The Volokh Conspiracy

As I noted in a recent post, the Pew Research Center survey of public knowledge of religion found that atheists and agnostics, Jews, and Mormons are the groups with by far the highest knowledge levels in this field. The disparity between these groups and the rest of the population persists even after controlling for education.

What explains the difference between these three groups and the general population? Jamelle Bouie and Matthew Yglesias argue that it is their status as religious minorities. As Bouie puts it:

To me, it’s no surprise that the highest scorers — after controlling for everything — were religious minorities: atheists, agnostics, Jews and Mormons. As a matter of simple survival, minorities tend to know more about the dominant group than vice versa. To use a familiar example, blacks — and especially those with middle-class lives — tend to know a lot about whites, by virtue of the fact that they couldn’t succeed otherwise; the professional world is dominated by middle-class whites, and to move upward, African Americans must understand their mores and norms. By contrast, whites don’t need to know much about African Americans, and so they don’t.

Likewise, religious minorities — while not under much threat of persecution — are well-served by a working knowledge of religion, for similar reasons; the United States is culturally Christian, and for religious minorities, getting along means understanding those reference points. That those religious minorities can also answer questions about other religious traditions is a sign of broader religious education that isn’t necessary when you’re in the majority.

I am skeptical. If Bouie’s theory were correct, the disparity between the three highest-scoring groups and the rest would be mainly the result of their strong performance in knowledge of Christianity – the majority religion in the US. Mormons (an average of 7.9 correct answers out of 12), atheists/agnostics (6.7) and Jews (6.3) do indeed score better on questions about Christianity than Christians do (6.0). But in the case of the Mormons, this is in large part accounted for by the fact that Mormons are Christians themselves, even if of an unusual kind. The 12 questions about Christianity are primarily about the Bible and its doctrines.Mormons recognize the Bible as one of their holy books (though they differ from other Christians in also paying deference to the Book of Mormon). In the case of atheists/agnostics and Jews, their main knowledge advantage over Christians comes from their much higher levels of knowledge about non-Christian “world religions” (mainly Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism). Jews got an average of 7.9 questions out of 11 in this category, atheists/agnostics 7.5, and Christians a mere 5.0 (the Mormon average was 5.6). While Jews, atheists and agnostics also outscored Christians on knowledge of Christianity, the margin was much smaller.

Thus, the main knowledge advantage of these three religious minorities came on questions that had little if any connection to “survival” as religious minorities in an overwhelmingly Christian society. Moreover, even the minority groups’ edge on knowledge of Christianity cannot be entirely attributed to this factor. After all, several of the questions about Christianity covered parts of the Bible that are also Jewish holy scriptures. Jews have reasons to know about them that are unrelated to their minority status. As for atheists and agnostics, a high percentage of them were raised Christian or Jewish and therefore might have acquired some biblical knowledge that way. In sum, the Bouie-Yglesias theory probably accounts for only a small percentage of the difference between the three high-scoring groups and the rest.

What does account for the difference between these three groups and the rest? I suspect that it is their greater cosmopolitanism. Jews, atheists, and Mormons are all notable for their unusually high levels of interest in other cultures, religions, and philosophies. In the former two cases, this is well-known. Mormons, by contrast, may strike some people as insular. However, the Church actually puts a high emphasis on education and many young Mormons spend two or three years as missionaries abroad, which exposes them to contact with other cultures and religious traditions. Although very different in their religious and (median) political beliefs, Mormons, atheists, and Jews are similar in their higher than average commitment to education and cosmopolitanism. For these reasons, it’s not surprising that these groups outscore the rest on measures of religious knowledge.

A Recent Pew Research Center survey of American’s knowledge about religion shows widespread ignorance. The study asked 32 mostly relatively basic multiple choice questions about various religions (including a few on religion and public life):

On average, Americans correctly answer 16 of the 32 religious knowledge questions on the survey by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life…..

More than four-in-ten Catholics in the United States (45%) do not know that their church teaches that the bread and wine used in Communion do not merely symbolize but actually become the body and blood of Christ. About half of Protestants (53%) cannot correctly identify Martin Luther as the person whose writings and actions inspired the Protestant Reformation, which made their religion a separate branch of Christianity. Roughly four-in-ten Jews (43%) do not recognize that Maimonides, one of the most venerated rabbis in history, was Jewish.

In addition, fewer than half of Americans (47%) know that the Dalai Lama is Buddhist. Fewer than four-in-ten (38%) correctly associate Vishnu and Shiva with Hinduism. And only about a quarter of all Americans (27%) correctly answer that most people in Indonesia – the country with the world’s largest Muslim population – are Muslims.

There is also widespread ignorance about constitutional restrictions on the teaching of religion in public schools. Most survey respondents believe that the Supreme Court has banned the teaching of the Bible even as “literature,” and most believe that public schools are not allowed to have “comparative religion” classes:

[A]mong the questions most often answered incorrectly is whether public school teachers are permitted to read from the Bible as an example of literature. Fully two-thirds of people surveyed (67%) also say “no” to this question, even though the Supreme Court has clearly stated that the Bible may be taught for its “literary and historic” qualities, as long as it is part of a secular curriculum. [J]ust 36% of the public knows that comparative religion classes may be taught in public schools.

I. Who Knows the Most About Religion?

Which groups have the highest knowledge levels? It turns out that it’s atheists and agnostics (an average of 20.9 correct answers out of 32), though Jews (20.5) and Mormons (20.3) scored almost equally well. The differences between the three groups are statistically insigificant. Atheists, Jews, and Mormons still score higher than other groups even after controlling for education.

Interestingly, atheists and agnostics (6.7 correct answers) score significantly higher than Christians (6.0) on the 12 questions that cover knowledge of Christianity and the Bible. Mormons (7.9) and white evangelicals (7.3) are, however, clearly the high scorers in this subcategory.

II. Is Ignorance About Religion Rational?

In some ways, ignorance about religion may be rational, just like the equally widespread political ignorance. For most voters, it is rational to be ignorant about politics because most people aren’t much interested in politics, political knowledge is rarely useful for everyday life, and the chance of any individual vote determining the outcome of an election is infinitesmal. Of course, individually rational decisions not to spend much time acquiring political knowledge may lead to bad collective outcomes, such as poor electoral decisions and terrible public policies.

In the case of religion, theological knowledge has little utility for everyday life, most people have only limited interest in religious doctrine, and any one individual’s ignorance about religion probably has very little effect on society. Thus, it’s possible that most people are ignorant about religion for much the same reason that they are ignorant about politics. However, economist Bryan Caplan – a leading scholar on public ignorance – has some reservations about this analysis:

If people sincerely believed that their eternal fates hinged on their knowledge of religion, their ignorance wouldn’t be rational. If you could save your soul with 40 hours of your time, you’d be mad to watch t.v. instead. Unfortunately for religious believers, this leaves them with two unpalatable options:

1. Option #1: Deep-down, most religious believers believe that death is the end. (This is consistent with the fact that even the pious mourn their loved ones at funerals, instead of celebrating the good fortune of the deceased)….

2. Option #2: Most religious believers are so stupid and/or impulsive that they’ll knowingly give up eternal bliss for trivial mortal pleasures. But why then do so many believers show intelligence and self-control in other areas of life?

An alternative possibility is that most Americans believe that in order to be saved in the afterlife you just have to be “spiritual” in some vague way. So long as you believe in God (or perhaps multiple gods), the precise details of religious doctrine don’t matter too much. This is consistent with survey data showing that most Americans believe that a variety of religions can lead to salvation, but 50% say that you can’t be a good or moral person if you are an atheist. If all you need for salvation is a kind of vague general religiosity (plus, perhaps, some good works), then you don’t need much actual knowledge of religion.

