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Waiting For Andromeda
Christopher Hitchens, having demonstrated to everyone's satisfaction that blind salamanders disprove the existence of God (or something like that), adds this characteristic flourish:
... to the old theistic question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" we can now counterpose the findings of professor Lawrence Krauss and others, about the foreseeable heat death of the universe, the Hubble "red shift" that shows the universe's rate of explosive expansion actually increasing, and the not-so-far-off collision of our own galaxy with Andromeda, already loomingly visible in the night sky. So, the question can and must be rephrased: "Why will our brief 'something' so soon be replaced with nothing?" It's only once we shake our own innate belief in linear progression and consider the many recessions we have undergone and will undergo that we can grasp the gross stupidity of those who repose their faith in divine providence and godly design.
What I like about Hitchens is how often he slips into exactly the sort of self-satisfied misanthropy that you find among the people he theoretically hates the most - the nutty apocalypticians and Left Behind devotees, that is. If the world were to end tomorrow in the hail of fire, I'm confident that one of the last things to be heard on Earth, before the meteor hits, would be the sound of Hitchens and Tim LaHaye both shouting in perfect unison: See, I told you so!
Obama and the Evangelicals, Cont.
There are two ways to read Pew's numbers on evangelical voters and the '08 election. You could read them the way Mark Hemingway does, emphasizing the fact that Obama is currently running a point behind where John Kerry was among white evangelicals at this point in the 2004 race. Or you could read them as good news for Obama, since McCain is currently running eight points behind where George W. Bush stood at this point in '04. I'd choose the latter reading. In July of 2004, only 4 percent of white evangelicals said they were undecided about whom to vote for. Now 12 percent say that they are - and while it's possible that nearly all of those undecideds will come home to the GOP once the chips are down, undecided voters do tend to break against the incumbent party, which seems to open a pretty sizable opening for Obama.
When all was said and done, Bush took a whopping 78 percent of the white evangelical vote in 2004. If Obama can hold the evangelicals who are supporting him now, and swipe two-thirds of the undecideds, he'll hold McCain to just 68 percent of this demographic - which could easily turn out to be an election-tipping difference. The opportunity is there. Obama just needs to figure out if he's willing to take the political risks necessary to exploit it.
Update: Obama's performance at Saddleback (and McCain's) will probably be at least mildly important in determining how those undecided evangelicals cast their votes.
Who Speaks For Islam?
The bad news at the Aspen Ideas Festival is that you can't attend two panels at once - which meant that while I was listening to David Brooks yesterday, I had to miss our own Jeff Goldberg moderating a discussion on Islam between Irshad Manji and Dalia Mogahed. Fortunately, Jennie Rothenberg (our crack web editor) was in attendance, providing commentary as well as the following clips:
Continue reading "Who Speaks For Islam?" »
Immortal Longings
Via Andrew, here's John Horgan, contributing to a symposium on the Singularity:
Let's face it. The singularity is a religious rather than a scientific vision. The science-fiction writer Ken MacLeod has dubbed it “the rapture for nerds,” an allusion to the end-time, when Jesus whisks the faithful to heaven and leaves us sinners behind.
Such yearning for transcendence, whether spiritual or technological, is all too understandable. Both as individuals and as a species, we face deadly serious problems, including terrorism, nuclear proliferation, overpopulation, poverty, famine, environmental degradation, climate change, resource depletion, and AIDS. Engineers and scientists should be helping us face the world's problems and find solutions to them, rather than indulging in escapist, pseudoscientific fantasies like the singularity.
But the very fact that the Singularity's appeal derives from some of the same impulses that drive religious faith - even as the prophets proclaiming its imminent arrival insist that they're relying on cold hard science - means that you aren't coming to make very much hay by telling the Ray Kurzweils of the world that we need to train our attention on terrorism or nuclear proliferation or famine or climate change instead. Some of the yearning for "transcendence" that the Singularity satisfies might go away in a juster, safer world, but the fundamental yearning it's addressed to - the desire for immortality - wouldn't. Eliminate terrorism and nuclear weapons, and you'll still die. Do away with poverty, clean up the environment, and ensure a fairer distribution of the earth's resources, and you'll still die. Find a cure for AIDS, and not only will you still die, but so will everybody you've cured.
Seen through this lens, telling people that they need to solve all the world's immediate problems before they take up the biggest Problem of all is like telling doctors facing a bubonic-plague outbreak that they can only address themselves to it once they've found a cure for colds, allergies, and stomach flu. Now of course this lens assumes that there could be a cure for death, which is where the issue of pseudoscience enters the picture, and the (im)plausibility of the claims the Singulatarians are making - an issue, I should note, that the substance of Horgan's essay is addressed to. But the mere fact that the Singularity is inherently "escapist," and bears a not-inconsiderable resemblance to Christianity, isn't a problem with the concept. It's the whole point.
Theodicy Revisited
A reader writes, amid a fascinating comments thread on this post:
From a purely logical point of view, Christianity's free will answer is unassailable: it is only because we have the capacity for evil that good is possible, and without sin there would be no Redemption. QED.
But as you point out the comparative facility of New Yorker writers to make the existence-of-evil argument, it is also grating for the equally well-off to make the free-will counter argument. I have led a pretty sheltered existence, and I've never known true evil, in my bones or in my gut. I have not known real hunger, or real pain. The oh so neat argument of free will seems so cold, so utterly irrelevant, when speaking with, say, a Holocaust survivor who has given up on God after experiencing the camps ... Of course you can point out that it is in that horror that other Holocaust survivors have found a reason to believe in God, but such considerations seem equally useless when talking not about the general presence of evil in the world, but about the precise and unique evils that one person has suffered.
The best Christian answer to the existence-of-evil argument seems to me to be, therefore, not the existence of free will (although, again, it is a perfectly valid response), but the much more concrete reality of Incarnation. God allowed evil to exist but He loves Man so much that He defeated it not just through the abstract (yet essential) gift of free will, but also by embracing His creature's condition and experiencing evil in the same ways.
Of course, from an atheist's perspective, this begs the question: to believe that God mitigated the presence of evil by experiencing and defeating it personally is to believe that God exists. But there is another way to put it: if it were possible to believe simultaneously in the existence of evil and in the existence of a benevolent God, then this benevolent God would have to be the kind of God who is willing to suffer evil alongside His creature and with the same intensity. This seems to me to be a very compelling answer.
