***
Critics pounce after Obama talks Crusades, slavery at
prayer breakfast
President Obama has never
been one to go easy on America.
As a new president, he
dismissed the idea of American exceptionalism, noting that Greeks think their
country is special, too. He labeled the Bush-era interrogation practices,
euphemistically called “harsh” for years, as torture. America,
he has suggested, has much to answer given its history in Latin America and the
Middle East.
His latest challenge came
Thursday at the National Prayer Breakfast. At a time of global anxiety
over Islamist terrorism, Obama noted pointedly that his fellow Christians, who
make up a vast majority of Americans, should perhaps not be the ones who cast
the first stone.
“Humanity has been grappling
with these questions throughout human history,” he told the group, speaking of
the tension between the compassionate and murderous acts religion can inspire. “And
lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place,
remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed
terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow
all too often was justified in the name of Christ.” [emphasis added]
Some Republicans were
outraged. “The president’s comments this morning at the prayer breakfast are
the most offensive I’ve ever heard a president make in my lifetime,” said
former Virginia
governor Jim Gilmore (R.). “He has offended every believing Christian in the United States.
This goes further to the point that Mr. Obama does not believe in America
or the values we all share.”
Obama’s remarks spoke to his
unsparing, sometimes controversial, view of the United States — where
triumphalism is often overshadowed by a harsh assessment of where Americans
must try harder to live up to their own self-image. Only by admitting these
shortcomings, he has argued, can we fix problems and move beyond them.
“There is a tendency in us, a
sinful tendency, that can pervert and distort our faith,” he said at the
breakfast.
But many critics believe that
the president needs to focus more on enemies of the United States.
Russell Moore, president of
the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, called Obama’s
comments about Christianity “an unfortunate attempt at a wrongheaded moral
comparison.”
What we need more, he said,
is a “moral framework from the administration and a clear strategy for
defeating ISIS,” the acronym for the Islamic
State.
Obama spoke a day after
meeting with Muslim leaders, in what participants said was his first roundtable
with a Muslim-only group since taking office. The Muslim leaders who argued
that they feel their community has faced unfair scrutiny in the wake of
terrorist attacks overseas. Although the White House released only a broad
description of the meeting — which touched on issues including racial profiling
— participants said it gave them a chance to express their concerns directly to
the president.
Farhana Khera, executive
director of the civil rights group Muslim Advocates, one of 13 participants,
said the session gave Obama a chance to focus on Muslim Americans the way he
has done with other constituencies, such as African American and Jewish groups.
“I started off by saying the
biggest concern I hear from Muslim parents is their fear that their children
will be ashamed to be Muslim” because of discrimination, Khera said. “We are
asking him to use his bully pulpit to have a White House summit on hate crimes
against religious minorities, much like the summit on bullying reset the
conversation around LGBT youth.”
Obama emphasized the need to
respect minorities in his speech Thursday, saying it was part of the obligation
Americans face as members of a diverse and open society, “And if, in fact, we
defend the legal right of a person to insult another’s religion, we’re equally
obligated to use our free speech to condemn such insults — and stand
shoulder-to-shoulder with religious communities, particularly religious minorities
who are the targets of such attacks.”
For the president, the prayer
breakfast represented a role he has played before: explaining to Americans why
others might see things differently. Joshua DuBois, who headed the White House Office of Faith
Based and Neighborhood Partnerships under Obama and has served as an informal
spiritual adviser, said the president is conscious of the fact that Islam is an
abstraction for much of the general public.
“The president, as a
Christian, knows many American Muslims,” DuBois said. “Unfortunately, a lot of
folks in our country don’t have close relationships with Muslims. The only time
they’re hearing about Islam is in the context of the foreign policy crisis or
what’s happening with ISIS.”
As a result, many Americans
have an increasingly hostile view of Islam. A Pew Research
Center survey last fall
found that half of Americans think the Islamic religion is more likely than
others to encourage violence, while 39 percent said it does not. The view
that Islam is more apt to encourage violent acts rose 12 percentage points from
the beginning of 2014 and was double the number who said so in March 2002 —
less than a year after the Sept. 11 attacks.
In the past, Obama has used
stark, personal terms to describe ongoing tensions between African Americans
and America’s
white majority. When discussing the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the
February 2012 shooting of Trayvon Martin, a black teenager, he spoke of being trailed while shopping in a department store and
hearing the locks on cars click as he walked down the street.
