August 2010 Archives

According to the latest Newsweek poll, 24 percent of Americans think Obama is either Muslim or a follower of Islam. And 31 percent think it's definitely or probably true that he "sympathizes with the goals of Islamic fundamentalists who want to impose Islamic law around the world." I'm guessing that the Obamas will be joining a church in Washington after Labor Day.

What's up with Glenn Beck? The Washington media were shocked by the religiosity of his "Restoring Honor" rally last Saturday--but what do you expect from a press gang that only knows how to fight the last war. It overlooked last year's Beck rally--and so hyped this one as Beck's Second Coming. (See Douthat, Ross). But according to the professional crowd counter hired by CBS, less than 100K showed up. And what transpired on stage lacked the populist zip that we've come to expect from Glenn & Friends. It was a pretty feckless show, if you ask me.

Maybe the problem was that Glenn told them to leave their placards at home. What's a Tea Party Rally without placards? Sarah Palin was scripted into portraying the mother of a combat vet, and sounded like her heart wasn't in it. As Glenn said, this was a rally not about what's wrong with America but with what's right about America. How the hell do you get to restore honor when you don't talk about how "they" took it away?

Michael Sean Winters has noted that "Restoring Honor" harked back to the "I Love America" rallies that Jerry Falwell held at all 50 state capitols in the mid-1970s, and indeed there was something retro about the God-and-Country themes that Saturday's event endlessly hammered home. But the Falwell rallies came in the wake of the Vietnam war--and the anti-war counterculture. They were Nixon's Silent Majority gearing up for the Reagan Revolution. The Beckian summons came with the other side--the Democrats--doing their level best to embrace God and conducting the war that the Republicans started with more vigor than the country appears to want. Except for some professional atheists, no one is disrespecting God. If there's an antiwar movement, it's keeping to itself.

Sure, Glenn has moved from fixing on "social justice" to identifying liberation theology as the fly in Obama's religious ointment--but denouncing liberation theology is a pretty 70s thing too, and too fancy for one of those Tea Party placards. "Obama is a Liberation Theologian"? I don't think so. Pace Douthat, but I'd say that Glenn Beck the Preacher of Spiritual Uplift is not what his fans want, nor what the GOP needs. To me, he seems like one Fox guy who actually believes what he says--and at the moment what he's saying is off message.  

Since it covered itself with obloquy by taking a stand against the proposed Islamic community center in lower Manhattan, the ADL has been eager to put some distance between itself and its co-opponents. Franklin Graham, for example, who seized the occasion to issue his latest denunciation of Islam in general:

President Bush and President Obama made great mistakes when they said that Islam is a peaceful religion. It is not. There is no evidence in its history. It's a religion of hatred. It's a religion of war.

In response, ADL national director Abe Foxman took to the Huffington Post to denounce "groups with extreme anti-Muslim agendas," including those protesting with vile words and deeds the construction of mosques and Islamic centers in other parts of the country.

Now comes Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, founder and now spiritual head of Israel's ultra-orthodox Shas Party and, mutatis mutandis, Franklin Graham's Israeli equivalent when it comes to Islam. Yesterday, he declared that God should send a plague to strike down the Palestinians and their leader, Mahmoud Abbas. Shas happens to be a member of the current Israeli governing coalition, whose leader, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is about to enter into formal peace talks with Abbas. Netanyahu issued a mild statement to the effect that R. Yosef's comments "do not reflect Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's view or the position of the government of Israel." Let it be known that the current government of Israel is not pro-plague.

To its credit, the ADL's Israel office has not been shy about criticizing Yosef's incendiary rhetoric in the past, and not only when he has, for example, called down God's wrath on the likes of former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Back in April of 2001, the office denounced both a Passover sermon in which Yosef called for all Arabs to be annihilated and his subsequent "clarification" that he was only talking about terrorists. It is to be expected that a similar criticism will be forthcoming about the latest Yosef effusion.

But it would be more than appropriate if, this time around, Foxman himself stepped up to plate. What goes for Franklin Graham should go for Ovadia Yosef.

P.S. After a couple of weeks in Maine, it's great to be back. I guess.

Update: And Foxman does it.

My position on the "Ground Zero Mosque."

For most of the next couple of weeks. Sunny with (at most) intermittent blogging. 

