Jesus, Desmond Tutu, and Donald Trump Jr.

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So here's the deal: I'm not really a Bible-believing Christian anymore. But ... I think I'm a Bible-believing agnostic? Weird thing to say, I realize, but the point is that while I'm not really sure I have a grip on metaphysics I know my moral outlook is very much shaped by growing up in the church, and particularly my association with the Mennonite Church.

So that's why I found it so interesting that Donald Trump Jr. came in for some mockery and criticism this week. Here's what he said: 

“If we get together, they cannot cancel us all. Okay? They won’t. And this will be contrary to a lot of our beliefs because — I’d love not to have to participate in cancel culture. I’d love that it didn’t exist. But as long as it does, folks, we better be playing the same game. Okay? We’ve been playing T-ball for half a century while they’re playing hardball and cheating. Right? We’ve turned the other cheek, and I understand, sort of, the biblical reference — I understand the mentality — but it’s gotten us nothing. Okay? It’s gotten us nothing while we’ve ceded ground in every major institution in our country.”

Emphasis added. Peter Wehner took note of the comment at The Atlantic.

...the former president’s son has a message for the tens of millions of evangelicals who form the energized base of the GOP: the scriptures are essentially a manual for suckers. The teachings of Jesus have “gotten us nothing.” It’s worse than that, really; the ethic of Jesus has gotten in the way of successfully prosecuting the culture wars against the left. If the ethic of Jesus encourages sensibilities that might cause people in politics to act a little less brutally, a bit more civilly, with a touch more grace? Then it needs to go.

Decency is for suckers.

 Ed Kilgore piled on at New York:

We have grown accustomed to the irony of conservative Christians all but idolizing a politician who is the most heathenish public figure of our generation, inordinately proud of his power over women in particular and supposedly lesser beings generally and incapable of confessing a single sin or weakness or defeat. But it’s still a bit jarring to hear this chip off the old block openly calling for an ethic of hatred, resentment, and vengeance against his imagined persecutors.

Wehner and Kilgore are right, but incomplete. It's easy to mock Donald Trump Jr. for his callow approach to Christianity, but honestly: Isn't he just saying the quiet part out loud? If America is nominally a Christian country -- most of us still claim the religion, however tightly or loosely those affiliations are held -- can we be said to be a society that "turns the other cheek?"

Think about where that phrase originates:

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well.

That's a radical command. It's one that almost nobody -- least of all self-proclaimed Christians -- follows.

If we were that kind of society, we might not have a death penalty. If we lived by a "turn the other cheek" ethos, we might not have troops spread out around the globe, ready to deliver violence at a moment's notice. If that's who we were, we wouldn't have grown men continuing to use John Wayne as a model of masculinity. And honestly, I'm not sure I know if it's possible to build a society on a "turn the other cheek" ethos. What I do know is that we're not in danger of finding out anytime soon. Donald Trump Jr. is just expressing the way we already live.

What does it look like to live in that fashion? Michael Eric Dyson gets at the possibilities in a reflection on the legacy of  Archbishop Desmond Tutu: 

When people claim the political utility of forgiveness, they help stabilize a culture addicted to the satisfaction of petty vengeance, establishing in its stead a measure of justice supported by big-picture moral values and social visions.

“Thus,” Archbishop Tutu argued, “to forgive is indeed the best form of self-interest, since anger, resentment and revenge” undermine the common good. South African leaders borrowed from Black American kin in their fight against apartheid. Nelson Mandela promoted armed resistance against murderous white rule, while Archbishop Tutu advocated nonviolent resistance against white supremacy. As the head of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Archbishop Tutu believed that the only way to achieve a thriving democracy was for its citizens to come clean about their sins. He argued that Black forgiveness would remake South African society and pave the way for true justice.

This kind of work is -- let's be honest -- unnatural. Our instinct is never to turn the other cheek, but to repay injury with injury. The people among us who try to live by a "turn the other cheek" ethic are basically saints. And too often, their example can be misused by those who would happily inflict injury but naturally wish to avoid consequences for their actions. (Oh, all the people who love to quote Martin Luther King Jr. without following his example!) 