But he has also framed the
most incendiary aspects of race relations — whether it’s the moment when his
former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright, thundered “God damn America” from
the pulpit or the shooting of another unarmed young black man, Michael Brown —
as an opportunity to test the concept of American exceptionalism.
“We welcome the scrutiny of
the world — because what you see in America is a country that has
steadily worked to address our problems and make our union more perfect,” Obama
said. “America
is not the same as it was 100 years ago, 50 years ago or even a decade ago.
Because we fight for our ideals and are willing to criticize ourselves when we
fall short.”
But each of these admissions
of fault — whether it is Obama’s acknowledgment during his 2009 Cairo speech that the United States was involved
in the 1953 coup overthrowing the government of Iran Prime Minister Mohammad
Mossadegh or the suggestion that America has “a moral responsibility to act” on arms control because
only the United States had “used a nuclear weapon” — has drawn sharp criticism
from opponents.
Obama has argued that United States is
exceptional because it is strengthened from citizens’ frank
assessments of how it is faring. And he has defended the exceptional role it
plays in the world given its military power and political traditions, like when
Obama decided to intervene in Libya
on the grounds that it is not in America’s nature to stand by while
a civilian population is threatened.
But he has always argued that
straying from those values, as he believes happened during the George W. Bush
administration, weakens the United
States. “We went off-course,” he said early
in his presidency of the detention and interrogation practices of his
predecessor, and he pledged to end torture, close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba,
and correct what he defined as mistakes America made during the country’s
“season of fear.”
Critics say that Obama is
chastising the wrong people.
“The evil actions that he
mentioned were clearly outside the moral parameters of Christianity itself and
were met with overwhelming moral opposition from Christians,” Moore said. He added that while he understood
Obama’s attempt to make sure “he is not heard as saying that all Muslims are
terrorists, I think most people know that at this point.”
^^^^^
The Foolish, Historically Illiterate, Incredible
Response to Obama’s Prayer Breakfast Speech
Using religion to brutalize
other people is not a Muslim invention, nor is it foreign to the American
experience.
People who wonder why the
president does not talk more about race would do well to examine the recent
blow-up over his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast. Inveighing against
the barbarism of ISIS, the president pointed out that it would be foolish to
blame Islam, at large, for its atrocities. To make this point he noted that
using religion to brutalize other people is neither a Muslim invention nor, in America, a
foreign one:
Lest we get on our high horse
and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades
and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In
our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name
of Christ.
The “all too often” could
just as well be “almost always.” There were a fair number of pretexts given for
slavery and Jim Crow, but Christianity provided the moral justification. On the
cusp of plunging his country into a war that would cost some 750,000 lives,
Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens paused to offer some explanation.
His justification was not secular. The Confederacy was to be:
[T]he first government ever
instituted upon the principles in strict conformity to nature, and the
ordination of Providence, in furnishing the materials of human society ... With
us, all of the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the
eye of the law. Not so with the negro. Subordination is his place. He, by
nature, or by the curse against Canaan, is
fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system. The architect, in
the construction of buildings, lays the foundation with the proper material-the
granite; then comes the brick or the marble. The substratum of our society is
made of the material fitted by nature for it, and by experience we know that it
is best, not only for the superior, but for the inferior race, that it should
be so.
It is, indeed, in conformity
with the ordinance of the Creator. It is not for us to inquire into the wisdom
of His ordinances, or to question them. For His own purposes, He has made one
race to differ from another, as He has made “one star to differ from another
star in glory.” The great objects of humanity are best attained when there is
conformity to His laws and decrees, in the formation of governments as well as
in all things else. Our confederacy is founded upon principles in strict
conformity with these laws.
Stephens went on to argue
that the “Christianization of the barbarous tribes of Africa”
could only be accomplished through enslavement. And enslavement was not made
possible through Robert’s Rules of Order, but through a 250-year reign of mass
torture, industrialized murder, and normalized rape—tactics which ISIS would find familiar. Its moral justification was not
“because I said so,” it was “Providence,” “the
curse against Canaan,” “the Creator,” “and
Christianization.” In just five years, 750,000 Americans died because of this
peculiar mission of “Christianization.” Many more died before, and many more
died after. In his “Segregation Now”
speech, George Wallace invokes God 27 times and calls the federal government
opposing him “a system that is the very opposite of Christ.”
