A reader comments:
I applaud your efforts to call out the Christianists. At the same time, I wonder why you don’t have more company in doing so. I want to draw a parallel between Islamism and Christianity that points to something I’ve never quite been able to understand: the apparent willingness of many Muslims and Christians to allow the appropriation of their religion’s public face by those who seem to constitute only a small fraction of believers.
Tom Friedman, among many others, has been correct to point out the hypocrisy of Muslim leaders who quickly condemn many American actions as anti-Muslim while barely uttering a word when Islamic terrorists bomb mosques and murder Muslims. Similarly, many Muslims are eager to point out the unfair perception that violence inheres in Islam, but it seems (to me) that Muslims are more vocal and more mobilized in denouncing the West for stigmatizing them as violent than they are in opposing actual violence carried out in the name of their faith.
An analogous observation can be made of American Christians. Many of my Christian friends hate – indeed, are offended by – the notion that as Christians people assume them to be intolerant, bigoted, and (worst of all) Republican. But how is it that Christians in the States have allowed American Christianity to be more commonly associated with intolerance than humility? If the perception has been allowed to slip so far, don’t all Christians deserve the blame? Isn’t their faith important enough to be defended from those who would, if you’ll pardon the term, hijack it?
Well, two points. The first is that the Christianists are not involved in anything like the extremism of the Islamists; and the Constitution protects us from full-bore theocracy. And so acquiescence among American Christians is far more defensible. Secondly, the Christianists have a lot of authority on their side. The Vatican has embraced the politicization of Christianity; and the Christianists in America have proven able to deliver votes to Karl Rove, thus cementing their own political power. Ordinary Christians, especially those whose faith is a little less dogmatic and a little more self-effacing than the Christianists’, can easily be intimidated into silence or acquiescence. But that silence is slowly ending. As the political project of the Christianists crumbles – as all such political projects inevitably do – we’ll see another cycle of withdrawal from politics and concentration on, you know, actual Christianity. That’s my hope, at least. And history gives it credence.
(Photo: Thomas Michael Alleman for Time.)
The Dish 