So: I have no respect for Donald Trump Jr. But he's an easy target. In our lives, in our politics, in our actions, most of us think -- even if we're not really willing to say -- that the biblical reference gets us nothing. He was just being honest about it. 

Memories: The difference between fundamentalism and evangelicalism

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Discussing the debates within the Southern Baptist Church, David French offers a distinction between evangelicals and fundamentalists (and no, he emphasizes, the two are not the same):

Instead, I’d frame the difference in a number of different ways—“grace versus law,” or perhaps “open-hearted versus closed-minded.” In an earlier newsletter, I described fundamentalists as possessing “fierce existential certainty.” The fundamentalist Christian typically possesses little tolerance for dissent and accepts few sources of truth outside of the insights that can be gleaned directly from the pages of scripture.

(Snip.)

Evangelicals often also have a higher view of grace than fundamentalists. They emphasize God’s grace more than God’s rules and are more prone to focus on God’s mercies than God’s judgment.

In my real life and my online/writing life, I refer to myself as a lapsed Mennonite, but it's actually more complicated than that. I was raised and baptized -- Feb. 27, 1983 -- in the Church of Christ, a fundamentalist nondenominational church found primarily in the south. Some of my earliest memories involve my dad's year attending what was then known as Oklahoma Christian College, a sort of denominational school, as much as there could be one, for the churches of Christ.

I grew up so afraid of sin. So afraid I would lie, then die without having had the opportunity to pray for forgiveness. It's stressful to be a kid when Hell is sitting at your elbow, constantly. Jesus dying on the cross was an act of love, but it also reflected God's Terrible Wrath. God may have so loved the world, but he also was ready to torture you eternally for getting crosswise with him, and that was the part that made an impression. I think I remember the word "grace" being used in Church of Christ sermons, but I don't really remember feeling it. 

In 1984, my family moved to Hillsboro, a central-Kansas town populated mainly -- but not exclusively -- by Mennonites and Mennonite Brethren, the latter a more evangelical branch of the church. And then, one day, my parents decided to take us to an MB service. This was shocking -- to step foot inside a church that wasn't a Church of Christ, to worship with all these people we'd been told all our lives were going to Hell because they didn't love God the right way (they used musical instruments in their worship!) was terrifying.

Over time, though, I got over it. What I remember most from this time was a transition from the constant fear, from a legalistic belief in God, to the emphasis on God's mercy -- on having a relationship with God. Hell was still there, to be sure -- it was one reason the church supported missionaries. But it receded as a presence from the center of my daily lived theology. Eventually, as I got older, I embraced the Mennonites more broadly, but then slipped away from the church. I won't lie: Along the way the old ways have occasionally stuck in the back of my mind. What if my grandparents, who stayed in the Church of Christ and who railed against my father's choices, were right? What if a little embrace of grace was just a steppingstone to Hell? 

Somewhere over the years I asked myself that question and answered: "So be it." I think it was when I encountered gay Mennonites at the original national meeting of the Mennonite Church-USA in 2001. (Oh, goodness, that's 20 years ago now.) I decided that if God really did so love the world, he wasn't going to hold it against me for trying to act in the same spirit even if I got the particulars wrong. It was liberating. Of course, that also liberated me to leave the church entirely, I suppose.

The point being: French's distinction between fundamentalists and evangelicals really resonated with me. They both might look conservative from the outside, and they are, but there are (um) fundamental differences in approach. In my life, those differences have been meaningful.

Memories: Goneward, Christian soldiers

Does he, though?

I used to be a real churchy guy.

One reason I moved to Lawrence in 2000 -- aside from the newspaper job -- is that I already knew of a lefty Mennonite church in town that I had come to adore. For the first few years I lived here, the congregation was my home. By that time, my late 20s, I had come to define my Christianity as a sort of language: I didn't think it was necessarily the only right language, but it was the language I knew and had grown up in, so it was the language I would use. The congregation was a place where I could be open about that, and it was ok. And the community was terriffic - the most meaningful of my life. Church-goers were my mentors, my friends, the people I watched movies with and drank with and, once or twice, even tried to date. (Unsuccessfully.) I may never find that again, and that hurts.

