When faith becomes the enemy
By
Sue O'Brien
Sunday,
January 20, 2002 - So you don't believe that Christians are subject
to discrimination?
Not
so many years ago, I was part of a search for
a new faculty member at the University of Colorado.
One candidate's teaching and research credentials far outstripped the pack.
He also was a significant leader in his mainstream
Protestant denomination.
"He
looks good," one colleague said, "but do we really want (imagine a shudder
here) all this religious involvement?"
The
suspect believer eventually was hired, but for a moment there we
almost had to invent a new form of affirmative action - for Christians.
Comes
now my across-town rival, Rocky Mountain News editorial page editor Vincent
Carroll, with a fine new book, "Christianity on Trial: Arguments Against
Anti-religious Bigotry," co-authored by former Rocky staffer David Shiflett.
Carroll
and Shiflett contend that Christians are at risk of being shoved to the
margins of public life, victims of a disinformation campaign that minimizes
their contributions and maximizes their warts.
The
villain of the piece is the "cultural elite"
- not just Boulder professors but members of the media, artistic, political
and intellectual establishments.
And, yes, they're mostly unabashed liberals.
But
it wasn't always thus. From abolition through the civil rights
movement, the authors point out, religious activism was dominated by liberalism.
Indeed, the crusades of my own youth, driven by the "social gospel," revolved
around civil rights, school integration and elimination of the death penalty.
But
in 1973, with the Supreme Court's Roe vs. Wade opinion, the
political coloration changed as conservative Christians erupted against
abortion rights - and the elites suddenly equated religious faith with
a political position they abhorred.
"In
effect," write Carroll and Shiflett, "the stigmatizing of the activist
Christian Right has provided an excuse for a generalized anti-religious
rhetoric, and even for demands that people motivated by faith withdraw
from the public square."
Christians,
of course, bear the brunt of this. (Who was it who said the
only person it's still safe to make jokes about is a 50-year-old white
male Episcopalian?) Slighting remarks about Jews or Muslims still draw
outrage. Christians, however, are expected to stand still and
take it as targets of suspicion, slander, derision and out-and-out hostility.
The bottom-line message is that religion is no longer relevant to modern
life.
Carroll
says he was inspired to write the book, an even-handed historical review
of both shining and shameful moments, by the anti-religious rhetoric of
many Rocky letter-to-the-editor writers.
Similarly,
my own conversion on this issue came courtesy of The Post's Open Forum,
during student Danny Phillips' 1996 challenge to the teaching of evolution
in the Jeffco public schools. In chorus, our letter-writers
howled that Phillips and his supporters were "religious zealots," "ignorant,"
"fanatics," "know-nothings," "narrow-minded," "pushy ideologues," "irrational,"
"gullible," "smug." Most of the insults these defenders of intellectual
freedom hurled at the creationists could have applied with equal justice
to themselves.
Theirs
was a different kind of fundamentalism, but no less dogmatic and no less
intolerant. And the ugliness of the outcry was enough to persuade
this mainstream, born-only-once, liberal Episcopalian that the attack was
not limited to just my most most fundamental (and wrong-headed) brethren.
It was an attack on the whole community of faith.
"Christianity
on Trial" wisely refuses to take sides among Christian subdivisions.
It has none of the "everyone else is damned" absolutism that makes the
religious right so divisive in a world in which all believers need to hang
together.
As
Sen. Joe Lieberman, the first Jewish vice presidential candidate,
points out, in fact, what separates Americans today "seems to be not our
different denominations and faith practices, but faith itself.
We are a society of the religious and the secular, where practicing Jews,
Christians and Muslims often have more in common with each other than with
their non-believing peers."
In
turn, say Carroll and Shiflett, that division
has led to a "secular orthodoxy" in which religious belief is seen as so
menacing that it must be kept at bay. And the easiest way to
accomplish that is to drag Christianity's skeletons out of the closet,
while ignoring the seminal role it has played in shaping Western civilization.
We
remember the suppression of Galileo, but not the trust in a rational universe
that made true scientific inquiry possible. We remember the
Salem witch-burnings, but not the core belief in equality that gave rise
to the ideal of democracy itself.
We
treat Christianity's past as something to recover from, not to celebrate.
That
is heresy. And, perversely, we're letting those who have the
most to fear from faith tie believers to the stake.
It's
the PC Inquisition.
"We
have grasped the mystery of the atom, and rejected the Sermon on the Mount."
- Gen. Omar Bradley
Sue
O'Brien (sobrien@denverpost.com) is editor of The Denver Post editorial
pages.