I would suggest to Michael Gerson that one reason that America has been doing a very inadequate job of promoting religious tolerance in the Middle East is that one major political party is completely unaware of the true history of religious tolerance in the United States. In Republican circles, this country was founded by devoted trinitarian Christians, despite the fact that the first trinitarian president was Andrew Jackson, and he only converted after he retired from public life. Most of the presidents who served between Jackson and Woodrow Wilson were no more than nominally religious, with several, including John Tyler, Franklin Pierce, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, and Rutherford Hayes appearing to be completely disinterested in religious life. Others, like Millard Fillmore and William Taft, were unitarians who (explicitly, in Taft’s case) denied the divinity of Christ.
The initial compact that put the “United” in the “States” was an agreement between Quakers and Congregationalists and Episcopalians and Presbyterians and Baptists and Catholics to put aside their religious differences in the interest of creating a central government that would make no laws respecting their faith. The intellectuals who put the Constitution together and then promoted its adoption were not trinitarians, but unitarians who had been steeped in the works of British and French philosophers, as well as the classics produced in Ancient Rome and Greece.
Religious tolerance didn’t just happen. It evolved over time. Congregationalism was still the state religion of Massachusetts until 1833. But, as Americans grew used to having the freedom to adopt whatever religion they chose and live wherever they wanted, a new society snapped into existence unlike any before seen on Earth.
The GOP, however, thinks that pluralism represents a threat to American society and teaches that this country was founded on Christian principles, by which they errantly mean a dogmatic belief in the divinity of Christ.
How can we promote religious pluralism and tolerance in the Middle East if half our country doesn’t even know it was accomplished here at home?
To our Christian Conservatives, the handwriting in the Old Testament and the US Constitution look exactly alike.
God’s hand, writ both!
It wouldn’t hurt if these self-proclaimed “Lovers and Devout Followers of Their Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ,” ever actually read the New Testament sometime.
And, of course, after that, the US Constitution.
Maybe, Mr. Gerson, you, you sociopathic douche-canoe, can lead the way.
You might actually learn something.
But learning something means you have to have an open mind. And I don’t think you’re capable of that.
Please prove me wrong.
The handwriting of God…
Well there’s a guy entrapped in his own clever metaphor. Maybe he can show us a sample for calligraphic analysis.
Occurs to me that perhaps Sarah Palin reads her Bible the same way she reads current events.
“The GOP, however, thinks that pluralism represents a threat to American society and teaches that this country was founded on Christian principles, by which they errantly mean a dogmatic belief in the divinity of Christ.”
Actually, I think that while the divinity of Christ is a given for most of them, it doesn’t generally enter into their thinking. Jesus is simply God’s sidekick, and God is their ultimate appeal to authority, who just happens to want whatever they want and just happens to be angered by anything they’re uncomfortable with other people having.
Is Gerson suggesting that the US should protest the IDF repression of Christians in Nazareth, Bethlehem, and Galilee?
Or the mood in Israel that has some Israelis longing to tear down the Al Aqsa mosque?
Or the wealthy Tel Aviv residents who complain to the city about the bells of a church built in 1870 or the muezzin’s calls from a mosque built much earlier?
Of course, Gerson could look back to the US and the treatment of muslims and mosques in cities in towns all over the country.
Or focus on a major US Arab ally that finances religious intolerance.
And then there’s Texas.
“The initial compact that put the ‘United’ in the ‘States’ was an agreement between Quakers and Congregationalists and Episcopalians and Presbyterians and Baptists and Catholics….”
I don’t know which of the founders were Catholic, but they would have needed to keep their religion well concealed, as anti-Catholic sentiment was ubiquitous in that time and place. The hysteria about Irish immigration in the 1840s was directly linked to their Catholicism. Before the influx of Irish, Roman Catholics were less than 1% of the American population.
Wikipedia: “In 1629, George Calvert, 1st Lord Baltimore in the Peerage of Ireland, fresh from his failure further north with Newfoundland’s Province of Avalon colony, applied to Charles I for a royal charter for what was to become the Province of Maryland. Calvert’s interest in creating a colony derived from his Catholicism and his desire for the creation of a haven in the New World for Catholics.”
To the best of my memory of high school American history classes, only Rhode Island really embraced religious pluralism.
We’re not going to get anywhere on this one with reasonable, historical arguments. There’s something else going on here — some deep set of emotions is involved. It’s just like the gun thing; you can discuss the actual history all day and all night and it won’t make any difference.
The gun thing, as we know, is essentially about race (and, to a slightly lesser degree, about a manufactured “fear of government”). I think the religion thing is a manifestation of similar fears about “Muslims” etc. (shocker, I know — I’m making the world’s most obvious point) but with an added dimension of, essentially, completely flexible morality.
I didn’t really get this straight in my head until I read Hitchens’ book on religion (God Is Not Great). Basically religion allows people to re-set all the levers on ethical behavior. It’s designed that way, with “contrition” and all that — you can murder and plunder and exploit all you want and you still get to draw the lines of “good” and “evil” wherever you want to put them so that you and your ilk end up on the good side. It’s so arbitrary and flexible that it even protects a decadent monster like George W. Bush, who’s exactly the kind of shiftless, rich drunken reprobate they’d despise if he hadn’t been “born again” (which is just meaningless sophistry).
It’s framing an agenda for a theocratic state through coy arguments. Low information voter people will nod at the historical revisionism and say “I didn’t know that. How interesting that the Quakers and the Catholics are why we’re “United” States.” When it’s just patent bullshit as Ben Franklin or Thomas Jefferson would tell them were they still alive. Special pleading from the clergy class all of it.
Clever propaganda, not deep set of emotions. Hidden agenda. Aren’t we clear about this now. Political strategy, not abnormal psychology is what is going on here. Continuing to treat it on an individual basis catches you by surprise when the political trap line is pulled.
Two elements of the same equation — the expoxy and resin of conservatism. The agenda and strategry you’re correctly pinpointing wouldn’t work if it didn’t play to to deep emotions I’m talking about.
I know enough hardcore conservatives to see, in person, how it works. People like Bush and Romney pursue an agenda as you’re saying, and do it by getting my religious relatives to have deep-set “gut level” emotions about what’s right and wrong for America on some “spiritual level” they’re imagining is the most important element of society.
I mean, there is no more dangerously meaningless term in our politics than “values” (as in “values voters” and “family values”).
It’s exactly what I wrote above: total immorality and absence of ethics gets dressed up with a few church visits and smiling vacation photos to create a meaningless veneer of “correct” (meaning, non-scary, white, “traditional”) “values”…while our side gets besmirched by ominous associations with “atheism” and “non-Christian” “belief.”
Bush was a playboy cokehead/drunk who lost money in the oil business, while Obama was an accomplished law professor with a history of community service. How do you turn a contrast like that upside down? Religion.