This, however, still leaves open the question of why most people don’t make more of an effort to determine whether this kind of ecumenical spirituality is actually true. After all, many great religious leaders (e.g. – Luther and Calvin) argued that your soul can only be saved if you embrace the one true faith. Some atheist writers (e.g. – Christopher Hitchens) contend that you are more likely to become a moral person if you reject religion altogether. It may not be rational to reject these possibilities without investigating them in greater depth than most of the American public apparently has. On the other hand, it’s possible that getting at religious truth is so difficult that most people rationally choose not to study it in depth because they know they are unlikely to increase their chances of salvation very much even if they do.

On balance, I think that religious ignorance is somewhat less rational than political ignorance, though far from completely irrational. But the issue is complex and deserves further study.

UPDATE: Some argue that in many religions, it’s faith, not knowledge that determines salvation. This, however, doesn’t really counter Caplan’s point. You need knowledge to know which theological doctrines are the ones you have to have faith in. Should you have faith in Christ, Vishnu, or the doctrines of the Koran? It’s hard to make an informed choice unless you have at least basic knowledge of Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam.

UPDATE #2: The Atlantic has a summary and links to various commentaries on the Pew survey.

The Brisbane Times reports that:

A Queensland University of Technology lawyer[,] … Alex Stewart[,] has taken leave from his non-academic position as a QUT [Queensland University of Technology] commercial contracts lawyer after controversy erupted over a YouTube clip in which he smokes self-made cigarettes rolled in pages from the [Koran and the Bible] before rating which “burns better”….

The Daily Telegraph (UK) reports,

[Stewart] on leave following a meeting on Monday and is facing an inquiry.

“The university is obviously extremely, extremely unhappy and disappointed that this sort of incident should occur,” vice-chancellor Peter Coaldrake said.

Stewart’s point was apparently to argue (among other things) that people shouldn’t venerate books to the point of getting upset about others’ supposed mistreatment of the books. “Is this profanity? Is it blasphemy? Does it really matter? I guess that’s the point with all this, this crip — it’s just a [bleeped out] book. Who cares? Who cares?” I quote here a video accompanying the Brisbane Times article, which includes a short excerpt from Stewart’s YouTube clip. But I do not know where one can find the full clip; if you can point me to it, or send me a file containing it, I’d be much obliged.

Note that the Brisbane Times video also quotes a police spokesman who is saying that Stewart’s actions were likely not a criminal offense. Thanks to Prof. Howard Friedman (Religion Clause) for the pointer.

UPDATE: Just to repeat what the title says, Stewart is a lawyer working for the university, not a professor.

Ann Coulter’s column today argues that Obama is not a Muslim; rather, he ”is obviously an atheist.” The gist of the argument is “The only evidence for Obama’s Christianity is that he faithfully attended the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ for 20 years….Attending Wright’s church is the conscious, calculated decision to immerse yourself in hate-filled demagoguery and call it ‘Christianity.’”

I disagree with both the facts and the conclusion. Coulter is accurate in calling Jeremiah Wright ”a racist nut.” However, that does not prove that Wright (and by extension Obama, to whatever extent Obama believes in Wright’s theology) is not a Christian. Some practitioners of “liberation theology” (including the black liberation theology variant) may simply be Marxists looking for some broadly-appealing rhetoric to add to their political program. Other practitioners, however, may be sincerely and otherwise-orthodox Christians who truly believe in both Christianity and Marxism, and in the liberation theology fusion of the two. For example, liberation theology was popular among many Catholics in Latin America from the late 1960s until 1984, when it was condemned by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. I think it is implausible to believe that, pre-1984, the many Latin American American bishops, priests, nuns, and Catholic lay people who embraced  liberation theology were all closet atheists. It seems much more reasonable to conclude that at least some of them were orthodox Catholics who, until 1984, could consider liberation theology to be one legitimate way of expressing the Catholic faith.

Similarly, I would suggest that many of the pastors in slave states in antebellum America who taught that slavery was legitimate because of the slaves’ inherent racial inferiority were also sincere Christians, albeit grossly mistaken in their teachings on this matter.

Ergo, belief in the racist, Marxist philosophy of black liberation theology is not necessarily incompatible with being a Christian who has orthodox beliefs on most matters of Christian doctrine (e.g., the trinity, the resurrection, virgin birth, and so on).

Second, the record of President Obama’s Christianity is not limited to his record of attendance at Reverend Wright’s nut-house. For example, this year, the President spoke at a prayer breakfast on Easter Sunday, on what the resurrection means to him personally. His remarks about “the Easter celebration of our risen Savior…and what lesson I take from Christ’s sacrifice” were entirely straightforward statements of orthodox Christianity. I doubt that any normal Christian, of whatever denomination, could theologically disagree with a single word President Obama said.

The ongoing debate over the “Ground Zero Mosque” has generated lots of commentary. But I fear that much of it conflates three separate issues: whether the government should use its power to block the construction of the mosque, whether the construction of any Islamic facility near Ground Zero is objectionable, and whether this particular organization is problematic because of the views of its leader. As I see it, the government should not suppress the mosque, and I see nothing wrong with building an Islamic facility near Ground Zero. But objections based on the dubious record of Cordoba Project leader Feisal Abdul Rauf are not so easily dismissed. There are many weak, foolish, and even bigoted anti-mosque arguments out there. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t any good ones.

I. The Role of Government.

Some mosque opponents, such as New York Republican gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino, have argued that the government should use zoning or eminent domain to block the construction of the mosque. As Eugene Volokh and I have explained in earlier posts, such proposals violate constitutional rights to speech, religious freedom and property. The are also deeply immoral and unjust. A free society must not suppress the freedom of its members merely because their views are objectionable. If Nazis, racists, and communists are entitled to freedom of speech and property rights, so too are the owners of the proposed mosque.

But the fact that the owners have a right to build the mosque that the government must respect does not mean that their exercise of that right is unobjectionable. There are many situations where it may be wrong to exercise a right that should be protected by law. I have a legal right to join the KKK or the Communist Party. But doing so would be deeply wrong nonetheless.

II. Objections to the Presence of any Islamic Center.

Some mosque critics argue that it is wrong to build any Islamic facility near Ground Zero. The most sweeping form of that argument claims that Islam is a generally oppressive, illiberal religion. There are many flaws in Islam as currently practiced in much of the world. But I don’t find such categorical condemnations persuasive.

Islam is a religion with some one billion adherents, with many differing interpretations of its dictates. One can certainly find illiberal and oppressive passages in the Koran and point to them as proof of Islam’s inherent evil. But one can easily perform the same exercise with the Torah and New Testament, which include passages justifying gender inequality, defending the mass murder of the Canaanites, mandating that adulterers be stoned to death, and urging slaves to obey their masters. It would be a mistake to use these passages to “prove” that Judaism and Christianity are inherently oppressive. Most modern Jews and Christians either ignore them or try to interpret them away. Liberal Muslims seek to do the same with comparable passages in the Koran. It is perhaps true that most modern Islamic societies are illiberal and oppressive. But the same could be said of most majority-Christian societies as recently as a century ago. In both cases, political institutions and levels of economic development probably play a larger role than religion as such.

A more moderate objection to the presence of an Islamic site near Ground Zero admits that Islam is not inherently evil, but contends that a Muslim site in that location would be insensitive. Consider this argument by Charles Krauthammer:

Location matters. Especially this location. Ground Zero is the site of the greatest mass murder in American history – perpetrated by Muslims of a particular Islamist orthodoxy in whose cause they died and in whose name they killed.

Of course that strain represents only a minority of Muslims. Islam is no more intrinsically Islamist than present-day Germany is Nazi – yet despite contemporary Germany’s innocence, no German of good will would even think of proposing a German cultural center at Treblinka.

