A reader writes:
Your post reminded me of this passage from Tocqueville's Democracy in America:
"I have pointed out how in times of enlightenment and democracy the human spirit is loath to accept dogmatic beliefs and has no lively sense of the need for
them except in the matter of religion. This shows that, at such times above all, religions should be most careful to confine themselves to their proper sphere, for if they wish to extend their power beyond spiritual matters they run the risk of not being believed at all. They should therefore be at pains to define the sphere in which they claim to control the human spirit, and outside that sphere it should be left completely free to follow its own devices.
"Muhammad brought down from heaven and put into the Koran not religious doctrines only, but political maxims, criminal and civil laws, and scientific theories. The Gospels, on the other hand, deal only with the general relations between man and God and between man and man. Beyond that, they teach nothing and do not oblige people to believe anything. That alone, among a thousand reasons, is enough to show that Islam will not be able to hold its power long in ages of enlightenment and democracy, while Christianity is destined to reign in such ages, as in all others."
This whole chapter in Democracy is incredible — almost perfect. Tocqueville's right, I think, about the fundamental compatibility between Christianity and what we might call modernity (at least, modernity rightly understood), unless, as happens so often now, Christians betray the core message of the Gospels that Tocqueville describes.
Islam is far more compatible with Islamism than Christianity is with Christianism. So how all the more tragic is it that Christianity in America has descended into such un-American and un-Christian politicization.
The Dish 