It’s not followers of Islam who scare me, it’s “Islamicists”
– followers of Islam who, with the holiest of intentions, and only to please
God, crash planes and kill innocent people.
It’s okay with me (barely) if they crash their own planes and kill themselves. Or if people willingly
drink their own Kool-Aid. But no
fair, it seems to me, threatening the lives of moderate Muslims or anyone else.
And so I read with interest these excerpts from Paul Gaston’s piece
in Saturday’s Washington Post:
People calling themselves Christians
are gathering once again for a crusade against what they consider to be the
secular humanist subversion of Christian values. . . .
What these self-avowed Christians do
not acknowledge -- and what the American public seems little aware of -- is
that the war they are waging is actually against other people calling
themselves Christians. To simplify: Right-wing
and fundamentalist Christians are really at war with left-wing and mainstream
Christians. It is a battle over both the meaning and practice of Christianity
as well as over the definition and destiny of the republic . . .
The assault on the judiciary is
especially revealing. The vicious
attacks on Judge George Greer, the Florida
jurist who presided over the Schiavo case, reveal the
bizarre nature of right-wing Christian fantasies. A regular recipient of
hate mail and threats against his life, Judge Greer is a lifelong Southern
Baptist, a regular in church and a conservative Republican. None of those
credentials protected him from the assaults of fellow Christians, including
messages saying he would go straight to Hell . . .
Nearly
all of the demonized judges are, in fact, practicing Christians, not secular humanists. Perhaps half of them are Republican
appointees, and at least that many regard themselves as conservatives. In
addition to Greer, most of the judges of the 11th Circuit who upheld his
rulings, as well as most of the Supreme Court justices who declined to
intervene, consider themselves Christian . . .
And, lest we forget, Charles Darwin
himself was a serious Christian.
The
history of a Christian church divided against itself
is a long and bloody one. People calling themselves Christians have stood for
war and peace, subjugation and brotherhood, communism and capitalism, privilege
and equality, enslavement and liberty, imperialism and isolation.
That
is one reason Thomas Jefferson insisted on religious liberty in the new
republic. In his
Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom, he wrote that "millions
of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity,
have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch
toward uniformity."
The present war within the Christian
fold is perhaps more threatening to the republic than any of the previous intramural
disputes. Right-wing religious zealots,
working in partnership with the secularists who have advised President Bush,
are a threat to the most fundamental of American principles. The founders
of our nation welcomed and planned for spirited debate over public policies,
including the role of the judiciary. But as sons of the Enlightenment, they
looked to found a republic in which the outcome of those debates would turn on
reason and evidence, not on disputed religious dogma. They planned wisely for principles
that are now under wide assault.
All Americans, of whatever religious or
non-religious persuasion, need to be on the alert to preserve those principles.
The burden falls especially heavily on
the mainstream Christians who are slowly awakening to the gravity of the
challenge facing them. Too long tolerant of their brethren, too much given
to forgiveness rather than to confrontation, they need to mount a spirited,
nationwide response to what constitutes a dangerous distortion of Christian
truths and a frightening threat to the republic they love.
The writer is professor emeritus of
southern and civil rights history at the University of Virginia.
This is
not to say for a moment that any significant fraction of America’s
fundamentalist Christians advocate violence.
But there’s not a whole lot of “judge not lest ye be judged” going on
out there, either; and reading the above elicits the quote below (thanks to Del Rickel for bringing it to my attention):
BARRY
GOLDWATER’S VIEW
Per the Congressional
Record, September 16, 1981:
There is no position on which people
are so immovable as their religious beliefs. There is
no more powerful ally one can claim in a debate than Jesus Christ, or God, or
Allah, or whatever one calls this supreme being. But
like any powerful weapon, the use of God's name on one's behalf should be used
sparingly. The religious factions that are growing throughout our land are
not using their religious clout with wisdom. They are trying to force
government leaders into following their position 100 percent. If you disagree
with these religious groups on a particular moral issue, they complain, they
threaten you with a loss of money or votes or both. I'm frankly sick and tired
of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I
want to be a moral person, I must believe in 'A,' 'B,' 'C,' and 'D.' Just who do they
think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate
their moral beliefs to me? And I am even more angry as
a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it
has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate.
I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try
to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of
'conservatism.'
– Conservative Arizona senator and
1964 Republican presidential nominee
Barry Goldwater