I lost half a dozen relatives in the Holocaust. But I don’t see any inherent problem with having a German cultural center near the site of a former Nazi death camp. So long as the center does not interfere with the operations of the memorial established at the camp, does not promote anti-Semitism, and doesn’t advocate the sort of virulent nationalism that helped cause the Holocaust, it should be unobjectionable. As Krauthammer notes, Germans as a group are not to blame for the Holocaust. And German culture is not reducible to Nazism and anti-Semitism. A center promoting elements of German culture that are not implicated in those phenomena does not somehow offend against the memory of Holocaust victims. A German cultural center that actually condemns Nazism and extreme nationalism while celebrating positive elements of German culture could actually make a useful contribution to reducing prejudice and honoring the victims.

I recognize, of course, that some Jews might still be offended, and avoiding such offense might be a pragmatic justification for not building the center. But the issue is whether the offense-taking would be justified. No one has a moral obligation to change their plans merely because others take unjustified offense.

The same points apply to the proposed Islamic Cultural Center near Ground Zero. Islam is not reducible to terrorism and oppression. A Muslim center near Ground Zero that promotes positive aspects of the Muslim tradition is unobjectionable. One that also denounces terrorism and radical Islamism would be a positive good.

III. Objections to this Particular Center.

Even if there is no good reason to oppose an Islamic facility as such, there are serious objections to Feisal Abdul Rauf, leader of this particular project. For details, see recent articles by Cathy Young, Christopher Hitchens, and Michael Weiss. Hitchens, Weiss, and Young all agree that Rauf’s group has a legal right to build the mosque and do not object to the construction of a mosque near Ground Zero as such. But they also have serious qualms about Rauf’s views, questioning whether he really is an advocate of “moderation,” tolerance, and peace as his defenders claim. To briefly summarize the case against Rauf, the most important points are that he seems to praise much of the ideology of Iran’s repressive theocratic regime, refuses to admit that Hamas is a terrorist group (which should be a no-brainer even if you think that Israel’s policies in Gaza are unjustified), claims that the US was “an accessory” to the 9/11 attacks, and sometimes draws a kind of moral equivalency between US foreign policy and Al Qaeda. Weiss also points out that Rauf took part in a bogus “peace organization” organized by a prominent Malaysian anti-Semite.

As Young notes, there are also more positive attributes to Rauf’s record. For example, he has denounced the 9/11 attacks, criticized some radical Islamist groups, praised the US Constitution, and urged Muslims to respect women’s rights. I don’t think the man is a radical Islamist or a defender of terrorism. Nonetheless, Rauf’s statements are sufficiently troubling that there is good reason to to be skeptical about his mosque initiative unless and until he retracts the above comments or proves that he was somehow misquoted. To borrow from Krauthammer’s Treblinka analogy, it is as if the hypothetical German cultural center there had a leader who claimed that US and British efforts in World War II were morally comparable to the crimes of the Nazis, asserted that Jewish leaders were “accessories” to the rise of Nazi anti-Semitism, refused to describe the SS as mass murderers, and praised the ideology of a fascist dictatorship. Even if he also denounced the Holocaust, claimed to oppose anti-Semitism, and urged fascists to drop some of their most objectionable policies, we could legitimately harbor serious doubts about his organization. The same goes for Rauf and his Islamic Cultural Center.

UPDATE: Various commenters have defended Rauf’s remark posiing a moral equivalence between US foreign policy and Al Qaeda, by claiming that its full context somehow excuses it. I don’t agree. This is what Rauf said:

The complexity [in hostility of many Muslims towards the US and the West] arises, sir, from the fact that — from political problems and the history of the politics between the West and the Muslim world. We tend to forget, in the West, that the United States has more Muslim blood on its hands than al Qaida has on its hands of innocent non Muslims You may remember that the US lead sanction against Iraq lead to the death of over half a million Iraqi children. This has been documented by the United Nations…..

What complicates the discussion, intra-Islamically, is the fact that the West has not been cognisant and has not addressed the issues of its own contribution to much injustice in the Arab and Muslim world. It is a difficult subject to discuss with Western audiences but it is one that must be pointed out and must be raised.

First, to deal with a side issue, Rauf’s claim that US led sanctions on Iraq killed a half million children is simply false, and is certainly not the kind of idea that is peddled by responsible “moderates.”

Second, Rauf clearly does intend to draw a moral parallel between “Muslim blood” on US “hands” and the innocents killed by Al Qaeda, suggesting that the former is a defensible reason for Muslim hostility to the US (though not, he points out, for terrorism; I noted that Rauf isn’t a proponent of terrorism in the original post).

Rauf’s claim also ignores the fact that nearly all of this “blood” is either that of combatants or that of civilians killed accidentally in military operations. It also ignores the many innocent Muslim lives saved by US interventions in Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Kuwait, among others. In the former three cases, there wasn’t even a significant US strategic or economic interest at stake.

If this were Rauf’s only indefensible statement, I might be inclined to overlook it. But in combination with the other ones noted above, I’m not.

As I mentioned last week, Terry Jones — a minister at the ironically named Dove World Outreach Center — is organizing a burning of Korans to mark September 11. That strikes me as both largely pointless, non-substantive rudeness (as opposed to fair and substantive criticism of Islam, which would be perfectly proper) and as largely counterproductive to any realistic attempt to try to convert people from Islam to Christianity. In fact, it plays into the hands of those who are trying to associate American criticism of Islam — including more substantive, reasoned criticism — with angry, substance-free extremism.

But it seems to me that the response from Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (as quoted in this New York Times national feed story) itself plays precisely into Terry Jones’ hands. Here’s what Hooper was quoted as saying:

“Can you imagine what this will do to our image around the world?” said Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Washington. “And the additional danger it will add whenever there is an American presence in Iraq or Afghanistan?”

Unless I’m misreading this, Hooper is pointing out that violent Muslims might react to Jones’ symbolic expression by trying to kill American soldiers — and apparently suggesting that Jones should be held responsible for this reaction by violent Muslims.

This of course reminds people about the violent strains of Islam, and the danger those strains pose. But it also shows how some spokespeople for mainstream Islam (here, Hooper) are willing to use the actions by their violent coreligionists as a tool for suppressing non-Muslims’ alleged blasphemies and insults. That is precisely the image of mainstream Islam, it seems to me, that Terry Jones is trying to foster. I doubt that this was a cunning plan on Jones’ part, but that seems to be the effect.

Continue reading ‘Koran-Burning Minister and Council on American-Islamic Relations Spokesman Play Into Each Other’s Hands’ »

“Is America Islamophobic?,” asks Time magazine. The lead story is abridged online here. I have little opinion on the title question, partly because I’m not a public opinion researcher, and partly because I don’t know what exactly “Islamophobic” means. And paragraphs such as this don’t help much:

Although the American strain of Islamophobia lacks some of the traditional elements of religious persecution — there’s no sign that violence against Muslims is on the rise, for instance — there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence that hate speech against Muslims and Islam is growing both more widespread and more heated. Meanwhile, a new TIME–Abt SRBI poll found that 46% of Americans believe Islam is more likely than other faiths to encourage violence against nonbelievers. Only 37% know a Muslim American. Overall, 61% oppose the Park51 project, while just 26% are in favor of it. Just 23% say it would be a symbol of religious tolerance, while 44% say it would be an insult to those who died on 9/11.

So 46% of Americans believe Islam is more likely than other faiths to encourage violence against nonbelievers — which, as best I can tell, is an accurate belief. I don’t think most Muslims support violence against nonbelievers. But it seems to me that Islam as we see it in the world today is more likely than most other major faiths to encourage violence against nonbelievers, at least if we focus on encouragement that actually makes the violence materially likely (which is the sort of encouragement that I suspect most people are worried about).