I get a lot of spam on Spiritual Politics (still waiting for that captcha program), and mostly it has to do with product promotions--replica rolodexes, male sex products--and fulsome but sadly unspecific tributes to the blog's high quality. Over the past couple of days, however, there has been a slew of messages relating to the "Ground Zero mosque"--for the most part a spume of hostility the worst example of which (so far) is the following:

It's an aberration that the President of the United States endorses a mosque so close to the biggest and most atrocious terrorist act in the history of the World! It's a spit in the face of the people that died there in horror; their families, and the rest of us Americans. It is unacceptable! We should wait until the mosque is finished, and then it up while all the Muslims are in there praying!!! See how they feel about that.

I have, of course, no idea where this is coming from, or whether it represents someone's actual opinion or just the usual spamming imperative to get noticed by the blogger and maybe even make it into the blog's comment section. I'd guess the latter. The spammer has, for the moment, simply decided to piggyback on the road rage du jour that has become the new norm of self-expression in the electronic public square.

But its significance is not so easy to determine either. On an actual road, you're likely to be in close proximity to hundreds or thousands of other vehicles before you encounter one lunatic bent on inflicting whatever ails him on the rest of the driving community. You don't conclude that all drivers have gone nuts. In the journalistic blogosphere, however, you can't see all those other drivers who take a peek at what you've written and go on with the rest of their lives without leaving more than the record of another page view or site visit. So it seems as though the entire world's gone mad.

But maybe it hasn't. Maybe the amount of real outrage at the proposed Islamic community center in Lower Manhattan is small--compared to the spam and the politically motivated pseudo-outrage and the, dare I say it, actual support for religious liberty and its right to prevail over the ill will, suspicions, and sense of injury of some other Americans. 

As it rose to power in the late 1850s, the Republican Party absorbed the anti-Catholic populists of the American Party who live in historical memory as the Know-Nothings. So called because they denied all knowledge of what their party stood for, the Know-Nothings contributed a nativist gene to the GOP that it has never managed to knock out.

In the early days, Catholics and Jews were the principal suspect classes of outsiders. The problem, especially when it came to Catholics, was that there were just so darn many of them by the end of the 19th century that it didn't pay to indulge (at least publicly) in anti-Catholic bigotry. At the end of the 1884 presidential campaign, a Presbyterian preacher introduced GOP nominee James G. Blaine to a crowd of Protestant clergy with the words, "We are Republicans, and I don't propose to leave our party and identify ourselves with the party whose antecedents have been rum, Romanism, and rebellion"--thereby costing Blaine the election.

In recent years, the wise guys in the Republican Party have cottoned to the fact that the U.S. of A. has become a good deal more Latino than it used to be, and that it might not be such a good idea for the future of the GOP if it embraced (at least publicly) such anti-Latino-immigrant laws as Arizona passed a few months ago. Why not find a less politically potent body of Americans on which to vent one's nativist animosity? 

I give you: The Muslims. Unlike the Latinos, who are pushing toward 20 percent of the American population, they constitute less than one percent. And the largest portion of them are African-Americans who would never vote Republican anyway. But how to change the nativist narrative in time for November's mid-term elections?

The Ground Zero Mosque, of course. Talk about godsends. In May, when the story emerged, the ratio of newspaper, broadcast, and blog coverage of the Arizona law to the proposed Islamic Center in Manhattan was 20:1. Last month, it was 10:1. So far this month, it's been running at 1.3:1. That's according to Lexis-Nexis Academic word searches of Arizona+law+immigration+Brewer and Ground Zero+mosque+protest. Add coverage of other anti-Muslim protests around the country and the ratio turns the other way.

Ugly it may be, but you've got got to hand it to Palin, Gingrich, and Co. They know what they're doing.

It could be argued that the sins of Dublin auxiliary bishops Raymond Field and Eamonn Walsh, as laid out in the Murphy Report, didn't amount to much. Both, it seemed, failed in their duty to pursue and/or adequately report an allegation of sexual abuse by a priest. But, under pressure from their superior, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, the two tendered their resignations last December--and appropriately so. In the midst of the complete meltdown of the Irish church's institutional credibility, participation in the culture of cover-up had to be grounds for removal from office--for the good of the church. Or so one would have thought.

