Matt Yglesias

Does The Media Give Islam A Pass?

Jeffrey Goldberg spies a double-standard:

I do think that elite makers of opinion in this country try very hard to ignore the larger meaning of violent acts when they happen to be perpetrated by Muslims. Here’s a simple test: If Nidal Malik Hasan had been a devout Christian with pronounced anti-abortion views, and had he attacked, say, a Planned Parenthood office, would his religion have been considered relevant as we tried to understand the motivation and meaning of the attack? Of course. Elite opinion makers do not, as a rule, try to protect Christians and Christian belief from investigation and criticism. Quite the opposite. It would be useful to apply the same standards of inquiry and criticism to all religions.

Really? I don’t recall George Tiller’s killing—or Eric Rudolf’s before him—as having touched-off some kind of widespread social or intellectual attack on American Christianity. Indeed, the United States Conference of Bishops responded to the Tiller murder in a manner that, had it been used by CAIR, would have prompted cries of moral equivalence:

“Our bishops’ conference and all its members have repeatedly and publicly denounced all forms of violence in our society, including abortion as well as the misguided resort to violence by anyone opposed to abortion,” Cardinal Rigali said. “Such killing is the opposite of everything we stand for, and everything we want our culture to stand for: respect for the life of each and every human being from its beginning to its natural end. We pray for Dr. Tiller and his family.”

And, I dunno, it is what it is. After all, what are you really supposed to say about religion. After all, not only is the bishops’ statement kind of inadequate, but the central premise of Christian religion (the whole Jesus thing) is—according to me and to Jeff Goldberg too—totally false. Islam too! And yet at the same time we all need to coexist. And fortunately the vast majority of people professing every faith, along with the vast majority of those professing no faith, are rejecting violence and not killing people.

Hawkishness and the “New Atheists”

Robert Wright is doing some blogging to promote his great new book The Evolution of God and offers this thought on the oddly right-wing foreign policy views of the so-called “new atheists”:

It must strike progressive atheists as a stroke of bad luck that Christopher Hitchens, leading atheist spokesperson, happens to have hawkish views on foreign policy. After all, with atheists an overwhelmingly left-wing group, what were the chances that the loudest infidel in the western world would happen to be on the right?

Actually, the chances were pretty good. When it comes to foreign policy, a right-wing bias afflicts not just Hitchens’s world view, but the whole ideology of “new atheism,” especially as seen in the work of Hitchens allies Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins.

Wright’s ensuring discussion of this bores into the details of Western ideas about Muslim grievances and makes good points. I think another way of thinking about it is that Dawkins has basically tried to reformulate atheism in the evangelizing and illiberal mode of illiberal evangelizing religion. Thus, much as right-wing Christians and right-wing Muslims can simultaneously loathe each other and have structurally similar views, so, too, can “new atheists” join the party. Elsewhere you have a liberal ethic adhered to by people who identify with different spiritual traditions and also by what I think are “normal” atheists, just people who don’t identify with a religious tradition, rather than people who want to construct a self-conscious atheist identity and go to battle over it.

Bishops, Baptists Organizing Against Contraception

It’s precisely because of stances like this that it’s very hard to take the “abortion is murder” crowd seriously when they say abortion is murder. Their revealed behavior indicates that they don’t actually find abortion especially problematic, but just place it on a spectrum containing a general aversion to women controlling their own sexuality:

But more conservative religious groups working with the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships say they would be forced to oppose such a plan—even though they support the abortion reduction part—because they oppose federal dollars for contraception and comprehensive sex education. This camp, which includes such formidable organizations as the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops and the Southern Baptist Convention, is pressuring the White House to decouple the two parts of the plan into separate bills. One bill would focus entirely on preventing unwanted pregnancy, while the other would focus on supporting pregnant women.

Atrios sees this as a reason to mock those who advocate seeking “common ground” with abortion proponents. I think we’re arguably seeing here the real fruits of seeking common ground in good faith—their real views are smoked out.