This observation is hardly evidence of a “phobia” in the sense of “irrational fear” or “irrational prejudice” (it’s quite rational), or even in the sense of “hatred or hostility towards the group” (which is how I think “-phobia” tends to often be used in terms such as “Islamophobia” and “homophobia” are used). And if “Islamophobia” simply means “holding negative views about some strains of Islam,” then Islamophobia becomes a virtue (if practiced properly) and not a vice — just as I think it’s correct to hold negative views about some strains of Christianity, Judaism, and so on, or to be aware of accurate generalizations about what is especially likely to be encouraged by Protestantism, Catholicism, Mormonism, and so on.

Loose juxtaposition of justified worry about Islam with the label “homphobia” also makes me wonder just how the authors define “hate speech against Muslims and Islam.” As readers of the blog are aware, I have publicly condemned what strikes me as unjustified discrimination against Muslims, or unjustified rejection of Muslims’ reasonable requests for religious accommodation (see, e.g., with regard to the near-Ground-Zero mosque, accommodations for Muslim women doctors, religious accommodations for Muslims generally, accommodations for Muslim women athletes, accommodations of Muslim headgear in court, and the propriety of Muslim witnesses’ swearing on the Koran). I’ve even done this in two articles on National Review Online, see here and here. But insisting on fair and equal treatment of Muslims doesn’t require blindness to the perils posed by some strains of Islam, and awareness of those perils doesn’t require refusal to give fair and equal treatment to Muslims.

Ronald Reagan once said that the conservative D.C. weekly Human Events was his favorite newspaper. And with good reason. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, there were few significant alternatives to the then-hegemonic MSM. Along with National Review, which was Reagan’s favorite magazine, Human Events was an essential source for stories that the MSM refused to cover, and for perspectives that the MSM shut out or marginalized. Unfortunately, a recent article in Human Events falls very far below the solid journalism standards which helped Human Events earn the respect of Reagan and so many others.

“Obama The Muslim,” by  Major Gen. Jerry Curry is an article not worthy of a fifth-rate blog, let alone a serious newspaper. The latter two-thirds of the article consists of criticisms of Obama’s policies on Israel and on Arizona border security. I generally agree with those criticisms, but they provide not a shred of evidence that Obama is a Muslim. Former President Jimmy Carter is extremely hostile to Israel, and he is obviously not a Muslim. U.S. Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) is extremely hostile to border security, and he is not a Muslim. 

So let’s consider the evidence that Curry deploys in the first third of the article:

“President Obama says there is nothing more beautiful than the Muslim call to prayer in the evening.” “Obama’s father and step-father were Muslims and he spent his childhood living in a Muslim country where his school enrollment records say his religion is Islam.”

–All approximately but not precisely true. Four years of his childhood in Indonesia, plus a school record there. The actual prayer call quote is “one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset,” not “nothing more beautiful.” This is a starting point for Curry’s case, but in itself, not even close to proof that Obama is currently a Muslim.

“He says that the United States was not founded as a Christian nation.”

–The same position was taken by the United States Senate in 1797 when ratifying the Treaty of Tripoli, and by President John Adams in signing the Treaty. Neither President Adams nor any of the 1797 U.S. Senators were Muslims.  Article 11 of the Treaty stated:

As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion,-as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen,-and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

“As President of the United States he genuflects to the Muslim King of Saudi Arabia but not the Christian Queen of England. He thumbs his nose at America’s friends and bows to its enemies.”

–I agree that Obama is deferential and obsequious to American enemies such a Hugo Chavez and the Iranian tyrants, and that he has been the most anti-British President of the United States in well over a century, and that he is seriously harming American relations with Poland, the Czech Republic, France, and other allies. But none of that is evidence that he’s a Muslim.

As for the Saudi king: Obama did not “genuflect.” To genuflect, in a literal sense, is to bring at least one knee to the ground, as a sign of respect. Obama did not do that. He gave the Saudi king a deep bow from the waist. I thought this was a disgusting gesture for an American President, but it’s not genuflection. (“Genuflect” can also be used in a looser sense, as behaving in a servile manner. In the article, however, Curry is plainly talking about literal physical actions.)

However, Obama bowed even lower to the Emperor and Empress of Japan. That’s not evidence that Obama is a closet Shinto.

As Curry accurately states, Obama gave only the mildest quasi-bow to Queen Elizabeth II. In light of what 1776 was all about, patriotic Americans should not criticize the American President for insufficient bowing to the British monarch. One can infer from Obama’s bowing patterns that he is anti-British, and one can see that in Japan and Saudi Arabia, he went out of his way to make gestures which made himself and our nation look weak and obsequious. The bowing is evidence that he’s a poor President, but not that he’s a closet Muslim.

According to Curry, “My mother believed in ‘common sense’ testing. She said if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, waddles like a duck and acts like a duck; it’s a duck….In short, Obama quacks like a Muslim, waddles like a Muslim and acts like a Muslim, so is he a Muslim? My mother would say, ‘Yes! He’s a Muslim through and through.’”

I’ll give Mrs. Curry more credit than that. The looks/talks/waddles test for duck identification involves three characteristics are shared by ducks and by no other animals. Mr. Curry, however, listed only characteristics which are common to some Muslims and many non-Muslims: thinks America is not a Christian nation, dislikes the British, acts obsequious around some non-British royals, is anti-Israel, is weak on border security, tries to ingratiate himself with tyrants. Curry might as well have written, “It has two eyes, lives near water, and eats fish.” Sure, it might be a duck, but it also might be a lots of other things. Such as a law school lecturer who agrees with most of the beliefs of the far-left Christian church he attended for twenty years.

Curry’s final item of alleged proof: “Growing up as a Muslim, Obama must have learned that according to the Qur’an it is acceptable to lie, deceive and live by a double standard provided in so doing one advances Islamic goals. Muslims only pretend to trust and be friends with non-Muslims; in the deepest of their Muslim hearts they have been taught that all non-Muslims are infidels.”

–Generally speaking, “must have” conjectures are not evidence of anything. For the sake of argument, let’s temporarily accept the claim that Islamic teaching sanctions lying in certain cases. Even so, there is no evidence that “Obama must have learned” this particular alleged teaching. His Muslim education did not continue past an early age. It might be plausible to presume that he was taught some elementary tenets of Islam (e.g., there is only one God; God spoke to mankind through a series of prophets, culminating in Muhammed; the Qur’an is scripture.) There is simply no evidence that the “lying to infidels is OK” theory of Islam is universally taught in Muslim education for young children, or, for that matter, to all persons who progress through a full course of Muslim religious instruction. That some Muslims teach the acceptability of lying, and that some Muslim scholars endorse this approach, does not prove that Obama “must have” been taught this particular theory.

It would usually be a sign of bad character for any elected official to proclaim his adherence to one religion while secretly adhering to a very different religion. However, Curry’s strongly-stated conclusion is not even remotely supported by the feeble and poorly-researched evidence which he cobbles together. The article should never have been published by Human Events. Of course even eminent publications such as The Atlantic can have a writer who wallows in malicious speculation based on extremely weak and poorly-considered evidence. 

Jerry Curry’s article is not proof that Human Events never produces good articles, nor is Andrew Sullivan’s Trig Trutherism proof that The Atlantic does not publish good articles. However, because reading time is finite, when I choose to read an edited periodical, I try to choose periodicals for which I have confidence that the editors have done a good job in selecting reliable, credible columnists. Accordingly, Human Events‘ retention of Curry as a columnist, like The Atlantic‘s  retention of Sullivan, often make me choose to prioritize reading other periodicals instead.

Co-blogger Eugene Volokh links to an Indian newspaper article about a ruling concerning the property rights of Hindu gods. According to the article, Hindu deities are allowed to acquire at least some types of property rights under Indian law, though perhaps “only deities of registered public trusts were allowed to acquire property in their names.”