After 9/11, though, even my loose definition of faith began to feel implausible. Everywhere I looked, it seemed, people were doing terrible things in the name of whatever religious language they possessed. Hindus and Muslims killed each other in India. They didn't ostensibly share my religion, but Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson did, and they blamed the terror attacks on "abortionists, feminists and gays." I didn't want to share the identity of "Christian" with them. Around the same time, my own congregation went through a process that resulted in our welcoming, for the first time, gay and lesbian people into membership -- a necessary and good journey, one that I advocated, but also draining. I didn't want to have to fight over whether the love of my gay friends was somehow legitimate or not. Over time, I began to think that if God condemned those genuine and loving relationships -- as so many of my fellow Christians fiercely believed -- that maybe I couldn't be cool with God. One Sunday morning, singing hymns, I realized that I could not honestly sing or speak the words in front of me. Mark Twain was right. You can't pray a lie.

John Updike is nowhere near my favorite author. But in November 2002, he wrote a short story for The Atlantic about a man who relinquishes his faith after watching the Twin Towers fall.

Thus was Dan, an Episcopalian lawyer of sixty-three, brought late to the realization that comes to children with the death of a pet, to women with the loss of a child, to millions caught in the implacable course of war or plague. His revelation of cosmic emptiness thrilled him, though his own extinction was held within this new truth like one of the white rectangles weightlessly rising and spinning within the boiling column of smoke. He joined at last the run of mankind in its stoic atheism. He had fought this wisdom all his life, with prayer and evasion, with recourse to the piety of his Ohio ancestors and to ingenious and jaunty old books—Kierkegaard, Chesterton—read in adolescence and early manhood. But had he been in that building (its smoothly telescoping collapse in itself a sight of some beauty, like the color-enhanced stellar blooms of telescopically photographed supernovae, yet as quick as the toss of a scarf)—had he been in that building, would the weight of concrete and metal have been an ounce less, or hesitated a microsecond in its crushing, mincing, vaporizing descent?

No.

And I felt it.

But I have kept the door open to returning to the church. Art was a big motivator -- the songs of Johnny Cash and Sufjan Stevens, the novels of Marilynne Robinson, the films of Terrence Malick. And I have remained sympathetic to the conservative Christian friends that I made in college, understanding why they are so vociferously opposed to abortion without sharing that view.

The last few years, and the last few weeks, have made that open door feel a bit closer to closed. White American Christianity -- which is not *Christianity*, I realize, but still the faith language I know best -- aligned itself with Donald Trump so thoroughly that it began to look distinctly un-Christian to me. The celebration of vulgarity, the lies, the racism and misogyny ... if this was what people understood that God required of them, wanted of them, I wanted nothing to do with that God, or those people really. More likely, the people who called themselves Christians did what they wanted and told themselves that it was God speaking, but that didn't really make me feel any better.

There is no real complex, intellectual theology for me to offer you, only my sense even now that I lost something when I walked away from the church, but that I cannot embrace what the church -- or, rather, what I knew as my experience of church -- has to offer. I know there are other varieties of religious experience, but they don't speak to me. My old congregation still meets, in a different place than when I was a regular, and I still visit from time to time. The music of the old hymns still stirs me. But I still can't sing the words. Right now, I am not sure that I ever will be able to again.

Do American Christians need a strongman to protect them?

David Graham on Jeff Sessions, Christianity and Trumpism: 

When Plott asked Sessions, who is now running an underdog campaign to return to his old U.S. Senate seat in Alabama, how Christians could support Trump, he replied with a reference to Egypt and el-Sisi.

“It’s not a democracy—he’s a strongman, tough man, but he promised to protect them. And they believed him, because they didn’t want the Muslim Brotherhood taking over Egypt. Because they knew they’d be vulnerable. They chose to support somebody that would protect them. And that’s basically what the Christians in the United States did. They felt they were under attack, and the strong guy promised to defend them. And he has.”

A few prominent, though isolated, evangelicals have been highly critical of the president. They argue that Trump shows none of the signs of Christian devotion or morality, and that Christians who align themselves with the president are making a crude bargain with a flawed man in an attempt to obtain safe harbor. Michael Gerson, in a 2018 Atlantic cover story, criticized the habit of “evangelicals regarding themselves, hysterically and with self-pity, as an oppressed minority that requires a strongman to rescue it. This is how Trump has invited evangelicals to view themselves. He has treated evangelicalism as an interest group in need of protection and preferences.”

