion, it is pathetic (though typical) that Fox decided to exploit the story and present it in such a deliberately misleading fashion. It is further evidence that Fox is more interested in acting as missionaries than as journalists. And since the subject of this article has also written a book about his journey, Fox also gets an opportunity to practice its other religion: the holy sacrament of commerce.