The first point - that nobody wants to hear about how the existence of free will requires suffering from someone who hasn't suffered meaningfully themselves - is part of what interests me about the correlation between material comfort and complaints against God for permitting evil to flourish, the rain to fall on the just and unjust alike, and so forth. I've always thought that how you respond to the Christian argument about free will and the necessity of evil depends in large part on how you respond intuitively to the experience of human existence - whether you instinctively regard life, the universe and everything as a Very Good Thing with a certain amount of evil and corruption woven in, or whether you regard human life chiefly as "a business of evenly rationed suffering," as Wood puts it, with the constant possibility that the "truly unbearable" will suddenly consume everything that you hold dear. (Wood employs the evocative term "hellmouth" to describe this all-too-common worst-case scenario, a term he borrows from Norman Rush, who defined it as “the opening up of the mouth of hell right in front of you, without warning, through no fault of your own.”)
Continue reading "Theodicy Revisited" »
Who's Afraid of the Millenarians?
I am no great admirer of the apocalyptic style in religion or politics, but I would find Ian McEwan's essay on the clear and pressing danger posed by end-time thinking vastly more persuasive if he didn't crown his argument with this passage:
Within living memory we have come very close to extinguishing our civilisation when, in October 1962, Soviet ships carrying nuclear warheads to installations in Cuba confronted a blockade by the US Navy, and the world waited to discover whether Nikita Khrushchev would order his convoy home. It is remarkable how little of that terrifying event survives in public memory, in modern folklore. In the vast literature the Cuban missile crisis has spawned - military, political, diplomatic - there is very little on its effect at the time on ordinary lives, in homes, school, and the workplace, on the fear and widespread numb incomprehension in the population at large. That fear has not passed into the national narrative, here, or anywhere else as vividly as you might expect. As Spencer Weart put it: "When the crisis ended, most people turned their attention away as swiftly as a child who lifts up a rock, sees something slimy underneath, and drops the rock back." Perhaps the assassination of President Kennedy the following year helped obscure the folk memory of the missile crisis. His murder in Dallas became a marker in the history of instantaneous globalised news transmission - a huge proportion of the world's population seemed to be able to recall where they were when they heard the news. Conflating these two events, Christopher Hitchens opened an essay on the Cuban missile crisis with the words - "Like everyone else of my generation, I can remember exactly where I was standing and what I was doing on the day that President John Fitzgerald Kennedy nearly killed me." Heaven did not beckon during those tense hours of the crisis. Instead, as Hitchens observes, "It brought the world to the best view it has had yet of the gates of hell."
I began with the idea of photography as the inventory of mortality, and I will end with a photograph of a group death. It shows fierce flames and smoke rising from a building in Waco, Texas, at the end of a 51-day siege in 1993. The group inside was the Branch Davidians, an offshoot of the Seventh Day Adventists. Its leader, David Koresh, was a man steeped in biblical, end-time theology, convinced that America was Babylon, the agent of Satan, come in the form of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms and the FBI to destroy the Sabbath-keeping remnant, who would emerge from the cleansing, suicidal fire to witness the dawn of a new Kingdom ... In that grim inferno, children, their mothers, and other followers died. Even more died two years later when Timothy McVeigh, exacting revenge against the government for its attack on Waco, committed his slaughter in Oklahoma City. It is not for nothing that one of the symptoms in a developing psychosis, noted and described by psychiatrists, is "religiosity".
So here we have three anecdotes. In the first instance, the world is brought to the brink of thermonuclear destruction by a pair of none-too-religious politicians and their advisers, influenced in their decision-making by a combination of old-fashioned power politics and secular fantasies of global revolution. In the second instance, a religious fanatic who appears to have posed a danger only to the small group of men and women taken in by his mix of spiritual and sexual charisma dies, along with his followers, amid a botched and legally-dubious assault by one of the law-enforcement arms of a secular government. In the third case, a political fanatic of no discernible religious beliefs perpetrates a gruesome act of mass murder, with the aim of punishing the same government for its conduct in the second instance. None of the three offers a particular compelling testament to the dangers of religious millenarianism, as opposed to other motivations for potentially lethal conduct, whether on the level of states or individuals.
Now obviously there are more dangerous religious madmen in the world than David Koresh, and obviously McEwan is on firm ground when he argues that some of the various great crimes of history have been rooted in apocalyptic hopes and fears. But his own anecdotes offer a useful reminder that worldly motivations tend to play a vastly larger role in war and terrorism and similar evils than do spurious prophecies of an imminent Armageddon or dumb misreadings of the Book of Revelation. This is true even among religious believers: From Crusaders trying to conquer the Holy Land to contemporary jihadis hoping to restore the Caliphate, from Woodrow Wilson trying to make the world safe for democracy to George W. Bush trying to, well, make the world safe for democracy, religiously-motivated political actors are much more likely to believe that God wants them to pursue a particular geopolitical objective than they are to assume that He wants them to ring in the actual End of History with a hail of bombs (or suicide bombers). People whose fondest wish is to hasten end of the world can be dangerous, no doubt, and perhaps one such fanatic will yet succeed in ringing in the apocalypse with a suitcase nuke or a vial of Captain Trips. But in general, such people tend not to advance to positions where they can do world-historical damage. Which is why the worst crimes, well-meaning and otherwise, usually aren't committed by the millenarians who keep a good secularist like McEwan up at night; they're committed by rational actors, religious and secular alike, who want to change the world we live in, rather than bring it to an end, and fail to count the fatal cost of pursuing their ambitions.
Religion, Happiness and Socialism
Will Wilkinson has an interesting post responding to Arthur Brooks' interesting work on religion and happiness in the United States, in which he (Will, that is) points out that the religion-happiness correlation seems to be America-specific, and that the advance of secularization in Western Europe has coincided with an increase in levels of reported happiness on the continent. Here's Will's take on the America-Europe discrepancy:
Brooks rightly points out that in the U.S. a great number of community organizations are anchored in religion. And sociality and community are key to happiness. So, sure, non-religiosity in the U.S. is likely to be a socially alienating and stigmatized kind of non-conformism ... It seems to me that Brooks has simply found that America has a religious culture, and therefore it’s less trouble to be religious in the U.S., not that religiosity has some kind of deep connection to happiness.