It actually makes more sense for deities of polytheistic religions to acquire property than for a monotheistic God to do so. Most adherents of the major monotheistic religions believe in the type of God posited by “classical theism,” who is omnipotent and omniscient. An omnipotent God has no need for physical property. Even if he did, he could effortlessly create any property he needed himself, if necessary in unlimited quantity. And of course he would not need human courts to enforce his property rights, being fully capable of doing so himself at no cost in time or effort. Moreover, anyone who wanted to sue him for using his property to commit a tort would be unable to do so because there is no way a court could force an omnipotent being to pay restitution.

By contrast, most of the deities of a polytheistic religion are necessarily not omnipotent. No more than one omnipotent being can exist in the same universe. If God A cannot coerce God B, then A is not omnipotent. If, on the other hand, A can force B to do his bidding, then B isn’t omnipotent.

Unlike the God of classical theism, non-omnipotent deities have many potential uses for property rights. They might want some items they can’t create for themselves. Even with respect to some objects they could make, they might prefer to pay humans to manufacture them in order to exploit the benefits of comparative advantage. Comparative advantage might also lead them to rely on humans to protect their property against the depredations of other humans (perhaps also other deities). Finally, non-omnipotent deities are at least potentially subject to the power of human courts.

There is, however, one major problem with property rights for non-omnipotent deities. As Eugene points out, it’s hard to prove that the “owners” actually exist and ascertain how they want to use the property in question. The Indian law described in the article appears to handle this problem by limiting deities’ property rights to those that have registered public trusts. In practice, therefore, the gods’ property rights will be exercised by human trustees. This, however, raises the issue of how deities could sue to remove the trustees for breach of their fiduciary duties.

The New Zealand Herald reports,

Instead of facing Islam’s most holy city, a clerical error of astronomical proportions has seen the faithful [among the 200 million Muslims in Indonesia] directing their prayers towards Kenya and southern Somalia.

The Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI), the country’s highest Islamic body, has admitted that they made an error in an edict issued in March regarding the direction of the sacred Kaaba site in Mecca. Originally they had said that the Saudi Arabian city — where Muslims turn towards during their daily prayers — was due west of Indonesia, but they have now corrected themselves and are instead instructing followers to face a bit further to the north….

Despite the mistake, [Ma'ruf Amin, a senior MUI cleric,] reassured Muslims that any prayers made looking towards Africa will not have been wasted. “God understands that humans make mistakes,” he said.

Thanks to Prof. Howard Friedman (Religion Clause) for the pointer.

In a recent Slate essay, Ron Rosenbaum argues that agnosticism is preferable to atheism because atheists wrongly believe that they can explain the origins and nature of the universe:

I think it’s time for a new agnosticism, one that takes on the New Atheists. Indeed agnostics see atheism as “a theism”—as much a faith-based creed as the most orthodox of the religious variety.

Faith-based atheism? Yes, alas. Atheists display a credulous and childlike faith, worship a certainty as yet unsupported by evidence—the certainty that they can or will be able to explain how and why the universe came into existence. (And some of them can behave as intolerantly to heretics who deviate from their unproven orthodoxy as the most unbending religious Inquisitor.)

Faced with the fundamental question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” atheists have faith that science will tell us eventually. Most seem never to consider that it may well be a philosophic, logical impossibility for something to create itself from nothing.

I think Rosenbaum fundamentally misconceives the nature of atheism. Atheism is not a complete theory of the nature of the universe. Rather, as I discussed here, atheism is simply a rejection of the existence of God, by which I mean a being that is omnipotent, omniscient and completely benevolent (the definition [traditionally] accepted by [the vast majority of adherents] of the major monotheistic religions). One can reject the existence of God without believing that we “can or will be able to explain how and why the universe came into existence.”

There are numerous arguments against God’s existence that don’t depend on any particular theory of the origins of the universe. In my view, the “problem of evil” is one of the strongest. For a good and accessible summary of the major arguments for atheism that don’t require explanations for the nature of the universe, see David Ramsay Steele’s recent book Atheism Explained. The “new atheists” whom Rosenbaum attacks also don’t rely on any comprehensive theory of the universe in making their case against the existence of God. Writers like Harris, Hitchens, and Dawkins have their flaws; but believing that they can explain the origins of the universe isn’t one of them.

But how can atheists rule out the possibility that God created the universe if they don’t have an airtight alternative explanation? The answer is that it’s often possible to rule out one potential explanation for X even if we don’t know for certain what actually caused it. For example, I don’t know why I had a headache a couple days ago. But that doesn’t mean I can’t rule out the theory that it was caused by a witch’s curse. There is strong evidence against the existence of witches with magical powers that isn’t tied to any particular explanation for the origins of my headache. Similarly, if we have strong arguments against the existence of God that are not tied to any specific cosmological theory, we have good reason to be atheists even if we can’t explain why the universe exists.

My purpose here is not to provide a comprehensive argument for atheism. That can’t possibly be accomplished in a blog post. Rather, I want to make the much narrower point that such an argument doesn’t require a demonstrably true alternative explanation for the existence of the universe. And most serious atheist writers do not in fact rely on the claim that they have such an explanation.

Rosenbaum is on firmer ground in criticizing some of the rhetorical excesses of the “new atheists.” Richard Dawkins, for example, has foolishly claimed that religious training of children necessarily amounts to “child abuse.” On the other hand, some theists engage in equally ridiculous rhetorical abuse of atheists. Theist intolerance and bigotry against atheists is at least as common as the reverse. For example, some 50% of the American public believe that it is impossible to “be moral and have good values” if you don’t believe in God. In any event, the crude rhetoric and intolerance of some adherents says very little about the ultimate validity of either atheism or theism. And it also doesn’t provide much of an argument for agnosticism.

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously wrote that freedom of speech requires “not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.” The same point applies to property rights. A free society must protect the property rights of those who espouse unpopular views – even if their unpopularity is well-deserved. This problem is presented by a recent incident where Washington, DC police apparently refused to protect the property rights of Muslim traditionalists who are trying to prevent women from worshiping next to men in their mosque:

The D.C. police department will no longer intervene in an ongoing protest by Islamic women over their place in area mosques….

A group of Muslim women has provoked confrontations in mosques in and around the capital for months by claiming the right to worship next to men. The gestures have led to angry arguments between the women and conservative men among the Muslim worshipers.

Internal e-mails obtained by The Examiner show that the D.C. police department has now decided that the men are on their own.

“We are not to get involved,” Inspector Matthew Klein wrote in a May 24 e-mail. “Important that our officers not escort women out of there…”

D.C.’s reversal is a victory for a small group of reform-minded Muslims in the capital region who say that their faith has to shake off its backward view of women.

Told of the department’s about-face, protest organizer Fatima Thompson let out a sustained whoop.

“This is such a win,” she said. “We’re supposed to be one community. Yet the moment we walk in, we’re separated one from the other….”

But the department’s climb-down raised the hackles of Ilya Shapiro, a legal scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute.

“The religious angle is beside the point. This isn’t a lunch counter or a restaurant or a hotel,” he said. “Basically this is a private institution, and that’s what this turns on — private property rights. If you don’t want a trespasser on your lawn … you do rely on the police, ultimately, to eject people you don’t want.”

As a libertarian and an atheist, I have zero sympathy for those Muslim traditionalists who want to relegate women to second class status. Nonetheless, I have to agree with my fellow Ilya here [no relation]. Government must protect the property rights of all its people, even those with abhorrent views. If these Muslim males are indeed the owners of the mosque, they have a right to exclude those who want to use the mosque in ways they disapprove of.

Muslim traditionalists are far from the only religious group with questionable views on women’s rights and other issues. Orthodox Jewish synagogues, for example, also require women to sit apart from men during worship. Some religious institutions exclude people involved in interfaith marriages; others exclude worshipers who are openly gay. The list can easily be extended. If we allow government to pick and choose which people’s property rights to protect based on their principles, the practical result will be protection for only those groups whose ideas conform to majority preferences or those of the political elite.

