Recently in Matters of faith Category

I'm fascinated by the debate between Jonathan and Gail, as a relatively liberal and a relatively conservative supporter, respectively, of Israel. I appreciated Jonathan's rebuttal of the notion that a Jew who criticizes Israeli policy is anti-Semitic, and I'm curious if Gail understands his point of view.

I'm also curious to hear Gail's critique of this article in The Economist about "Israel's siege mentality," notably the passages below:

For anyone who cares about Israel, this tragedy should be the starting point for deeper questions--about the blockade, about the Jewish state's increasing loneliness and the route to peace. A policy of trying to imprison the Palestinians has left their jailer strangely besieged....

Israel is caught in a vicious circle. The more its hawks think the outside world will always hate it, the more it tends to shoot opponents first and ask questions later, and the more it finds that the world is indeed full of enemies....

None other than the head of Israel's Mossad, its foreign intelligence service, declared this week that America has begun to see Israel more as a burden than an asset.

That has led to the charge by hawkish American Republicans, as well as many Israelis, that Mr Obama is bent on betraying Israel. In fact, he is motivated by a harder-nosed appreciation of the pros and cons of America's cosiness with Israel, and is thus all the keener to prod the Jewish state towards giving the Palestinians a fair deal. He has condemned the building of Jewish settlements on Palestinian territory more bluntly than his predecessors did, because he rightly thinks they make it harder to negotiate a peace deal. Mr Obama's greater sternness towards Israel is for the general good--including Israel's.

If the real issue is Israel's long-term survival and welfare as a Jewish democracy, how many schools of thought can there be on how to accomplish this....?

For many years I took the position that a society was best served by a government that allowed anything and a culture that encouraged the right thing. Only this, I thought, would produce the right incentive to do the right thing.

Rand Paul attempts to bring this approach, condemning racism while saying it's not his place to ban a business from practicing it. It is intellectually defensible.

The rub is that we all know that, if we let people do things we don't want them to do, they'll probably do them no matter how much we cry. That's why so many conservative evangelicals, who claim in theory to want small, non-meddling government, in practice are on crusades to ban abortion pills, gay marriage and so on. They know that they'll never control the culture enough to squelch such behaviors -- and even if they did, those behaviors would go on anyway.

Cigarette smoking is on the decline in California, but not because of the social pressure, but because the various bans and the pressure together affected behavior. It might be coercive, but it kinda works.

Yet in the South, a century and a half of forced freedom for the black man still hasn't resulted in the vast majority of white people becoming color blind. Imagine how bad they'd be, then, if government hadn't meddled.

That's the problem with libertarian ideals. A democratic citizenry steps back and lets its social groups and institutions do what they want -- and eventually the democratic citizenry has to get involved.

That's when those social groups and institutions start claiming that the democratic citizenry is a fascist or totalitarian state. It's all a little too convenient, isn't it....?

Faisal Shahzad's problem certainly isn't that he was or recently became a devout Muslim. His problem is that he has always been Pakistani. Even after being naturalized, his Pakistaniness came through.

As a fellow Pakistani-American who has researched the matter through my life, I can assert that the vast majority of Pakistanis are not violent. The vast majority of them are not even nuts. Only, say, about half of them are nuts.

The problem is, of course, knowing which half is nuts. Here, there are no easy signs, even among Pakistanis. Privately, we will all concede that half of Pakistanis are crazy. The other half, naturally.

It's like the studies that show that 60% of people think they're above average in intelligence, a statistical impossibility. Or the studies that show that most people think other people are selfish but only a small minority believe themselves to be selfish.
Still, every Pakistani, whether living in Peshawar or Paris or Peoria, insists that it's the other half that's botched that nation's great destiny. They are adamant that no progress can be made until the other half, the crazy half, is removed from the stage. Many insist that a new breed of young Pakistanis might be the salvation of the nation -- as though craziness skips a generation.