I've seen and heard some variation on "American Christians want a strongman to protect them" theory a few times now, and it raises a couple of thoughts:

* I don't think American Christians are really in danger of losing their liberty -- but they are in "danger" of having groups they have disfavored over time achieve the same levels of liberty they have traditionally held in our society. Southern whites and their allies made similar arguments during the 1960s about Black liberation. To folks who have been on top for so long, equality isn't perceived as a net gain -- more freedom for everybody! -- but as a loss of their own advantages. It's not about liberty. It's about power.

* That said (and here my Mennonite roots are showing) I am constantly confused by the need of conservative American Christians to dominate the society around them when they profess to follow a religion whose central narrative act was one of surrender -- to the authorities, to death -- by the Most Powerful Being in the Universe. Jesus didn't seek a strongman to protect him. I'm not sure why his followers think they shouldn't observe and act on his example.

Trumpist Christianity isn't Christianity

McKay Coppins writes about President Trump's photo op at the church:

As I’ve written before, most white conservative Christians don’t want piety from this president; they want power. In Trump, they see a champion who will restore them to their rightful place at the center of American life, while using his terrible swift sword to punish their enemies.

If you believe in Christianity, you believe in a God who sent his son not to overpower his enemies, but to die at their hands. It is really that simple. And that is the opposite approach of Christians who seek to dominate their neighbors rather than love them.

Trumpist Christians aren't Christians, at least not in a religious sense. Sure, they may attend church. But mostly, they're another tribe -- a tribe that wants little more than what other tribes want. Power. Profane power.

It will not lead to salvation.

Things that trouble me: Loving your enemies

Just saw this posted by a prominent African American attorney in Philadelphia:




And I get it. There's a history in this country of "Christians" using their religion to subdue black people. I'm reminded of this:

On display now at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., is a special exhibit centered on a rare Bible from the 1800s that was used by British missionaries to convert and educate slaves. 

What's notable about this Bible is not just its rarity, but its content, or rather the lack of content. It excludes any portion of text that might inspire rebellion or liberation. 

"About 90 percent of the Old Testament is missing [and] 50 percent of the New Testament is missing," Schmidt says. "Put in another way, there are 1,189 chapters in a standard protestant Bible. This Bible contains only 232."

A religion that contorts itself to maintain the mastery of its adherents is bad religion. It is propaganda parading around in the garments of faith. But I'm going to resist the temptation to say the people who do such things aren't "real Christians," because let's face it: Christianity is whatever its adherents actually do.

On the other hand: Loving your enemies is really fucking hard to do. Almost nobody is inclined to try, and very few make the attempt.

And I'm convinced that the proportion of people claiming to be Christian who really endeavor to love their enemies is exceedingly small.

I'm maybe not the person to lecture on this. My own faith is ... shaky. I can best be described as agnostic-with-one-foot-still-in-the-faith. But I believe Christianity's ideal is a challenge for adherents, not because of its sexual ethic, but because it requires us to love the most unlovable of people, in the most unlovable of situations.

That is an extraordinary demand. That so few of us follow it make the meme above seem pretty reasonable. But I hate that it is so.

About Christians, Refugees, and Trump

If you call yourself Christian and you're OK with Trump working to save Syrian Christians while banning Syrians of other religions, then Christianity is not your faith, it is not your religion, and it's certainly not your relationship with Jesus.

It's just a tribe. Just a way of dividing us from them. Little could be more profane.

Tim Tebow* and 'All-American Muslim'

Defenders of Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow have responded to critics of his faith exhibitions with one consistent response: "What if he was Muslim?" The idea being that Christian-hating politically correct liberals would probably celebrate if Tebow was praying to Mecca in the end zone.

We do, of course, have examples of high-profile Muslim athletes to consider. Muhammad Ali and Kareem Abdul Jabbar both came in for intense criticism for their conversions to the faith—really intense criticism, which makes the "controversy" surrounding Tebow look like teatime debate by comparison. More recently—but before 9/11—Mahmoud Abdul Rauf (an NBA player) was regularly booed during the 1990s after he decided the Star Spangled Banner was an expression of "nationalistic worship" incompatible with his faith. (Some Christians think the same thing, incidentally.)

