How about "Going Religious"?

A week ago, over at the Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg chastised his fellow Atlantians for the sin of political correctness in not identifying alleged Fort Hood murderer Major Nidal Hasan as the Muslim jihadi Goldberg takes him to be. A double standard, he claimed, is at work here: "elite makers of opinion in this country try very hard to ignore the larger meaning of violent acts when they happen to be perpetrated by Muslims."

Here's a simple test: If Nidal Malik Hasan had been a devout Christian with pronounced anti-abortion views, and had he attacked, say, a Planned Parenthood office, would his religion have been considered relevant as we tried to understand the motivation and meaning of the attack? Of course. Elite opinion makers do not, as a rule, try to protect Christians and Christian belief from investigation and criticism. Quite the opposite. It would be useful to apply the same standards of inquiry and criticism to all religions.

By way of response, religion prof. Dan Mathewson argues over on Religion Dispatches that, in fact, the MSM did pull its punches when it came to attributing Christian motives to Scott Roeder, the man charged with murdering abortion doctor George Tiller. Roeder, writes Mathewson, "was described in the media as a right-wing, anti-government, anti-abortion activist; but not a single article that I was able to find in the mainstream media discussed Roeder's Christian faith as a motivating factor of his crime."

Actually, as Andrew Walsh points out in his article on the Tiller case in Religion in the News, the very mainstream Kansas City Star, whose coverage was superb, gave extensive attention to Roeder's somewhat complicated Christian journey and how that related to his anti-abortion and anti-government views. But it's true that Roeder was not generally characterized as a "Christian extremist"--and, so far as I know, no one has proposed calling what he did "going Christian," the way Tunku Varadarajan, over on Forbes. com, provocatively proposed "going Muslim" to describe Hasan-like acts.

Varadarajan, whose column is not quite as appalling as it sounds, remarks in passing (in contrast to both Goldberg and Mathewson) that the real problem is not the media's favoritism toward one religious tradition over another but towards religion in general: "This is part of a larger--and too-hot-to-touch--American problem, which is the privileging of religion, and its frequent exemption from rules of normal discourse." The same point is made today by On Faith's leading secularista, Susan Jacoby: "My own view is that the U.S. media, when a violent act is linked to religion--any religion--always downplay any influence that might have been exerted by an extremist interpretation of that religion."

The secularists have a point. There is something like what Jacoby calls "religious correctness" that has long led Americans to downplay religion as a motive for public hostility. The "Know-Nothings" of the 1850s were called that because the members of the American Party recognized that it was un-American to say openly that their primary motivation was anti-Catholicism--religious prejudice.

For all that, it's hard to argue that religion has not been part of the national discussion of both the Roeder and Hasan affairs. Debate over responsibility for the murder of Dr. Tiller centered on the demonization of "Tiller the Baby Killer" and the advocacy of violent action against abortion providers generally by religious activists in the anti-abortion movement and their advocates in the, ah, MSM. Likewise, Hasan's Muslim connections and views have been vigorously pursued by, yes, the MSM. As in the case of the Know-Nothings, everybody knows what the game is. And minimizing the significance of the religion of the alleged perpetrator, and accusing others of political correctness in refusing to blame that religion, are both part of the game.