Now, Christianity did not “cause”
slavery, anymore than Christianity “caused” the civil-rights movement. The
interest in power is almost always accompanied by the need to sanctify that
power. That is what the Muslims terrorists in ISIS
are seeking to do today, and that is what Christian enslavers and Christian
terrorists did for the lion’s share of American history.
That this relatively mild,
and correct, point cannot be made without the comments being dubbed, “the most
offensive I’ve ever heard a president make in my lifetime,” by a former
Virginia governor gives you some sense of the limited tolerance for
any honest conversation around racism in our politics. And it gives you
something much more. My colleague Jim Fallows recently wrote about
the need to, at once, infantilize and deify our military. Perhaps related to
that is the need to infantilize and deify our history. Pointing out that
Americans have done, on their own soil, in the name of their own God, something
similar to what ISIS is doing now does not make ISIS
any less barbaric, or any more correct. That is unless you view the entire
discussion as a kind of religious one-upmanship, in which the goal is to prove
that Christianity is “the awesomest.”
I seemed to be going for
something more—faith leavened by “some doubt.” If you are truly appalled by the
brutality of ISIS, then a wise and essential step is understanding the lure of
brutality, and recalling how easily your own society can be, and how often it
has been, pulled over the brink.
^^^^^
and Christian/Muslim history
Christianity did not “cause” slavery, anymore
than Christianity “caused” the civil-rights movement. The interest in power is
almost always accompanied by the need to sanctify that power. That is what the
Muslims terrorists in ISIS are seeking to do
today, and that is what Christian enslavers and Christian terrorists did for
the lion’s share of American history.
–
Ta-Nehisi
Coates,
[the Coates article is above]
Thursday, at the National
Prayer Breakfast, President Obama gave a wonderful
talk that I recommend everyone read. You can skip past the
loosening-the-room-up humor to where he starts to get serious: “And certainly
for me, this is always a chance to reflect on my own faith journey.”
Several times (most
recently two
weeks ago) I’ve focused on the difference between liberal religion and
fundamentalist religion. One aspect of that difference is summed up in a quote
often attributed
to President Lincoln:
My
concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on
God’s side.
In fundamentalism, it’s
obvious which side is God’s: It’s all spelled out very clearly in a “literal”
interpretation of scripture. So there’s no problem going to extremes, because
you begin with 100% certainty.
But in liberal religion, how
to bring the spirit of your faith into the nitty-gritty of human experience is
always a bit mysterious, and you constantly have to re-examine your actions and
motives to be sure you’re still getting it right. That’s what Obama is talking
about:
We
should start with some basic humility. I believe that the starting point
of faith is some doubt — not being so full of yourself and so confident that
you are right and that God speaks only to us, and doesn’t speak to others, that
God only cares about us and doesn’t care about others, that somehow we alone
are in possession of the truth.
He goes on in that vein, in a
way that I find beautiful.
But you’d never know that
from the public discussion of his talk, which focused on this small excerpt,
one that comes right after Obama has criticized ISIL and “those who seek to
hijack religious for their own murderous ends”:
Lest
we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember
that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds
in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too
often was justified in the name of Christ.
The
president’s comments this morning at the prayer breakfast are the most
offensive I’ve ever heard a president make in my lifetime. He has offended
every believing Christian in the United States. This goes further to
the point that Mr. Obama does not believe in America or the values we all share.
Apparently one value Gilmore
thinks “we all share” is to regard whatever story makes us feel good as
“history”, no matter what actually happened. And he’s right: Obama doesn’t
believe in that. But neither do I or a lot of other Americans … or even a lot
of “believing Christians”.
Some secularists segued from Obama’s
criticism of Christianity to a denunciation of religion in general: They all
have been used to justify wars and atrocities at one time or another, so they
should all be done away with.
This is where I think the
Ta-Nehisi Coates quote at the top of this post fits in: People seeking power or
exercising power are always going to justify what they do in whatever way
things get justified in their culture. (Stalinists used to describe their
version of Marxism as “scientific” and make reference to the “laws of History”
rather than the will of God.) For most of history, that’s meant justification
in religious terms. But getting rid of religion wouldn’t change the underlying
dynamic. Rationalization will use whatever tools are at hand.
And religiously-justified
atrocities are never going to convince ordinary people stop practicing
religion. It’s like drinking alcohol: If you regularly enjoy a glass of wine at
dinner without it ever leading to anything horrible, hearing about drunk
drivers who kill innocent children or alcoholics who wreck their own lives
isn’t going to persuade you to stop. Your own positive experiences are always
going to trump horror stories about somebody else.
***