The Trouble With Burqa Bans

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Michelle Goldberg had a very good column in TAP Online the other day about the debate in France over banning burqas:

Ultimately, though, there’s no evidence that most burqa-clad French women regard themselves as oppressed. “There are women who wear burqas who are not being forced by anyone, who think that form of modesty is appropriate for who they want to be in the world,” says Scott. “It’s hard to distinguish between them and those who are being forced.” And so in the end, a ban putatively passed to further women’s rights could instead impinge on their freedom, and take from them something they value. Even worse, it could lead to those in the most fundamentalist of households being trapped inside their homes altogether. It would be cruel to limit these women’s options in the name of liberation, even if their clothes are a rebuke to the secularism that the French rightly hold sacred.

Putting her points on this together in a slightly different way, this sort of ban seems extremely unlikely to actually help anyone who’s genuinely in need of help. A woman whose husband and/or other male relations have enough power over her to force her into a burqa against her will is only going to be forced by those same men further underground by this sort of rule. The only kind of person who would be genuinely unveiled by this kind of legal measure would be someone with enough autonomy to be in a position to choose compliance with the law over compliance with tradition. The French have a strong tradition not just of secularism, but of a kind of illiberal egalitarianism that holds that everyone should really be the same, and I think it tends to push them toward measures like this that don’t ultimately help anyone.

Obama-is-a-Muslim Myth Surprisingly Bipartisan

Brad DeLong quoted a mystery reader as offering the following aperçu:

12% of the country still thinks Obama is a Muslim. 8% thinks he faked his birth certificate. The new Washpost/ABC poll says that 22% of the electorate id’s itself as GOP. Thus it is a fair inference that roughly half of declared Republicans are fringe lunatics–which explains why “respectable” conservative media outlets like National Review publish the Andy McCarthys and the Victor David Hansons, and why GOP politicians like Michelle Bachman and Steve King are now “mainstream” for the GOP.

I thought that was funny, but Brendan Nyhan points out that it doesn’t seem to be true: “The most recent Pew poll shows that 17% of Republican believe Obama is a Muslim — not 50% — along with 10% of independents and 7% of Democrats.”

To me, the striking thing about the poll isn’t so much the number of people who think Obama’s a Muslim (around 10 percent of people will apparently believe anything) as it is the truly huge proportion of the population who seems to be agnostic on the subject. Only 48 percent of Americans think Obama’s a Christian! Which is surprising not so much because of the ignorance it reveals as for the fact that I would have thought you need to get your Christian Q Rating considerably higher than that to win an election.

The Asymmetry of Majority and Minority

Jewish people are not in any serious way oppressed in the United States of America. But still, being a member of a religious minority group is a distinctive experience. Even in a country that doesn’t officially make Christianity an official state religion, Christianity seems to be the official religion of the state. When Christmas comes around, everyone gets days off so that people can go spend the holidays with their families. When Passover comes around, you get nothing. Mail comes on Saturday but not on Sunday. Liquor stores are closed on Sunday. That’s life, and it’s hardly the worst thing in the world. But it does give you a different perspective on things. And I think it’s a perspective that would probably help a Jewish judge to understand the claims of minorities religious groups in general. Not just other Jews, but Muslims and Hindus and Jehovah’s Witnesses and all the rest. These insights don’t necessarily determine outcomes, but you could imagine a Christian missing some of the real dynamics here. And by the same token, it strikes me as plausible to say that a Muslim judge or a Hindu judge would have similar virtues.

But this is a way of saying that membership in a religious minority group could enhance a judge’s insight into the constitutional protections due to members of religious minority groups. It’s not a claim about Muslims and Hindus and Jews. It would make no sense to look a Hindu judge in India and attribute special insights to him. For a Christian in the United States to say that being a Christian gives him special insight into religious freedom litigation would be creepy and possibly offensive. But if he was saying that his background growing up as a Christian in Lebanon gives him special insight, that would be a totally different thing.

More broadly, you don’t need to make any claims about the special virtues of any group in particular in order to see the point that a diverse group of decision-makers is going to reach a better understanding of issues than a monolithic group would.

Thrice-Married New Catholic Newt Gingrich Likes Gothic Churches

This is really retarded:

“Part of me is inherently medieval. I resonate to Gothic churches and the sense of the cross in a way that is really pre-modern.”