So why has the Vatican decided not to accept the resignations? The bottom line, as the Irish Times' Paddy Agnew points out, is that if all bishops who covered up clerical sexual abuse were permitted to resign, the episcopal ranks would be decimated. And then where would the church be? But of course, no one in the hierarchy can say that publicly. So the decision is announced in the quietest way possible, with no explanation offered. For the good of the church.

A big supporter of Judeo-Christian values--not to be missed.

I've been waiting around for some reaction to the Proposition 8 decision from my friends at bien-pensant Catholic blogs like America's In All Things and Commonweal's dotCommonweal and the National Catholic Reporter's NCR Today, but so far to almost no avail. Michael Sean Winters did issue a critique of Judge Walker's decision, based on a misunderstanding of what the judge meant when he wrote that "a private moral view that same-sex couples are inferior to opposite-sex couples is not a proper basis for legislation." The issue is not whether, as Winters asserts, "there is nothing 'private' about Catholic moral views." It's that, as Walker wrote, "[t]he state does not have an interest in enforcing private moral or religious beliefs without an accompanying secular purpose." And the defenders of Proposition 8 failed to demonstrate such a purpose.

Be that as it may, what are we to make of the silence of all those others on a subject that has engaged no little Catholic rhetorical and political action? What I'm inclined to make of it is that, like most American Catholics, they are actually in favor of same-sex marriage--at least as a right in civil society--and so can't bring themselves to stand with their bishops. But on the other hand, to do anything else would subject them to intolerable abuse from the Catholic right--abuse that (as David Gibson points out over at dotCommonweal today) even that paladin of right-wing Catholicism Archbishop Charles Chaput characterizes as meaner and more vitriolic than anything on the other side.

I'm not suggesting that these moderates come right out and tell the bishops they don't know what they're talking about. Rome has spoken pretty plainly on the issue. But there are issues of prudence and even principle that might usefully be raised. Such as that the church is going to have to prepare itself for the day when, as with birth control and divorce, it accepts same-sex marriage as a normal feature of a civil society whose moral legislation is not its own. And that just because the Magisterium now teaches that same-sex marriage is in violation of the natural law, it could be the case that, as has happened with other moral issues in the past (slavery, for example, and usury), a fuller understanding of the nature of things casts a different light on the matter.

Update: Over on Beliefnet, reader Bryan Comes comments that I missed one of those moderate voices I was looking for--his own, over at U.S.Catholic. And a good post it is. Thanks, Bryan! 

...on what's wrong with same-sex marriage. Or that's how I see it.

No college football player has ever made more of a show of his evangelistic Christianity than Tim Tebow, who before every game inscribed a Bible verse number on the glare grease under his eyes. So it's hard not to see his Denver Broncos teammates as making anything but a religious comment in hazing their new rookie by subjecting him to a classic monastic haircut. Catholic v. Protestant? I doubt it. In today's mix-and-match Christian world, tonsure = religious (probably).

In her round-up of anti-mosque protests in yesterday's New York Times, Laurie Goodstein found her way to Diana Serafin, an unemployed California grandmother who's been frequenting Tea Party events and anti-immigration rallies.

She said they read books by critics of Islam, including former Muslims like Walid Shoebat, Wafa Sultan and Manoucher Bakh. She also attended a meeting of the local chapter of ACT! for America, a Florida-based group that says its purpose is to defend Western civilization against Islam.

"As a mother and a grandmother, I worry," Ms. Serafin said. "I learned that in 20 years with the rate of the birth population, we will be overtaken by Islam, and their goal is to get people in Congress and the Supreme Court to see that Shariah is implemented. My children and grandchildren will have to live under that."

The best surveys of Muslims in America indicate that indicate that they now constitute well under one percent of the population. The 2008 Trinity American Religious Identification Survey, the third in a series beginning in 2009, shows that over the past 20 years, the number of adult Muslims i grew from 529,000 to 1,349,000--from .3 percent to .6 percent of American adults--growing half a fast in the 2000s as in the 1990s. It's possible, but unlikely, that Muslims will make up four percent of the U.S. population in 20 years.

No doubt there are some American Muslims who wish to live by Shariah law, just as there are some American Jews who order their domestic relations according to rabbinic law--halachah. Or just as other religious communities, from the Amish to the Roman Catholics, have their own rules governing the conduct of their members. But the idea that Muslims in America represent some kind of demographic/ideological threat to the American legal system is beyond far-fetched. It's a lie.