In truth, the craziness that sweeps Pakistan is not terribly different from the hot-blooded passions that characterize much of the greater Middle East and Mediterranean cultures. Cultures do have personalities, and these cultural personalities are more powerful than any religion or theology. The difficulty is when a nation with such a culture becomes dysfunctional, and religion is available as a means of rallying malcontents or gaining recognition or blazing a nihilistic train on the impersonal terrain of destiny.

Hmm, I think these folks are oversimplifying my criticism of Bristol Palin, but that's certainly their right.

Here's a HuffPo interview I did with Greg Boyd, who has a strikingly difficult mission: Helping evangelicals to actually subscribe to the worldview that they seek to share with others.

UPDATE: I fixed the link. Sorry about that!

A conference at Georgetown University looked this week at what the role of proselytizing should be in our interconnected, global era. I penned this piece for the Washington Post's "On Faith" blog for the occasion.

Key point: People of all faiths need a Golden Rule for proselytizing, but there are reasons they resist abiding by such a rule.

The late social critic Neil Postman said there are two kinds of people: Athenians and Visigoths. Athenians appreciate poetry and knowledge, Visigoths believe in mauling all competitors. The halls of power are often filled with Visigoths, while some of the great Athenians are found in the working class.

I'll apply that to our dealings with Iran. Visigoths like to portray rivals as Visigoths, in order to find an excuse to bomb them. Athenians by contrast, even when they fight, seek to empathize with their enemies.

For three decades, we have spoken daily in the West of attacking Iran. Some of their leaders have bloviated on occasion of desires to stick it to Israel, which leads to us speaking even more frequently and loudly about attacking Iran, which adds to their own bluster. Iran is surrounded by geopolitical threats. Yet when they respond with bluster, we heighten our desire to go Visigoth on them.

An Athenian reads the situation one way, a Visigoth another. Postman hoped there would be more Athenians among us than Visigoths. So do I.

I'm launching my new book about the so-called clash-of-civilizations Wednesday night at USC. Info on the event is here, and parking info is here. We'll have some copies of the book available for sale, and I'll be around to sign them after my chat with USC religious life dean Varun Soni. Come join us if you can!

My ruminations about the intersection of religion and politics have caused quite a ruckus among many people. What I find fascinating is a particular division among Christians: conservative Christians find my stuff to be awful and misguided, while liberal & progressive Christians find it to be exhilarating and eye-opening. Go figure. What's even more interesting is that I once sided with the conservatives in hating the kind of person that I am now.

But if you're going to read one book relating to my spiritual processings, I'd rather you read this one, by the Rev. Greg Boyd.

In it, Boyd offers precisely the sort of Biblical evidence that some readers here are demanding regarding the contention that the current conservative mix of faith & politics constitutes a kind of flag-waving idolatry. He uses Pauline theology skillfully to dismantle notions that any country can find "favor" in the eyes of the Lord within a world which Paul says is ruled by sin. If you're a conservative who can read this and not be challenged or even changed, you're spiritually and intellectually dead.

Many of my evangelical friends are disappointed with how I drifted from the Church, after spending all those years studying Calvin, Luther, Barth, Brunner, Schleiermacher, Yancey, Nouwen, Lewis, Merton and countless others.

I tell them that if there were more guys like Boyd, I'd be serving communion with them this Sunday. But the fact that there aren't many guys like this does have an impact on what I see God in heaven up to, as it relates to evangelicals.

This stuff is all so deeply personal, I know it is. I know some friends feel I'm being uncharitable in how I assess Christians and how I'm so outraged by the "rightwing clump" that I see in my imagination. I myself spent 15 years saying, "These folks aren't the real Christians"... and finally I decided, "Actually, maybe they are the real Christians, and the rest of us are the imposters...."

But as for Mr. Newland on this board, I find it interesting that he believes the Roman Catholic Church is the one true authority on Christian faith, when his last two popes have taken a sharply different view of politics than he does. Cafeteria Catholicism strikes again...?

My thanks for Mariel G. for running this new piece adapted from my new book.