Private property gives minorities with unpopular views, lifestyles, or identities, a secure space in which they are protected from the hostility of the majority. Such groups included black civil rights advocates in the Jim Crow era, and gays in areas with widespread homophobia. If they cannot exclude those who disagree with their views from their property, they cannot form organizations that advocate and exemplify their principles. Even if, like me, you have little sympathy for this particular Muslim group, you should keep in mind that selective enforcement of property rights is likely to bite people you sympathize with more.

A possible counterargument is that these women could be analogized to black civil rights activists who sat in at segregated lunch counters back in the early 1960s. But as co-blogger David Bernstein points out, Jim Crow-era southern blacks were victims of “the equivalent of a white supremacist cartel”: a massive system of public and private violence that comprehensively excluded them from a wide range of opportunities (even those that might have been offered by owners willing to accept them). They weren’t merely excluded from a few locations owned by people with idiosyncratic views. In such a context, a decision to promote one’s cause by violating the property rights of racists is at least understandable.

By contrast, Muslim women in modern America have numerous options. They are perfectly free to join more liberal mosques that treat women equally or to establish new mosques of their own. They are also free to join a different, more egalitarian, religion or to become atheists or agnostics. In most if not all of these endeavors, majority public opinion would be on their side and various sympathetic individuals and civil society organizations would likely try to help them. Muslim women in Saudi Arabia may indeed be in a position analogous to that of blacks in the Jim Crow South. Not so with Muslim women in Washington, DC.

If we truly support freedom of speech for “the thought we hate,” we must also support property rights for the advocates of those thoughts. That’s why I have previously defended the property rights of communists like Bill Ayers and eminent domain abusers such as the Pfizer Corporation. And that’s why the DC Police probably made the wrong call here.

UPDATE: I said that the Police only “probably” made the wrong call because it’s possible that there’s some dispute over who actually owns this mosque. If the male traditionalists are not the sole owners, then they may not have the right to exclude these women after all. If that’s the case, however, it’s not clear why the Police supported their claims until recently.

UPDATE #2: In the original version of this post, I wrongly identified Justice Brandeis rather than Justice Holmes as the one who wrote the line quoted in the first sentence. I have now corrected the mistake [HT: VC reader Robert Markle].

Jewish Studies Professor Michael Weingrad’s essay “Why there is No Jewish Narnia,” touched off a massive debate over the validity of his claim that there is no Jewish fantasy literature, including my own humble critique. Abigail Nussbaum has posted a helpful roundup of the debate. Weingrad himself responds to his critics here.

Like Nussbaum, I found the response unpersuasive. Indeed, it further undermines Weingrad’s case by pointing out that Guy Gavriel Kay – one of the most prominent fantasy writers of the last 35 years – is actually Jewish (which I didn’t know before). As Weingrad notes, Kay is not only a Jewish fantasy writer, but one who has actually incorporated the issues of Jews and anti-Semitism into his novels, especially The Lions of Al Rassan. Weingrad tries to distinguish Kay’s later work on the grounds that it is “historic fantasy” and not “high fantasy.” But virtually all of Kay’s “historic fantasy” works include such classic high fantasy elements as the use of magic, heroic quests, and a quasi-medieval setting. “High fantasy” and “historic fantasy” are not mutually exclusive categories. Indeed, J.R.R. Tolkien’s work (which Weingrad points to as the prototypical example of high fantasy) incorporated many historic elements from his research on early medieval languages and society.

Weingrad also admits that he “cannot state with any detailed precision what a Jewish alternative [to standard fantasy] would look like.” Without a clear definition of what he means by Jewish fantasy, it is always possible to manipulate the concept in such a way that none of the many fantasy works written by Jewish writers or addressing Jewish-related themes qualifies. Alternatively, Weingrad could define Jewish fantasy extremely narrowly, so as to exclude all of these works. But barring such gambits, I think it’s pretty obvious that there is a great deal of important fantasy literature by Jewish writers, and a smaller but still significant number of fantasy novels that directly address issues related to the Jewish experience. When one recalls that Jews are only a tiny fraction of the population of Britain and the United States (the two nations that produce most modern fantasy literature), there is no underrepresentation of Jews in this field to be explained.

In this post, I criticized psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa’s widely discussed recent article claiming that more intelligent people are more likely to be politically liberal. Kanazawa also claims that his data shows that more intelligent people are more likely to be atheists. This claim is better supported than the article’s argument about political liberalism. Nonetheless, the evidence isn’t nearly as strong as Kanazawa suggests. My own conjecture is that Kanazawa may be right about countries such as the United States, where atheists are a small minority, but less likely to be correct about the many nations where atheists are a much larger fraction of the population.

On the plus side, Kanazawa’s measure of atheism (survey responses stating a lack of religiousity and lack of belief in God) is better than his extremely dubious definition of liberalism. Even this part of his analysis is not completely airtight, since lack of religiosity doesn’t necessarily equate to lack of belief in God. Still, the two are at least highly correlated, and Kanazawa gets similar results for a General Social Survey question that directly asks respondents whether they believe in God. Controlling for various other variables, including education, gender, and race, more intelligent respondents are more likely to say that they don’t.

Unfortunately, however, Kanazawa improperly generalizes from the US results. Only about 2 to 10 percent of Americans are atheists and agnostics. In an overwhelmingly religious society, it is probable that relatively more intelligent people would be more likely to question conventional wisdom – especially since many of the arguments for atheism are counterintuitive. Kanazawa wrongly assumes that atheism is just as uncommon in the rest of the world as in this country. He cites the fact that The Encyclopedia of World Cultures refers to atheism in its descriptions of only 19 cultures, all of them formerly communist societies where the government coercively imposed atheism on the population. Regardless of what that Encyclopedia might say, however, many nations that have never been communist have large numbers of atheists and agnostics (the distinction between the two is not relevant to Kanazawa’s analysis). According to sociologist Phil Zuckerman’s comprehensive article in the Cambridge University Press’ Cambridge Companion to Atheism, there are at least 500 to 750 million atheists and agnostics worldwide. To put it another way, atheism and agnosticism have more adherents than any religious group aside from Roman Catholicism and Sunni Islam. Survey data compiled by Zuckerman also shows that many never-communist countries have 30% or more of their population who fall into one of these two groups. These nations include Japan (65%), Norway (up to 72%), Denmark (up to 80%), Sweden, South Korea, Belgium, the Netherlands, Great Britain, and others. These figures are far from definitive. But they do suggest that atheism is a lot more common than Kanazawa assumes. In the absence of comparative data covering countries where atheism is widespread, Kanazawa’s US data don’t prove that there is any universal tendency for more intelligent people to become atheists.

The fact that atheism is so common in much of the world also undercuts Kanazawa’s and others’ claims that it runs counter to evolutionary instincts. Any such instinctive theism is likely to be relatively weak if atheism can become so widespread despite centuries of repression by political and religious authorities that ruthlessly suppressed it in most of the world up until at least the nineteenth century, or even later.

Pat Robertson recently blamed the Haiti earthquake on a pact with the devil that the Haitians supposedly made in the early 19th century:

Pat Robertson, the evangelical Christian who once suggested God was punishing Americans with Hurricane Katrina, says a “pact to the devil” brought on the devastating earthquake in Haiti.

Officials fear more than 100,000 people have died as a result of Tuesday’s 7.0-magnitude earthquake in Haiti.

Robertson, the host of the “700 Club,” blamed the tragedy on something that “happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it.”

The Haitians “were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III and whatever,” Robertson said on his broadcast Wednesday. “And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, ‘We will serve you if you will get us free from the French.’ True story. And so, the devil said, ‘OK, it’s a deal.’ ”

Native Haitians defeated French colonists in 1804 and declared independence.

“You know, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free. But ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other.”