"Do the citizens of a state have the right to define legal marriage as a man-woman relationship? Or can courts overrule them on behalf of same-sex marriage?" So Russell Shaw began a piece in that avatar of Catholic conservatism, Our Sunday Visitor, a couple of weeks ago. Shaw went on to acknowledge that courts have "the raw power" to do so, but "[w]hether doing it would be a rightful exercise of their power is questionable indeed."

I'd turn the question around and ask Shaw if he thinks citizens of a state have the right to define legal marriage as a same-sex relationship? Suppose, in a parallel universe, they did so, and a federal court overturned the vote. Would he regard that as a rightful exercise of judicial power? Or suppose, in that same parallel universe, the citizens had voted to give a woman the right to abortion, and courts overruled them on the grounds that fetuses have a right to life. I'm confident Shaw would be on board with that decision.

Such considerations can help us parse the statement issued by Cardinal Francis George, president of the USCCB, in response to U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker's constitutional slam dunk of Proposition 8 in Perry v. Schwarzenegger:

Marriage between a man and a woman is the bedrock of any society. The misuse of law to change the nature of marriage undermines the common good. It is tragic that a federal judge would overturn the clear and expressed will of the people in their support for the institution of marriage. No court of civil law has the authority to reach into areas of human experience that nature itself has defined.

Here, the "clear and expressed will of the people" is a rhetorical feint, calculated to appeal to the majoritarian instincts of a democratic polity but carrying no real weight. For George, it's not the will of the people but what "nature itself has defined" that matters. How does he know that nature has defined marriage as exclusively "between a man and a woman"? Not by revelation, but through the exercise of reason. It's a matter of natural law, and therefore applicable to all people at all times. Or so the Catholic church teaches.

But check Beliefnet tomorrow.

David O'Connell, the former president of the Catholic University who was anointed coadjutor bishop of Trenton last weekend, may be a great guy--but given all that's been happening in the church over the past few months, his allocution left me cold.

His official episcopal slogan, Ministrare non ministrari--to serve rather than to be served--sounds humble enough, but it's simply an evocation of that old papal appellation, servus servorum dei--servant of the servants of God. Depending on who's wearing the mitre, it can signify faux as well as bona fide humility. Which posture will O'Connell assume?

He focused his remarks on laying out three ways a bishop serves: 1) teaching truth; 2) sanctifying his people; and 3) shepherding his people. "To teach. To sanctify. To shepherd. This is what a bishop does for God's people and with God's people." The most regal hierarch in history would have had no trouble uttering that line.

What about serving God's people by ensuring that they are protected against sexual predators in clerical clothing? What about serving God's people with an administration that is open and transparent? What about serving God's people by pledging to fulfill their spiritual aspirations? What about serving God's people, in a desperately poor city, with a renewed commitment to supporting their material needs? That's ministrare in my book.

Criticism of the Anti-Defamation League's opposition to Cordoba House, the Islamic center proposed to be built two blocks from the site of the World Trade Center, has been widespread and well-deserved. Stephen Prothero has a sharp essay over at CNN's Belief blog, as does Peter Beinart on the Daily Beast. Beinart makes the important point that for some time now the ADL has maintained a bifurcated stance on what constitutes "defamation." In the United States, the organization has more or less consistently maintained its original universalist commitment to opposing bigotry regardless of race, creed, or color. In Israel, however, its only interest is in anti-Jewish bigotry. Anti-Arab bigotry, by its lights, don't rate.

What's happened now is that the ADL is playing by Israel rules in New York. Never mind that it has joined with those who associate Muslims everywhere with the perpetrators of 9/11. As ADL national director Abe Foxman told the NYT, the "anguish" of those who lost loved ones "entitles them to positions that others would categorize as irrational or bigoted."

Let's try putting the shoe on the other foot, and imagine a comparable Israel case. An irenic Jewish group proposes building a community center devoted to peace and understanding a couple of blocks from the Cave of the Patriarchs, where on February 25, 1994, the Orthodox Jewish zealot Baruch Goldstein opened fire in a room being used as a mosque, killing 29 worshipers and wounding 150. Would the ADL oppose construction, out of deference to the anguish of the victims' families, or would it attack the opponents as irrational bigots? I think I know the answer.