No doubt there's some truth to this (though I would venture that non-religiosity is somewhat less socially alienating than it used to be). But my suspicion is that the difference has something to do with the role of the welfare state as well - that the benefits of belonging to a religious community are greater in the U.S. than in Europe in part because our welfare state is smaller, and religious participation provides both tangible and intangible forms of security that are more valuable in a society where the free market is more freewheeling and the welfare state weaker. If you're a Christian who prefers the American model, you might say that the Europeans use government as a substitute for God; if you prefer Europe's path to modernity, you'd probably say something about Americans clinging to churchgoing because it's the only protection available against the harsh brutality of our jungle capitalism. Either way, I suspect that this symbiosis between high levels of religiosity and economic individualism is at the heart of American exceptionalism - which is another way of saying that libertarians root for secularization at their peril. (Though perhaps Will has some data in his infinite file cabinet of happiness research that blows my hypothesis out of the water.)
Our Pantheist Future
David Brooks' column on neuroscience and religion has attracted a fair amount of comment from my favorite bloggers: Andrew is favorable, Rod is puzzled, Dougherty and Larison dismissive. Here's Brooks' conclusion:
If you survey the literature ... you can see that certain beliefs will spread into the wider discussion. ... First, the self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships. Second, underneath the patina of different religions, people around the world have common moral intuitions. Third, people are equipped to experience the sacred, to have moments of elevated experience when they transcend boundaries and overflow with love. Fourth, God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is.
In their arguments with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the faithful have been defending the existence of God. That was the easy debate. The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits. It’s going to come from scientists whose beliefs overlap a bit with Buddhism.
In unexpected ways, science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other. That’s bound to lead to new movements that emphasize self-transcendence but put little stock in divine law or revelation. Orthodox believers are going to have to defend particular doctrines and particular biblical teachings. They’re going to have to defend the idea of a personal God, and explain why specific theologies are true guides for behavior day to day.
Now I take the Larison-Dougherty point that defending particular doctrines and particular Biblical teachings is what Christianity has more or less always been about, and that a faith based purely on "elevated experience" and "self-transcendence" isn't really any faith at all anyway, let alone a serious challenger to the Christian tradition. Another way of putting this would be to note that Christians can agree with the second and third of Brooks' four beliefs and vigorously dispute the last of them. Neither the commonality of moral intuitions across cultures nor the universal availability of some form of religious experience are notions that are particularly threatening to Christian orthodoxy (or to the other monotheistic faiths); what is threatening, out of Brooks' litany, is the notion that the sort of baseline spiritual experiences that neuroscientists can measure is the only sort of spiritual experience there is, and that we should define the concept of God as the sum of humanity's lowest-common-denominator encounters with the numinous.
This notion's major premise is summed up nicely by Brooks as follows: "Particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits." No, the Christian would say: Particular religious systems are cultural artifacts, in a sense, yes, but they're artifacts built around specific human experiences, not universal ones. Christian theology and Christian ritual are compatible with the universal human ability to experience the sacred through prayer and meditation, but they're "built on top" of particular encounters and revelations that tend to have little in common with the "transcending boundaries/overflowing with love" experiences that neuroscientists are equipped to measure. Indeed, in both the Old and New Testaments, the foundational encounters with God - the religious experiences that created Judaism and Christianity - are nothing like a meditative, free-floating sense of one-ness with the universe. Instead, whether it's Moses encountering the burning bush or Job being addressed out of the whirlwind or the disciples encountering the Risen Christ, the encounters with God that shape the Judeo-Christian tradition tend to be extremely personal on the one hand (God has a personality, a voice, even a body; He isn't just some cosmic soup we can all go swimming in) and extremely terrifying and difficult to comprehend on the other. Within the post-Resurrection Christian tradition, too, the defining encounters with the divine have followed a similar pattern - from Paul on the road to Damascus and John on Patmos down through monastics wrestling with demons, saints being addressed out of crucifixes, the various apparitions of the Virgin Mary and so forth. And the higher Christian mysticism, in particular, is defined by its emphasis on the need to move beyond the warm love bath that may - as Andrew suggests - represent our initial apprehension of the nature of the divine into the vastly more difficult terrain traversed by figures like Saint John of the Cross and Mother Teresa.
Having said all this, though, I think that Brooks is basically right: I don't think that the "neural Buddhism" (or "neural Pantheism," more aptly) that he's talking about is an intellectually serious challenger to the great monotheistic faiths, but then I'm in the tank for Christendom, and what I'm looking for in a religion doesn't seem to be what most Americans are looking for. In a society that's simultaneously shot through with spiritual yearnings and addicted to the idea that Science can solve all of life's problems, an approach to spirituality that dispenses with the weirdness and scariness and miraculousness of the Judeo-Christian encounter with God, throws a scientific patina on prayer and meditation and promises that Love is all you need seems like a pretty obvious winner. Especially since replacing a personal God with an impersonal Love Force seems to be a popular - if to my mind puzzling - way around the problem of theodicy for a great many people who take the Holocaust to have disproven the Christian conception of God. Also, what Tocqueville said.
And with that, I'll kick the subject over to Mr. Pantheism himself, James Poulos.
The Evangelical Manifesto
It's an intriguing document, but I think Alan Jacobs - who takes it on, here and here - is right to be frustrated with it, and with the extent to which it merely reflects a muddled moment iin religion and politics, rather than offering a plausible way out of the muddle.
Update: Michael Brendan Dougherty - like me, a Catholic eyeing Evangelical developments with interest - has a more positive take on the document.
Taking the Bait
Daniel Larison wants to know what I make of this passage, which kicks off Damon Linker's review of Charles Marash's Wayward Christian Soldiers: Freeing the Gospel From Political Captivity:
Who would now deny that the political ascendancy of the religious right has been bad for the United States? Its destructive consequences are plain for all to see. It has polarized the nation. It has injected theological certainties into public life. It has led political leaders to invest their aims and their deeds with metaphysical significance. It has made America a laughingstock in the eyes of the educated of the world. And it has encouraged devout believers to think of themselves as agents of the divine, and their political opponents as enemies of God.
I hesitate to dignify the deeply irritating "all reasonable people must agree with the self-evident truth of my argument" trope with a rejoinder, but since Daniel asks ... well, look, obviously if you disagree with the religious right's various policy objectives, you'll think that its rise ("ascendancy" seems like a little much, doesn't it?) has been bad for the United States. That's a perfectly reasonable position to take. But it isn't what Linker's arguing here. The "destructive consequences" he's talking about all seem to have to do with the nature of our political culture, not the shape of our public policies - specifically, the level of polarization, moral absolutism, and us-versus-them Manichaeism in American political life, with the damage to our reputation among "the educated of the world" thrown in for good measure.
