Liberals' new cause: Religious extremism
By JAMES KIRCHICK
Open the pages of a liberal magazine or peruse the liberal blogosphere, and you’re bound to come across denunciations of the religious right, if not religion itself. The “reality-based community,” as self-satisfied liberal bloggers call themselves, was a term created in direct response to the “faith-based community,” what the Bush administration called recipients of money from its Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. Given the religious right’s use of “faith” to justify hoaxes such as “intelligent design” and the ruinous attempt to convert homosexuals into heterosexuals, the left had good reason to criticize, and sometimes mock, the absurdities that are the inevitable result of religion mixing with politics.
Yet the left, with its healthy skepticism toward religion, has shown itself to be cynically flexible over the past few weeks in response to the utter insanities emitted from the big mouth of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Sen. Barack Obama’s pastor, mentor and friend of 20 years. Suddenly, some liberals have discovered a newfound love for extremists who hide behind the cloth to justify their radical views.
The lunatic remarks made by Wright in videotaped sermons released in March — which, lest there be any doubt that these pearls of wisdom were taken “out of context,” Wright reaffirmed at the National Press Club last week — are indefensible, and it is beyond pedantry to quibble over whether a spirited defense of Louis Farrakhan is more or less offensive than blaming abortion doctors and gays for Sept. 11, 2001, as Jerry Falwell infamously did two days after the terrorist attacks.
But in the warped minds of some on the left, uttering such inanities is not only “understandable,” it’s laudable. That is, of course, if the person alleging that the government created AIDS to kill African-Americans is an aggrieved black man lashing out at the rapacious, capitalist and irredeemably racist United States. Wright, you see, is actually a “patriot” for speaking uncomfortable “truths” about his country.
John Nichols is the Washington correspondent for The Nation. Like most of his comrades, he tends to be a vociferous critic of the religious right, regularly denouncing them for all manner of bad deeds. But to Nichols, Wright is not a divisive figure spreading dangerous lies. He is, in fact, “in possession of the balm that has frequently proven to be the cure for what ails America,” that is, “an eyes-wide-open faith in the prospect that this country can and will put aside the sins of the past and forge a future that is as just as it is righteous.” Nichols ended his ode to Wright by comparing the preacher to none other than Thomas Jefferson, a comparison that Wright would likely find insulting, given that he’s accused the author of the Declaration of Independence of pedophilia.
Indeed, many on the left are trying to outdo one another comparing great historical figures to Wright, whose most proximate antecedent would be a black, religious Lyndon LaRouche. Princeton professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell called Wright “Our Jeremiah,” in that he is akin to the “biblical truth tellers who regularly warned the government that divine destruction was imminent if the nation continued to oppress the powerless.” She then decided to insult the very notion of historical memory by comparing Wright to Frederick Douglass. Don Wycliff, former public editor of the Chicago Tribune, was perplexed as to what all the fuss over Wright was about. “I’m trying to figure out what it was that got everybody’s shorts into a twist,” he wrote in Commonweal magazine. (Wycliff’s bewilderment over the reaction to Wright’s lies and hyperbole does not speak well to his skills as an ombudsman.) The double standard some liberals have employed in response to Wright makes one seriously consider their oft-stated preference for
rationality, reason and secularism over superstition and prejudice.
Wright attacks capitalism throughout his sermons, an odd ideological target for a man who reportedly drives a Porsche and whose grateful congregants are building him a $1 million, four-garage home in a predominantly white suburb of Chicago (so much for being “unapologetically black”). He has also praised Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Libya’s Muammar al-Qadhafi. So it’s really no wonder that a huckster such as Wright has emerged as some sort of “reality-based community” folk hero. The political left finds common cause with the religious left and is apparently willing to overlook exactly the sort of racist sectarianism that it would be so quick to condemn were its perpetrator a white conservative.
Last Monday, Wright claimed that criticism directed toward him represents “an attack on the black church.” With this shot across the bow, Wright perpetrated a solipsistic conflation of the mainstream African-American religious tradition (which, despite the protestations of his apologists, he does not represent) with his own bigoted paranoias: anti-Zionism, anti-white racism and the lie (especially dangerous in the black community, where HIV infection is skyrocketing) that the government created the virus to kill African-Americans.
As much as Obama may now try to separate himself from his former preacher, he unwittingly justified Wright’s barnstorming performance with his initial justification that “I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community.” Unfortunately, some in the reality-based community seem to agree.