It seems that Robertson has learned nothing from the outcry generated by his 2001 comments endorsing Jerry Falwell’s claim that the 9/11 attacks were a punishment that God inflicted on America because of “the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, [and] People For the American Way.”

In addition to blaming this tragedy on a wholly fictitious pact with the devil, Robertson also confused Napoleon I (the French ruler the Haitians actually rebelled against in the early 1800s), with his nephew Napoleon III, whose reign didn’t start until 1852.

As a fellow Yale Law School graduate, I’d have to say that the Reverend Robertson isn’t one of our alma mater’s more impressive products.

Ireland has recently enacted a law banning “blasphemy,” which has in turn attracted plenty of justified criticism:

Secular campaigners in the Irish Republic defied a strict new blasphemy law which came into force today by publishing a series of anti-religious quotations online and promising to fight the legislation in court.

The new law, which was passed in July, means that blasphemy in Ireland is now a crime punishable with a fine of up to €25,000 (£22,000).

It defines blasphemy as “publishing or uttering matter that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters sacred by any religion, thereby intentionally causing outrage among a substantial number of adherents of that religion, with some defences permitted”….

But Atheist Ireland, a group that claims to represent the rights of atheists, responded to the new law by publishing 25 anti-religious quotations on its website, from figures including Richard Dawkins, Björk, Frank Zappa and the former Observer editor and Irish ex-minister Conor Cruise O’Brien.

Michael Nugent, the group’s chair, said that it would challenge the law through the courts if it were charged with blasphemy.

Nugent said: “This new law is both silly and dangerous. It is silly because medieval religious laws have no place in a modern secular republic, where the criminal law should protect people and not ideas. And it is dangerous because it incentives religious outrage, and because Islamic states led by Pakistan are already using the wording of this Irish law to promote new blasphemy laws at UN level.

There are many strong objections to the new Irish law, including the ones noted by the Atheist Ireland leader quoted above. I want to criticize the implicit assumption that it is somehow more justifiable to forbid criticism of religion than of secular political or moral views. Contrary to conventional wisdom, I don’t see why it is more objectionable to criticize Christianity or Judaism as opposed to conservatism or Kantianism. One possible answer is that many people are deeply attached to their religious views and are more likely to be offended by harsh criticism than believers in secular ideologies. But that is far from universally true. Some people care deeply about their secular political and moral commitments, as well, and may be just as offended by criticism as religious believers. Think of the reaction of strongly committed environmentalists to harsh criticism of recycling, for example. An alternative defense is that criticisms of religion are particularly likely to be inaccurate or based on unfair prejudices. But there are certainly many examples of inaccurate and unfair attacks on secular ideologies. Just look at the public debate over almost any contentious political issue.

Perhaps the most common argument for treating religion differently is the long history of persecution based on religion. But there is also a long history of persecution targeting advocates of dissenting secular political ideologies. In the last 100 years, it is likely that more people have been killed or imprisoned because of secular political beliefs than because of religious ones. Think of all the people repressed for such reasons under communist, Nazi, and fascist dictatorships. It’s also worth noting that in many countries, there is a long history of persecution of atheists. Arguing for atheism often involves “publishing or uttering matter that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters sacred by [a] religion.” For example, atheists often forcefully argue that God doesn’t exist, which can certainly be perceived as “insulting in relation” to a “matter” held “sacred” by most of the world’s major religions. Even if anti-blasphemy laws don’t impose a complete ban on pro-atheist speech, they surely have a chilling effect on it. Ironically, the effort to protect religion from persecution has the effect of facilitating prosecution of a group that has been persecuted at least as much as any religion. Note also the asymmetry in allowing unlimited criticism of atheism by religious believers, while the atheists have to carefully calibrate their responses lest they say something that runs afoul of the anti-blasphemy law.

Obviously, the law could potentially be amended to forbid all speech that is “grossly abusive or insulting” to any moral or political views, whether religious in nature or not. However, no liberal society would even consider that approach, since it would have the effect of chilling public debate across the board.

UPDATE: I have made a few changes to the post to eliminate awkward phrasing.

(Waiting for relatives to arrive on Christmas Day, I have decided to take up the deep theological questions raised by this … Claus, this Santa Claus.)

Last night at the children’s Mass at our Catholic parish in Washington DC, observe the arrival of the fellow up top in the photo, dressed in a red suit, who proceeded, at the end of the service, march down the aisle loudly saying, “Ho, Ho, Ho,” and “Merry Christmas,” and who delivered a special message to the children that he would be by later that night and they should all be Very, Very Good.  (Rumor has it that Tod Lindberg helped with matters, and a jolly good job too!)

But how should we understand this Santa Claus in church?  Here are two possible theological accounts.  I should note that I am not Catholic, and do not make any claims to deep understanding of Catholic doctrine.

The mythological, or the chief deity of sentimental capitalism.  In this version, the arrival of Santa Claus is extra-religious and extra-Christian.  This is the Santa Claus that got going with the ecumenical and eventually secular re-conception of Christmas.  It is not precisely pagan, but it is religion stripped down to a “love one another at least in this season” core that makes it unthreatening and in a sense available to any faith.  I am all for this.  The way in which the great American Jewish popularizers of Christmas – Irving Berlin above all – re-interpreted Christmas and made it accessible as a sentiment to everyone was a great contribution to peace on earth, good will toward men.

This is not inconsistent with a religious understanding of Christmas, or at least it need not be thought necessarily inconsistent. The best way to think of them is as layers of belief, with core doctrinal religious beliefs being the most deeply held but also the least likely to be shared – and a gradual set of more widely shared but less deeply doctrinally-insistent beliefs in the outer circle.  For many people, it is possible to hold both a deep, doctrinally driven set of theological beliefs, while simultaneously holding a set of shallower, more widely shared set of beliefs, without thinking that it is particularly inconsistent or hypocritical.  The older American understanding of what it means to wish someone a Merry Christmas – that it allows people to fit it into wherever they happen to fit within the layers of belief and sentiment, ranging from a literal “Jesus Christ is born today” to “Hey, it’s a good moment to think about goodness and charity and kindness,” is the best way to approach it, it seems to me.  It is an expeditious ambiguity that allows both understandings simultaneously – even by the same person – and it would be good if it took hold again, rather than the trend toward a more literal understanding, which leads to a greater religious piety, perhaps, but also to greater religious communalism.

Of course, there’s an easier way to understand Santa Claus, which is best put by that canonical work, A Christmas Story.  There are the minor mythological deities – the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy – but Santa Claus is supremo among the pagan deities.

Or you might just say that Santa Claus is the apex deity of sentimental capitalism.

On any of these interpretations, however, his appearance at the children’s Mass is as religious outsider – part of the circle of sentimental, ecumenical, good fellowship of the season, yes, but not religious in a sense relevant to a Catholic Mass.  Although I assumed this was the interpretation of Santa Claus in church, the first time I saw him appear in a Mass was a couple of years ago, when he appeared on the altar and processed out with the priest and servers and others of the serving party.  This struck me as a more serious religious statement, and one that – in the Mormon church where I grew up, for example, it would have seemed quite out of place.  I imagine that would be true of many Protestant churches as well, including ones that “process.”

Saint Nicholas.  An alternative Catholic reading of Santa Claus might argue that Santa Claus should not only be welcome in church, but welcome on the altar, and indeed, I suppose, if enacted by a priest, able to do Mass.  After all, this is Saint Nicholas.  Why shouldn’t he serve in Mass?  One might see the incorporation of St. Nick into the service, and not just as an appearance at the end of Mass, as an attempt by the Church to draw Santa Claus back into a genuinely Christian, indeed Catholic, role.  Putting the Catholic Saint back into Santa.