On the last point, I imagine Linker could find some polling data to back up his argument, though I'm also pretty sure that European sophisticates were wont to look down their noses at American rubes long before Pat Robertson came along. As for the rest of his claims, the available evidence seems to run the other way. Perhaps Linker has a different timeline in mind, but I would date the modern religious right's rise to the late 1970s, and I would urge anyone who honestly believes that the level of polarization, absolutism, and Manichaean excess has risen in our politics since the Seventies to read Rick Perlstein's Nixonland and reconsider. The parties have grown more polarized vis-a-vis one another since then, true, but our politics in general have grown vastly more peaceful, even as arguments over civil rights and Vietnam have given way to arguments over issues like abortion and gay marriage. Which ought to suggest, at the very least, that there's no easy correlation to be drawn between the influence of religion on democratic politics and the tendency of democratic peoples toward division, self-righteousness and violence.
One could, of course, dispute the premise that the politics of the Sixties and the early Seventies were any less flavored by theological concerns and metaphysical yearnings than the era that followed; indeed, I would be inclined to dispute it myself. But that still doesn't provide any grounds for claiming that the religious right "injected" theology into politics in some uniquely destructive way. Rather, it suggests that what Linker sees as an alien and destructive innovation - religious conservatism's intermingling of politics and metaphysics - is actually a more or less constant feature of American life, and one whose consequences for civil order and national unity have been far less dire during the post-'70s culture war than in the supposedly-more-secular era that preceded it.
Christianity, Darwinism and The Fall
Noah Millman makes a good point:
I continue to believe that both sides of the Darwin vs. Christianity battle are missing the most telling point. We should all agree that religious dogma has no bearing on the truth or falsity of a scientific theory. Heliocentrism is true; geocentrism is false. There is an enormous weight of evidence behind the theory of evolution by natural selection. There is going to be more and more evidence behind new theories about the workings of the human mind, and the interactions of the human genome and human personality. All religion can do is react to these discoveries and, as part of that reaction, caution us about drawing unwarranted conclusions (political, moral, what-have-you) from the evidence. But I don’t think that’s the end of the story, because I think science does have implications for the persuasiveness of specific religious doctrines, simply as a psychological matter. And I think evolution through natural selection is extremely uncongenial to the central Christian story about the nature of sin and evil in the world. Why? Because the Christian story has the entry of strife into the world come about as the result of human sin, whereas the core idea behind evolution by natural selection is that our existence – and the consciousness and ability to sin that comes with it – is a product of strife. Put bluntly: natural selection is not the mechanism that the Christian deity would use to create man in His image. Or, if it is, I’d like to see the explanation. I think that natural selection poses similar but less-acute problems for Judaism and Islam; it poses the fewest problems, I suspect, for Hinduism. Again: I’m not speaking of science refuting religion. I’m speaking of scientific results making certain core religious claims less persuasive.
Of course, one reason I think it's a good point is that I just made it myself, in a review of Dinesh D'Souza's What's So Great About Christianity for the the just-released, not-yet-online spring issue of Claremont Review of Books. The idea that evolution-by-natural-selection somehow disproves religion in general, or theism more specifically, is basically preposterous. The idea that the mechanism of natural selection, in which the development of man requires millions of years of strife and suffering and death in the animal kingdom, poses a specific challenge to Christian beliefs about the nature of God is more plausible, and warrants a more serious response than the "hey, evolution is too compatible with a belief in designer God" rejoinder that some Christian apologists, D'Souza included, often employ.
I didn't attempt to address that challenge in the review, in part because I wouldn't say that I have a settled opinion on the matter. It seems to me, though, that the possible rejoinders to the Millman argument fall into three broad categories. One view would hold that strife and pain and death are only evils when they are experienced by creatures who are made in the image of God; since animals are not so created, they have more or less the same moral status as machines, and the Almighty is indifferent to their suffering. In this view, evolution by natural selection poses no difficulty at all for Christian theodicy: Pain and death are natural to our animal ancestors but an evil when experienced by self-conscious beings with free will, and for that reason homo sapiens were granted immortality initially, only to subsequently lose it through disobedience to God. (This seems to be the view that Stephen Barr takes in this post, though I may be misinterpreting him.)
The second perspective the one that C.S. Lewis inclined toward; as you might expect from the man who created Narnia, he was particularly concerned by the problem that animal suffering poses for theodicy, and he argued that Satan's influence on the world must necessarily have predated the Fall of Man. Sin entered human history with the disobedience of our first parents, in other words, but it entered the history of the universe at the beginning of time, with Lucifer's disobedience. The emergence of Man through evolution-by-natural-selection, in this view, is a case of God making use of a fallen creation for His own good ends.
The final perspective - which I associate, perhaps incorrectly, with Teilhard de Chardin - suggests that the Fall is both a temporal and an extra- or supra-temporal event, one whose impact on creation runs both forward and backward in time, retroactively poisoning the pre-historic development of man as well as his history. This sounds like the strangest and most implausible of the possible explanations, obviously. But given the mysterious relationship between space and time that modern physics has uncovered, and the still more mysterious relationship between space, time and eternity that obtains if Christianity's account of things is true, it may not be quite so implausible as it sounds.
The Pope and the Scandal
Over at the Current, I have a post up on Benedict XVI's meeting with the sex-abuse victims.
Prosperity And "Fundamentalism"
Daniel Larison has a couple of good posts up in response to Andrew's attempt to defend Obama's comments about religion. Andrew casts the remarks as a reference, not to faith as such, but to "a certain kind of religion, a neurotic, rigid variety that is often - but not always - part of the fundamentalist psyche," and that can indeed be a manifestation (or so "history has sometimes shown," he contends) of "economic, political and cultural frustration." In response, Daniel makes the point that history may have "sometimes" shown this, but usually it doesn't show anything of the sort - a point that dovetails in obvious ways with my own remarks yesterday about cultural conservatism, prosperity and voting behavior.