James Kirchick is an assistant editor of The New Republic
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0508/10126.html
Open the pages of a liberal magazine or peruse the liberal blogosphere, and you’re bound to come across denunciations of the religious right, if not religion itself. The “reality-based community,” as self-satisfied liberal bloggers call themselves, was a term created in direct response to the “faith-based community,” what the Bush administration called recipients of money from its Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. Given the religious right’s use of “faith” to justify hoaxes such as “intelligent design” and the ruinous attempt to convert homosexuals into heterosexuals, the left had good reason to criticize, and sometimes mock, the absurdities that are the inevitable result of religion mixing with politics.
Yet the left, with its healthy skepticism toward religion, has shown itself to be cynically flexible over the past few weeks in response to the utter insanities emitted from the big mouth of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Sen. Barack Obama’s pastor, mentor and friend of 20 years. Suddenly, some liberals have discovered a newfound love for extremists who hide behind the cloth to justify their radical views.
The lunatic remarks made by Wright in videotaped sermons released in March — which, lest there be any doubt that these pearls of wisdom were taken “out of context,” Wright reaffirmed at the National Press Club last week — are indefensible, and it is beyond pedantry to quibble over whether a spirited defense of Louis Farrakhan is more or less offensive than blaming abortion doctors and gays for Sept. 11, 2001, as Jerry Falwell infamously did two days after the terrorist attacks.
But in the warped minds of some on the left, uttering such inanities is not only “understandable,” it’s laudable. That is, of course, if the person alleging that the government created AIDS to kill African-Americans is an aggrieved black man lashing out at the rapacious, capitalist and irredeemably racist United States. Wright, you see, is actually a “patriot” for speaking uncomfortable “truths” about his country.
John Nichols is the Washington correspondent for The Nation. Like most of his comrades, he tends to be a vociferous critic of the religious right, regularly denouncing them for all manner of bad deeds. But to Nichols, Wright is not a divisive figure spreading dangerous lies. He is, in fact, “in possession of the balm that has frequently proven to be the cure for what ails America,” that is, “an eyes-wide-open faith in the prospect that this country can and will put aside the sins of the past and forge a future that is as just as it is righteous.” Nichols ended his ode to Wright by comparing the preacher to none other than Thomas Jefferson, a comparison that Wright would likely find insulting, given that he’s accused the author of the Declaration of Independence of pedophilia.
Indeed, many on the left are trying to outdo one another comparing great historical figures to Wright, whose most proximate antecedent would be a black, religious Lyndon LaRouche. Princeton professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell called Wright “Our Jeremiah,” in that he is akin to the “biblical truth tellers who regularly warned the government that divine destruction was imminent if the nation continued to oppress the powerless.” She then decided to insult the very notion of historical memory by comparing Wright to Frederick Douglass. Don Wycliff, former public editor of the Chicago Tribune, was perplexed as to what all the fuss over Wright was about. “I’m trying to figure out what it was that got everybody’s shorts into a twist,” he wrote in Commonweal magazine. (Wycliff’s bewilderment over the reaction to Wright’s lies and hyperbole does not speak well to his skills as an ombudsman.) The double standard some liberals have employed in response to Wright makes one seriously consider their oft-stated preference for
rationality, reason and secularism over superstition and prejudice.
Wright attacks capitalism throughout his sermons, an odd ideological target for a man who reportedly drives a Porsche and whose grateful congregants are building him a $1 million, four-garage home in a predominantly white suburb of Chicago (so much for being “unapologetically black”). He has also praised Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Libya’s Muammar al-Qadhafi. So it’s really no wonder that a huckster such as Wright has emerged as some sort of “reality-based community” folk hero. The political left finds common cause with the religious left and is apparently willing to overlook exactly the sort of racist sectarianism that it would be so quick to condemn were its perpetrator a white conservative.
Last Monday, Wright claimed that criticism directed toward him represents “an attack on the black church.” With this shot across the bow, Wright perpetrated a solipsistic conflation of the mainstream African-American religious tradition (which, despite the protestations of his apologists, he does not represent) with his own bigoted paranoias: anti-Zionism, anti-white racism and the lie (especially dangerous in the black community, where HIV infection is skyrocketing) that the government created the virus to kill African-Americans.
As much as Obama may now try to separate himself from his former preacher, he unwittingly justified Wright’s barnstorming performance with his initial justification that “I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community.” Unfortunately, some in the reality-based community seem to agree.
James Kirchick is an assistant editor of The New Republic
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0508/10126.html
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