I wonder if there was perhaps some discussion of the symbolism involved in actually having Santa Claus involved on the altar, in the service, and a conclusion that the nearly inevitable message conveyed is not the re-churching of Santa Claus, but instead the slightly-secularizing of the service itself.  That, of course, is a question of the interpretation of the message, and is a question of internal religious interpretation.  But there is a further aspect to it, viz., that we should not overlook the moral, and indeed religious, value of loose, theologically disconnected symbols that can be embraced or celebrated by those who are not just not Catholic, but not Christian, but for whom Santa Claus can provide a relaxed point of reference.  A deliberately ambiguous and “shallow” reference: sometimes superficiality is a point of virtue.

Update: Re Garrison Keillor … I decided to avoid attacking Keillor here, though of course I was tempted. But looking over his particularly nasty rant, I think that his real target is not the Jewish popular song re-cast of the American Christmas, but instead the PC rewrite of Christmas in the nominally Christian churches. He complains about the rewrite of the Lutheranism of his childhood, not by Berlin, but by the relentless – not secularizers but instead religious universalizers – de-traditionalizing of the PC Christian churches. But being a man of the left, he finds it hard to attack that alone, and so instead takes on a combined target. That is perhaps a charitable interpretation of Keillor, but hey, it’s Christmas.

Over at National Review Online, Cliff May, who is right 99.9% of the time, makes a rare error. He questions President Obama’s Nobel Prize speech claim that “the one rule that lies at the heart of every major religion is that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us.” May points to the Sermon on the Mount and to the teachings of the first-century Rabbi Hillel for evidence of the Golden Rule in Christian and Jewish thought. (An even better Jewish cite would have been Leviticus 19:18–”Thou shalt love they neighbor as thyself”–since Leviticus is Jewish scripture, and Rabbi Hillel’s kind and wise sayings are not.) May then writes: “I don’t think one finds either sentiment in the Koran and the Hadith. Infidels do not enjoy the same status as the Faithful – not in Allah’s eyes and not in the eyes of Allah’s servants. Not unless and until they convert.”

One can find innumerable historical examples of Christians, Jews, Muslims, and others viciously mistreating people who were of different religions. In many cases, the mistreaters could offer some plausible citation to their own religion’s scripture or other teachings. However, if the question is: “Does every major world religion contain the Golden Rule?” the answer is “yes.” To wit:

Islam:  ”Not one of you (truly) believes until he wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself.” An-Nawawī’s Forty Hadith, transl., Ezzeddin Ibrahim & Denys Johnson-Davies (Damascus, Syria: The Holy Koran Publishing House, 3d ed. 1977), Hadith 13, p. 56 (attributed to Mohammed; parenthetical in original).

Confucianism: Mencius said, “Try your best to treat others as you would wish to be treated yourself, and you will find that this is the shortest way to benevolence.”  Mencius, Mencius, transl. D.C. Lau (N.Y.: Penguin, 1970), book 7, part A, item 4, p. 182. (And yes, I know that there’s a lot of discussion about whether Confucianism and Taoism are actually religions, or just philosophies.)

Taoism: Lao Tzu said, “Regard your neighbor’s gain as your own gain and your neighbor’s loss as your own loss.”  Lao Tzu, T’ai Shang Kan Ying P’ien (Treatise of the Exalted One on Response and Retribution), transl. Teitaro Suzuki & Paul Carus (La Salle, Illinois: The Open Court Pub. Co., 1906).

Hinduism: “This is the sum of duty: Do naught unto others which would cause you pain if done to you.”  Mahabharata, 5:1517.

Buddhism: Siddhartha said, “What is displeasing and disagreeable to me is displeasing and disagreeable to others too. How can I inflict upon another what is displeasing and disagreeable to me?”  Christopher W. Gowans, Philosophy of the Buddha (London: Routledge, 2003), ch. 15.

Baha’i: : “Lay not on any soul a load which ye would not wish to be laid upon you, and desire not for any one the things ye would not desire for yourselves. This is My best counsel unto you, did ye but observe it.” Baha’u’lah, Gleanings, from the Writings of Baha’u’lah (U.S.: 1990), ch. 56, p. 128.

Jainism: “One should treat all creatures in the world as one would like to be treated.” Mahāvīra, Sutrakritanga 1.11.33.

Sikhism: “I am a stranger to no one; and no one is a stranger to me. Indeed, I am a friend to all.” Guru Granth Sahib, pg. 1299.

Are the above sayings all “central” to their respective religions? Well in Islam, the Hadith (stories and sayings of Muhammad, based on tradition) are much less central than the Koran. In Confucianism, Mencius is perhaps the greatest of Confucian writers, but he’s not Confucius. One could raise centrality questions about most of the quotes (other than the Sermon on the Mount, which is indisputably central). Does the Hadith’s reference to “his brother” mean: 1. A sibling? 2. A co-religionist? 3. Everyone? At the least, the Hadith’s text (like the text of references to a “brother” in other religions) is open enough so that kind-hearted people can legitimately interpret it as “everyone.”

While President Obama’s Nobel speech is Kennedyesque in the very best way, there is an important difference between the challenge that JFK faced and the one that BHO faces. Communism, like Nazism, was Evil incarnate. President Roosevelt was right to say so about Nazism, and President Reagan was right to say the same about Communism. The appropriate long-term goal for American policy was to eliminate these evils from the face of the earth. Such a goal is neither appropriate nor legitimate with regard to Islam. Accordingly, it was proper for the President Obama in Oslo to continue the Bush policy of appealing the best part of Islam, and of denying the claims of al Qaeda and similar evil-doers that they represent true Islam.

Although I didn’t vote for Barack Obama, he is my President, and I wish him every success in carrying out the positive vision he articulated today; if he does, he will have more than fully earned the Nobel Peace Prize.

Robert Wright’s BloggingHeadsTV is often the best place on the Web for highly intelligent conversation about politics and culture. Particularly excellent is a new episode, posted today, in which Wright interviews Bruce Feiler, author of the new book America’s Prophet, Moses and the American Story. Wright is a scholar of the history of religions, so the conversation is thoughtful, challenging, and enlightening. Wright finds himself astonished, by Feiler’s thesis, but admits that upon reading the evidence, it is irrefutable. As the book’s promotional material states:

The Exodus story is America’s story. Moses is our real founding father. The pilgrims quoted his story. Franklin and Jefferson proposed he appear on the U.S. seal. Washington and Lincoln were called his incarnations. The Statue of Liberty and Superman were molded in his image. Martin Luther King, Jr., invoked him the night before he died. Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama cited him as inspiration. For four hundred years, one figure inspired more Americans than any other. His name is Moses.

I will say that Feiler’s thesis is not at all startling to some of us who have studied religious rhetoric in American history. As when in 1858 Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, one of the founders of Reform Judaism in America, declared  that the American Independence Day was a second Passover: “the fourth of July tells us the glorious story of the second redemption of mankind from the hands of their oppressors, the second interposition of Providence in behalf of liberty, the second era of the redemption of mankind, the second triumph of right over might, justice over arbitrary despotism, personal and legal liberty over the power of the strongest and most warlike.”

When Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were chosen by the Continental Congress in 1776 to design a Seal of the United States, both proposed an image of the Exodus. Adams described the picture: “Moses standing on the Shore, and extending his Hand over the Sea, thereby causing the same to overwhelm Pharaoh who is sitting in an open Chariot, a Crown on his Head and a Sword in his Hand. Rays from a Pillar of Fire in the Clouds reaching to Moses, to express that he acts by Command of the Deity. Motto, Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God.”

Second Amendment advocates had no trouble seeing the connection between the iconic images of Moses parting the Red Sea (in the film The Ten Commandments) with an upraised staff, and NRA President Charlton Heston proclaiming liberty throughout the land while holding high the Kentucky Rifle. Regardless of whether a viewer is inspired or annoyed by the juxtaposition, it’s another example of how, even in the 21st century, the story of Moses and the Exodus continues to play an important role in American public life.