I would also add that you can usually tell when religion-infused political movements have emerged in response to economic frustrations, because such movements tend to include (unsurprisingly) a strong economic component - from the Thomas Muentzer-inspired peasants' revolt of the 16th century down through the Christian populism of William Jennings Bryan to the variations on liberation theology that you hear from (ahem, Mr. Obama) many African-American churches today. And the fact that the agenda of post-1970s religious conservatism (what Andrew describes, frequently and inaccurately, as "fundamentalism") does not include a strong economic component ought to suggest - at least to informed observers, a category that apparently doesn't include the leading Democratic contender for the Presidency - that "economic frustration" has very little to do with its appeal.
(It's also worth noting that to the extent that contemporary religious conservatives, Catholic and Protestant alike, do emphasize poverty and economic tribulation, it's usually in the context of exhorting their co-religionists to help others in need, whether in the U.S. or (especially) overseas. Gersonism is a politics for prosperous Christians looking to do good in the world, not economically-frustrated believers clinging desperately to their churches, guns, and bigotries.)
Sam Harris and the Prosperity Gospel
You know, I sometimes get the sense that Sam Harris doesn't have a damn clue what he's talking about:
Happily, Obama did a fine job of distancing himself from Reverend Wright's divisive views on racism in America, along with his fatuous "chickens come home to roost" assessment of our war against Islamic terrorism. But he did not (and should not) acknowledge that the worst parts of Reverend Wright's sermons, as with most sermons, are his appeals to the empty hopes and baseless fears of his parishioners--people who could surely find better ways of advancing their interests in this world, if only they could banish the fiction of a world to come.
... The problem of religious fatalism, ignorance, and false hope, while plain to see in most religious contexts, is now especially obvious in the black community. The popularity of "prosperity gospel" is perhaps the most galling example: where unctuous crooks like T.D. Jakes and Creflo Dollar persuade undereducated and underprivileged men and women to pray for wealth, while tithing what little wealth they have to their corrupt and swollen ministries. Men like Jakes and Dollar, whatever occasional good they may do, are unconscionable predators and curators of human ignorance. Is it too soon to say this in American politics? Yes it is.
I suppose it would be too much to ask for Harris to familiarize himself with the literature on the correlations between religious observance and positive personal and financial outcomes, in the nation as a whole but especially in the African-American community; it would apparently be too much, as well, for him to actually read the works of T.D. Jakes before declaring him an "unconscionable predator." There are pure charlatans in the world of the prosperity gospel, but what figures like Jakes (and Joel Osteen, Joyce Meyer, and many many others) represent is something else entirely: They're self-help authors on the one hand and apostles of moralistic therapeutic deism on the other, slapping Christian window dressing on how-to guides for upward mobility and psychological satisfaction. They aren't playing to the follies and fantasies of the poor and desperate; they're responding to the real-world aspirations of the working and the middle classes. They aren't peddling fatalism and false hope; they're offering ambitious Americans advice on how to be prosperous and happy in the workplace and the home, with a little God-talk worked in around the edges.
From the point of view of Christian orthodoxy, obviously, this sort of thing is deeply theologically problematical. From the point of view of a hardened materialist like Sam Harris, though, the sort of religion T.D. Jakes is selling is exactly the kind of religion that he ought to like: A faith that's relentlessly focused on success and happiness in this world, rather than on self-abnegation for the sake of the life to come. But to understand that, he'd have to expand his understanding of religious practice beyond the usual run of atheistic cliches and prejudices. Which would obviously be too much to ask.
Shari'a For Thee ...
Do read Noah Millman, critiquing the defense of Shari'a advanced by his fellow Noah (Feldman, that is) in the Times Magazine.
Easter
John Henry Newman:
Among the wise men of the heathen ... it was usual to speak slightingly and contemptuously of the mortal body; they knew no better. They thought it scarcely a part of their real selves, and fancied they should be in a better condition without it. Nay, they considered it to be the cause of their sinning; as if the soul of man were pure, and the material body were gross, and defiled the soul ... Accordingly their chief hope in death was the notion they should be rid of their body. Feeling they were sinful, and not knowing how, they laid the charge on their body; and knowing they were badly circumstanced here, they thought death perchance might be a change for the better. Not that they rested on the hope of returning to a God and Father, but they thought to be unshackled from the earth, and able to do what they would. It was consistent with this slighting of their earthly tabernacle, that they burned the dead bodies of their friends, not burying them as we do, but consuming them as a mere worthless case of what had been precious, and was then an incumbrance to the ground ...
Far different is the temper which the glorious light of the Gospel teaches us. Our bodies shall rise again and live for ever; they may not be irreverently handled. How they will rise we know not; but surely if the word of Scripture be true, the body from which the soul has departed shall come to life ... The dust around us will one day become animate. We may ourselves be dead long before, and not see it. We ourselves may elsewhere be buried, and, should it be our exceeding blessedness to rise to life eternal, we may rise in other places, far in the east or west. But, as God's word is sure, what is sown is raised; the earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, shall become glory to glory, and life to the living God, and a true incorruptible image of the spirit made perfect.
Good Friday
From The Everlasting Man:
In this story of Good Friday it is the best things in the world that are at their worst. That is what really shows us the world at its worst. It was, for instance, the priests of a true monotheism and the soldiers of an international civilization. Rome, the legend, founded upon fallen Troy and triumphant over fallen Carthage, had stood for a heroism which was the nearest that any pagan ever came to chivalry ... But in the lightning flash of this incident, we see great Rome, the imperial republic, going downward under her Lucretian doom. Scepticism has eaten away even the confident sanity of the conquerors of the world. He who is enthroned to say what is justice can only ask, 'What is truth?' So in that drama which decided the whole fate of antiquity, one of the central figures is fixed in what seems the reverse of his true role. Rome was almost another name for responsibility. Yet he stands forever as a sort of rocking statue of the irresponsible. Man could do no more. Even the practical had become the impracticable. Standing between the pillars of his own judgment-seat, a Roman had washed his hands of the world.
There too were the priests of that pure and original truth that was behind all the mythologies like the sky behind the clouds. It was the most important truth in the world; and even that could not save the world. Perhaps there is something overpowering in pure personal theism; like seeing the sun and moon and sky come together to form one staring face. Perhaps the truth is too tremendous when not broken by some intermediaries divine or human; perhaps it is merely too pure and far away.
Anyhow it could not save the world; it could not even convert the world. There were philosophers who held it in its highest and noblest form; but they not only could not convert the world, but they never tried. You could no more fight the jungle of popular mythology with a private opinion than you could clear away a forest with a pocket-knife. The Jewish priests had guarded it jealously in the good and the bad sense. They had kept it as a gigantic secret. As savage heroes might have kept the sun in a box, they kept the Everlasting in the tabernacle. They were proud that they alone could look upon the blinding sun of a single deity; and they did not know that they had themselves gone blind.