– Newt Gingrich, in an interview with U.S. News, on his conversion to Catholicism.

I don’t even know what to say. I like old churches too.

The Case for Mormon Moderation

It seems Zvika Krieger was already at work on a profile of Utah Governor Jon Huntsman before he unexpectedly agreed to take the Ambassador to China job. His conclusions about that business—partly politically motivated on Obama’s part, but it works because Huntsman’s so well-qualified, and it works for Huntsman since he doesn’t think a moderate can win unless the GOP gets a thrashing first in 2012—are probably correct, but not all that new and interesting. What is interesting is this theory of why Huntsman started drifting into the reform camp in the first place:

Huntsman seems to have learned another lesson from the Romney campaign: A Mormon, no matter how conservative, cannot win amongst the right wing of the party–particularly evangelicals. Romney thought he could win their favor by becoming a drum-beating social conservative, underestimating the deep-rooted antipathy many evangelicals have toward Mormons. A recent Pew poll found that 39 percent of evangelicals hold negative views of Mormons–a sentiment Mike Huckabee used against Romney. Though RNC Chair Michael Steele was lambasted last week for saying “the base … rejected Mitt because it had issues with Mormonism,” he wasn’t that far off: According to a study by John C. Green and Mark Silk, the size of the evangelical community was one of the best predictors of Romney’s success or failure in each state; without the evangelical vote, they argue, Romney probably would have won in four of the five southern states he lost. In light of Romney’s experience, the more likely base for Huntsman would have been the moderate wing of the party, which is less concerned with religion in general (and the LDS church specifically).

I’m not sure that Huntsman’s really hit on a “solution” to this problem. It seems to me that given evangelicals’ large numbers, the tendency, come what may, will be for an evangelical-friendly candidate to win. Which is to say, a Protestant Christian who favors banning abortion and is hostile to claims of gay and lesbian equality. Of course given the winner-take-all nature of most GOP presidential primaries, it’s always possible for an unlikely Republican candidate to prevail against a divided field. But a Mormon intrinsically has a steep hill to climb.

Catholics and Conspiracy

Ross Douthat on Dan Brown:

Brown’s message has been called anti-Catholic, but that’s only part of the story. True, his depiction of the Roman Church’s past constitutes a greatest hits of anti-Catholicism, with slurs invented by 19th-century Protestants jostling for space alongside libels fabricated by 20th-century Wiccans. (If he targeted Judaism or Islam this way, one suspects that no publisher would touch him.)

I think this is a bit apples-to-oranges. You could target Judaism or Islam for criticism in a book, but you simply couldn’t target Judaism or Islam “this way.” The Catholic Church has a centralized bureaucracy and an institutional continuity lasting over a thousand years. That’s good fodder for conspiracy theories. Other religions aren’t organized this way. Protocols of the Elders of Zion had to postulate not only a conspiracy, but the elders themselves, since you can’t have a conspiracy without conspirators.

That said, my favorite work of historical conspiracy fiction, The Eight, does the proper thing and takes aim at the Freemasons, a group that seems to have been invented precisely to provide fodder for good conspiracy theories. Plus, it also involves accounting improprieties!

Christianity on the Decline

Interesting Holy Week item from Gallup showing the slow-but-steady decline in the percentage of Americans self-identifying as Christian:

The right way to think about the growing political mobilization of Christianity is that back when Christian self-identification was up in the nineties there was nothing to mobilize. But as the number of self-identified Christian goes down, its potential as a politically salient identity goes up.

Inauguration Trivia

Via Robert Farley, it seems John Quincy Adams didn’t get sworn-in on a Bible:

John Quincy Adams, according to his own letters, placed his hand on a constitutional law volume rather than a Bible to indicate where his fealty lay.

Interesting. The symbolism of the oath-on-bible is interesting. In some respects, you can take it as symbolizing the fact that even though in our system “no one is above the law,” including the president, in practice it’s actually extremely difficult to fully hold the chief executive to that standard. We’re putting our faith in the idea that the person occupying that office to be guided by the higher law, God’s law. It makes a certain amount of sense but I can’t help but feel that the faith is often misplaced.