... And as it was with these powers that were good, or at least had once been good, so it was with the element which was perhaps the best, or which Christ himself seems certainly to have felt as the best. The poor to whom he preached the good news, the common people who heard him gladly, the populace that had made so many popular heroes and demigods in the old pagan world showed also the weaknesses that were dissolving the world. They suffered the evils often seen in the mob of the city, and especially the mob of the capital, during the decline of a society. The same thing that makes the rural population live on tradition makes the urban population live on rumor. just as its myths at the best had been irrational, so its likes and dislikes are easily changed by baseless assertion that is arbitrary without being authoritative ...
Some brigand or other was artificially turned into a picturesque and popular figure and run as a kind of candidate against Christ. In all this we recognize the urban population that we know, with its newspaper scares and scoops. But there was present in this ancient population an evil more peculiar to the ancient world. We have noted it already as the neglect of the individual, even of the individual voting the condemnation and still more of the individual condemned. It was the soul of the hive; a heathen thing. The cry of this spirit also was heard in that hour, "It is well that one man die for the people!" Yet this spirit in antiquity of devotion to the city and to the state had so been in itself and in its time a noble spirit. It had its poets and its martyrs; men still to be honored forever. It was failing through its weakness in not seeing the separate soul of a man, the shrine of all mysticism; but it was only failing as everything else was failing. The mob went along with the Sadducees and the Pharisees, the philosophers and the moralists. It went along with the imperial magistrates and the sacred priests, the scribes and the soldiers, that the one universal human spirit might suffer a universal condemnation; that there might be one deep, unanimous chorus of approval and harmony when Man was rejected of men.
Denominations and Double Standards
Here's Matt's take on the Jeremiah Wright controversy:
I'm unsure, in general, of what the standards we're supposed to apply to the political views of politicians' favored clergy. I have no idea what the rabbis at Temple Rodef Shalom (where I've gone to synagogue the past few High Holy Days) or at The Village Temple (where I had my bar mitzvah) think about political issues, but I assume I don't agree with them about everything, and certainly it'd be odd to drag up old statements made by any of the relevant rabbis about this or that and then ask me to either endorse the statement or repudiate the entire congregation.
By the same token, we don't assume that a politician who goes to mass wants to ban birth control nor do we ask Catholics who favored preventive war with Iraq to repudiate the Pope in order to prove their hawk bona fides. In short, we generally assume that a politician's stated political views express his or her position on political topics, and that affiliating with a religious congregation does not constitute an endorsement of everything the leaders of that congregation have ever said.
Which is a long-winded way of saying that I see this as a basically trumped-up issue.
This is slightly more persuasive than Ezra’s take, but it still seems like somewhat strained analysis. Obviously, nobody's going to expect a High Holy Days Jew or a Christmas-and-Easter Christian to account for their clergyman’s political opinion, since he (or she) isn’t their clergyman in any meaningful sense of the word. As for why we don't see Catholic politicians being called upon to ritually denounce the Pope, one might begin with the fact that the Pope rarely makes political statements that fall wildly outside the mainstream of American politics. John Paul II and Benedict XVI's criticisms of abortion and euthanasia and gay marriage are right-wing by American standards, sure - just as some of their comments on economics are left-wing - but for better or worse (and I think better, obviously) they simply aren't considered beyond the pale in the way that Jeremiah Wright's comments about 9/11 and sundry other topics are. Back when Popes did make statements that fell beyond the pale of American discourse (in the Syllabus of Errors era, for instance) Catholics were frequently called upon to clarify their view of the Holy See's position, and while these calls were often laced with bigotry, they also raised valid questions about Catholicism's consonance with American democracy, questions that it was entirely appropriate for Catholics to answer - just as it's appropriate for Barack Obama to answer questions about his church's view of politics today.
More importantly, though, we don't demand that Catholic politicians answer for every Papal address and encyclical because most people understand that a cradle Catholic’s relationship to the magisterium of the Catholic Church tends to be dramatically different from a convert to Protestant Christianity's relationship to the pastor of the only church he's ever attended. A Catholic's relationship to his local priest is perhaps more comparable, though again the weight that Protestantism - particularly in its evangelical strains - places on individual ministry tends to make a Protestant's choice of minister far more revealing than a Catholic's choice of parish. (Traditionally, Catholics weren't even allowed to parish-shop; where you lived determined where you want to mass.) I would also add that in the course of attending mass at dozens of Catholic parishes over the last decade, I can't say I've heard a single homily remotely like the Wright sermons that are stirring up all the controversy. And if I did attend a Catholic church whose pastor went in for, say, the occasional rant about the Freemasons, I wouldn't be surprised if that fact made waves if I ever ran for office.
Here's a thought experiment: Suppose John McCain were a member of Opus Dei. Or to push things a bit further, suppose he attended a schismatic Latin-Mass parish which had, among other things, bestowed an award on a Lefebvrite bishop given to anti-Semitic remarks. Do you think this would earn him media scrutiny, and make a difference in the Presidential race? Do you think it ought to? Your answer, I think, should go a long way toward determining how you think about the case of Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright.
Dobson's Choice
Dan Gilgoff, who literally wrote the book on the Focus on the Family founder, argues that Romney might have won the GOP nomination if figures like Dobson - evangelical leaders who were obviously sympathetic to Mitt - had been willing to confront the Mormon issue head on, instead of tiptoeing around it:
In an interview last year, Dobson acknowledged that "there are conservative Christians who will not vote for (Romney) because of his Mormon faith," but he said that wasn't necessarily "the correct view or my view."
As Dobson warmed to Romney — the two had a getting-to-know-you session at Focus' Colorado Springs headquarters last year — he could have opened a dialogue with his millions of radio listeners about why evangelicals should feel comfortable voting for a Mormon, even if they rejected his theology.
Instead, he took public swipes at Republican candidates Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson and John McCain, leaving his evangelical fans to deduce his support for Romney and Huckabee by process of elimination ...
That "could have" seems persuasive to me - but then again, I'm not James Dobson. It certainly seems like an early effort by quietly pro-Romney big shots in the evangelical community might have made a big difference in the final outcome; on the other hand, I also have to assume that Dobson and his associates have a pretty fine-tuned sense of where his audience stands and what they're thinking. Once Huckabee's star began to rise, in particular, it's possible that they decided that if Focus on the Family were perceived to be siding with a flip-flopping, formerly pro-choice Mormon over a consistent social conservative and rock-ribbed evangelical like Huck, they'd look like sell-outs to an awful lot of their listeners. Huckabee liked to suggest that the religious right's leadership was out of step with its foot soldiers and more concerned with preserving the GOP coalition than standing by their principles; I doubt that Dobson et. al. wanted to do anything that would vindicate this line of argument and jeopardize their credibility with the grassroots. And I imagine, as well, that they took the derision generated by Pat Robertson's endorsement of Rudy Giuliani as a cautionary tale.
At the very least, though, Dobson might have delivered that "undorsement" a little sooner ...
The Archbishop's Academentia
Alan Jacobs, in a fine post, suggests that Rowan Williams is afflicted with “verbal academentia." Frankly, I can't think of a better coinage to describe what’s wrong with the Archbishop’s approach to his office, both in the shari'a controversy and elsewhere.
Consider, for instance, this years-old public conversation with Philip Pullman, which was held shortly after the Archbishop praised and recommended an adaptation of His Dark Materials then playing at the National Theatre. It’s all very polite and erudite and engaging - all very academic, one might say - as the two men range across gnosticism, Original Sin, the role of fiction in education, the representation of religion in cinema, and what-have-you. You can see that Williams just lights up at the chance to be set down in the same room with Pullman, and set free to chat with him: What a fascinating fellow this atheist childrens' book writer is! What a fine chance to discuss the fascinating theological implications of his anti-theological work! Of course every child in England should read the book, and then sit down over tea and have a similarly fascinating discussion about the ever-so-complicated questions it summons up! etc.
Now of course there's a sense in which this style of engagement is preferable to, say, organizing a hamfisted boycott of Pullman's work, as some of the thicker tribunes of Christendom are wont to do. But at least boycotts get at an essential point that Williams' debating-society approach misses, which is that Pullman's arguments aren't just being thrown out for the sake of some ivory-tower bull session about theology - they're embedded in a work of propaganda that's designed to win the hearts and minds of his young readers away from anything resembling Christianity. This doesn't mean that Williams should have kicked over his chair, crossed the stage and hurled holy water in Pullman's eyes, but it would seem to require something more from him that the sort of cheerful, but of course dear boy spirit with which he approached the conversation, as though he and Pullman were fellow Christ's College students chatting about metaphysics over late-night glasses of port.
In the His Dark Materials debate and the shari'a affair alike, one has the sense that Williams doesn't quite understand how poorly his academic approach to controversial questions translates to the real world. Very few readers of Philip Pullman's novels are being inspired to a deeper engagement with Christian theology, as the Archbishop hopefully suggested they might be; similarly, the "parallel jurisdictions" emerging in Britain's Muslim communities bear little or no resemblance to the sort of high-minded framework he gestured at in his address. This doesn't mean that an academic approach, whether to atheism or Islam, is always and everywhere inappropriate; far from it. It's just inappropriate for Rowan Williams, given the office that he holds, and the duties - defending the faith, speaking out against injustice - that he's charged with.
Shari'a Comes For The Archbishop
I’ve done my duty and waded through the full text of the Rowan Williams address on “civil and religious law in England” that’s helped to kick up all the fuss about shari'a, and I can report that the Archbishop’s various defenders have a point – if you detach the address from the actual historical context in which it was delivered, you’re left with a somewhat-turgid but nonetheless interesting meditation on the relationship between civil law and religious law, and between the liberal state and religious communities.
Unfortunately, this is the historical context in which it was delivered:
A few weeks ago, I was chatting to a woman who works in an advocacy role for Muslim women in an area that, quite independently of the Bishop of Rochester, she described as a “no-go area” for non-Muslims. Her clients were women in the process of being sectioned into mental health units in the NHS. This woman, who for obvious reasons begged not to be identified, told me: “The men get tired of their wives. Or bored. Or maybe the wife objects to her daughter being forced into a marriage she doesn't want. Or maybe she starts wearing western clothes.There can be many reasons. The women are sent for asssessment to a hospital. The GP referring them is Muslim. The psychiatrist assessing them is Muslim and male. I have sat in these assessments where the psychiatrist will not look the woman patient in the eye because she is a woman. Can you imagine! A psychiatrist refusing to look his patient in the eye? The woman speaks little or no English. She is sectioned. She is divorced. There are lots of these women in there, locked up in these hospitals. Why don’t you people write about this?'
My interlocuter went very red and almost started to cry. Instead, she began shouting at me. I was a member of the press. “You must write about this,” she begged.
“I can’t,” I said. “Not unless you become a whistle-blower. Or give me some evidence. Or something.”
She shook her head. “I can't be identified,” she said. “I would be killed. And so would the women.”
Perhaps there will come a time when an Archbishop of Canterbury will have the luxury to muse at length on whether it might be appropriate for his nation to consider some sort of “plural jurisdiction” where Muslim communities are concerned. But regardless of his good intentions, it seems to me the height of folly for this head of the Church of England, at this moment in the history of his nation and his faith, to wander in the gardens of intellectual theory while brushing away the actual controversies on the ground. (“The ‘forced marriage’ question is the one most often referred to here, and it is at the moment undoubtedly a very serious and scandalous one; but precisely because it has to do with custom and culture rather than directly binding enactments by religious authority, I shall refer to another issue …”) It seems beyond irresponsible for a prelate in his position to build legal castles in the air, assuring us that “if any kind of plural jurisdiction is recognised, it would presumably have to be under the rubric that no ‘supplementary’ jurisdiction could have the power to deny access to the rights granted to other citizens or to punish its members for claiming those rights,” at a time when Her Majesty’s government seems incapable of preventing the spread of a de facto plural jurisdiction that may do exactly that. And it is frankly embarrassing for a man charged with the defense of Christianity in England to behave as though he's more interested in generalizing about religions (“the umma or the Church or whatever …”) than in drawing distinctions between them, or to imply that there is little in the theology, history and politics of Islam - save for what "some committed Islamic primitivists" would have you believe - that would distinguish it from any other "religious minority" seeking a "degree of accommodation" from the liberal state.
In short, he seems like a complete wally to me.
Photo by Flickr user SouthbankSteve used under a Creative Commons license.
Should Mormons Hate Huckabee?
Russell Arben Fox ponders, Steve Waldman analyzes, Rod Dreher reacts.
Update: And Alan Jacobs weighs in as well.
Have the New Atheists Read Nietzsche?
Edward T. Oakes wonders.
Good-Faith Atheism
From an essay by Father Ranier Cantalamessa, preacher to the Papal household; quoted by Richard John Neuhaus:
“The world of today knows a new category of people: the atheists in good faith, those who live painfully the situation of the silence of God, who do not believe in God but do not boast about it; rather they experience the existential anguish and the lack of meaning of everything: They too, in their own way, live in the dark night of the spirit. Albert Camus called them “the saints without God.” The mystics exist above all for them; they are their travel and table companions. Like Jesus, they “sat down at the table of sinners and ate with them” (see Luke 15:2). This explains the passion with which certain atheists, once converted, pore over the writings of the mystics: Claudel, Bernanos, the two Maritains, L. Bloy, the writer J.K. Huysmans and so many others over the writings of Angela of Foligno; T.S. Eliot over those of Julian of Norwich. There they find again the same scenery that they had left, but this time illuminated by the sun. . . . The word “atheist” can have an active and a passive meaning. It can indicate someone who rejects God, but also one who—at least so it seems to him—is rejected by God. In the first case, it is a blameworthy atheism (when it is not in good faith), in the second an atheism of sorrow or of expiation.”
At the risk of being uncharitable, I doubt that Christopher Hitchens belong to this category of unbeliever.
The Origins of the Quran
From this weekend's WSJ:
On the night of April 24, 1944, British air force bombers hammered a former Jesuit college here housing the Bavarian Academy of Science. The 16th-century building crumpled in the inferno. Among the treasures lost, later lamented Anton Spitaler, an Arabic scholar at the academy, was a unique photo archive of ancient manuscripts of the Quran.
The 450 rolls of film had been assembled before the war for a bold venture: a study of the evolution of the Quran, the text Muslims view as the verbatim transcript of God's word. The wartime destruction made the project "outright impossible," Mr. Spitaler wrote in the 1970s.
Mr. Spitaler was lying. The cache of photos survived, and he was sitting on it all along. The truth is only now dribbling out to scholars -- and a Quran research project buried for more than 60 years has risen from the grave.
Read the whole thing. Spengler comments here. You can find Toby Lester's fantastic Atlantic piece on the "sensitive business" of Quranic interpretation here.
Religion, Reason and Relativism
Daniel Larison weighs in on Noah Feldman's "all religions are equally implausible" line of argument.
What Is It About Mormonism?
Writing on Mormonism in this Sunday's Times Magazine, Noah Feldman becomes about the eighteen thousandth writer to explain that non-Mormon Christians only find the LDS faith weird and implausible because its revelation is so recent. Even though "there is nothing inherently less plausible about God’s revealing himself to an upstate New York farmer in the early years of the Republic than to the pharaoh’s changeling grandson in ancient Egypt," Feldman writes, for most people "antiquity breeds authenticity," because "events in the distant past, we tend to think, occurred in sacred, mythic time."
To which Alan Jacobs retorts:
But this only makes sense under the assumption that the only reason people disbelieve Mormonism is its recency. It seems not to occur to Feldman to ask whether all propositions of all religions are equally plausible or implausible. Is “antiquity” really the only factor at work here? If only a handful were attracted to the teachings of David Koresh, is the recency of those teachings a sufficient explanation? Such an assumption is simplistic at best. Let me be clear: I do not mean to say that Mormon beliefs are anything like the crackpot tenets of Koresh; I am just claiming that if you want to understand why certain beliefs are not widely respected or admired, you might want to know something besides how old they are. You might want to inquire into the actual content of those beliefs.
Moreover, if the Average Joe takes Judaism seriously than Mormonism — a proposition that may or may not be true — “antiquity” isn’t the reason. If that were the case, then the Average Joe would find the worship of Ashteroth, Baal, and Isis and Osiris as plausible as that of Yahweh. Insofar as people-in-general concede respect to Judaism, that’s not because of Judaism’s “antiquity” but because of its continuity. If we ever have Mormons who have been saying the same prayers to the same God for three thousand years or so, then those Mormons will almost certainly get a hell of a lot more respect than today’s Latter-Day Saints do.
Well said. I don't want to dismiss the "antiquity equals plausibility" argument, since it obviously contains an element of truth, but it tends to function as a conversation-stopper in intellectual discourse these days - as an easy out for secular writers who assume that all religions are equally implausible, or at least equally beyond rational examination, and who don't want to wade into the weeds of history, archaeology and comparative theology to see whether it might be otherwise. In reality, though, the major plausibility issue facing Mormonism isn't when and where and how long ago the events crucial to the religion are supposed to have taken place, but whether the Mormon account of those events feels persuasive as a historical narrative. This is an issue that faces every major religion that claims God intervenes in history; Mormonism's problem - and a major reason why its tenets are often "dismissed as ridiculous" (as Feldman puts it) by mainstream Christians - is that the Book of Mormon doesn't seem to stack up nearly as well in this regard as, say, the Gospel According to Saint Matthew.
Obviously, this historical-plausibility question doesn't matter to every believer, but it does matter (as it should) to an awful lot of people, which is why so much ink has been spilled by foes of Christian orthodoxy, from Elaine Pagels to Dan Brown, arguing from the historical record (as they see it) that the events of the Gospels didn't happen the way the Gospels said they did. The idea that it should be otherwise - that it's "indefensible," as Feldman puts it, to suggest that Roman Catholicism is more likely to be true than Mormonism because Saint Peter really existed whereas the Nephites probably didn't - only makes sense if you assume the premises of a materialistic (or fideistic) worldview. Which seems like a bad way to set about analyzing the beliefs of people who don't assume that worldview, which is what Feldman's essay is supposed to be doing.
Huckabee's Blood Libel?
George Will needs to simmer down:
On the Republican side, Mike Huckabee's role in the '70s Show involves blending Jimmy Carter's ostentatious piety with Nixon's knack for oblique nastiness. "Despicable" and "appalling" evidence of a "gutter campaign" -- that is how The Eagle-Tribune of Lawrence, Mass., characterized this from Sunday's New York Times Magazine profile of Huckabee: "'Don't Mormons,' he asked in an innocent voice, 'believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?'"
Imagine someone asking "in an innocent voice" this: "Don't Jews use the blood |