Beyond sports, though, there's been a recent example of American Muslims trying to publicly demonstrate how they intertwine their faith and lives: The TV show "All-American Muslim." And it's a useful example. Lowe's and other businesses have pulled advertising from the show under pressure from the Florida Family Association—which doesn't like the show because it depicts residents of Dearborn, Michigan as regular folks. The FFA would prefer—demands—that Muslims be shown as jihadist killers and oppressors.

And of course, we all remember the outrage that greeted the "Ground Zero Mosque" last year.

So: When Tim Tebow expresses his faith, he becomes the subject of discussion on talk shows and op-ed pages, all while making big money to promote brands like Nike. American Muslims who express their faith are lumped in with killers and concerted efforts are made not just to criticize them, but to drive them entirely from the public square.

What if Tim Tebow was Muslim? He's lucky he isn't.

* I expect this to be the last time I refer to Tebow for quite some time. For all our sakes.

Fox News says I'm an 'anti-Christian bigot'

Hey, at least they spelled my name right. Apparently I'm an anti-Christian bigot for having the temerity to criticize Tim Tebow, using Scripture no less. Which, fine. But what amuses me is that the commentator also paints Kurt Warner with the 'anti-Christian bigot' brush—yes, the same Kurt Warner who was previously the highest-profile evangelical Christian in the NFL. Purity is tough, man.

On writing about religion

Some people like writing. Others like having written. Me? I like having written without giving offense to people I love and respect.

By that standard, my musings in "Tim Tebow's ostentatious faith" and "Tebow, revisited" have been flaming disasters, with responses from my Christian friends generally ranging from stern disagreement to angry chastisement. The common theme in those responses: That (perhaps) I'd let antipathy to Christianity cloud my judgment.

The estimable William Voegelli weighed in with the least-angry but still-pointed variation on this theme: "If your point is that we would be better off rediscovering the value and satisfactions of reticence, I'm on board. If you're singling out Tebow because fundamentalist Christianity gives you the heebie-jeebies, I'm not." Privately, a close friend suggested (in not-so-many words) that I'd made a shtick out of being a big-city agnostic who was once a small-town Christian.

I didn't sleep much, or well, last night. It's quite a thing to have produced as intense a reaction as that.

But having examined my conscience, let me say this, unreservedly: Christianity doesn't give me the heebie-jeebies.

Here's my dirty little secret: You can take the man out of the church, but you can't really take the church out of the man. I know that 30 years of immersion in Christian circles—particularly among Mennonites—still shapes both me and my worldview. And though I've been frank about my own fall from faith, I've also felt a deep desire that (in the words of Paul writing to the Romans) I "not cause my brother to stumble." I've never wanted to undermine anybody else's faith: They have their journeys and I have mine. The idea of evangelical agnosticism is kind of silly if you think about it, anyway, and I've not had much use for the fundamentalist atheism of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.

There's a "but" coming, however.

I also don't believe that religion or Christianity are necessarily unmitigated forces for good, nor above critique. Just this week, Rick Perry released an ad that I believe to be a shining example of Christian chauvinism. It's not his faith that offends me; it's the political and societal implications of how he wields that faith that I find frightening and objectionable. I think it's possible to criticize that without being anti-Christian. But I also understand that if you're a conservative Christian, such criticism might look anti-Christian to you. To some extent, then, I have to offer my critiques in (er) good faith and let the chips fall where they may.

So what does any of this have to do with Tim Tebow, you may be asking. He's just a guy who is public about his faith, right? It's not like he's running for president or anything. Fair point. Why does an athlete deserve my critique?

Well, for one thing: Tebow's big news. His faith is big news, and controversial. Seems worthy of discussing in an op-ed column, then.

But let me tell a personal story. A number of years back, I was walking down Massachusetts Street in Lawrence, Kan. A church had gathered at one corner—as it often did weekly during early summer evenings—and one man stood atop a planter, shouting a hellfire-and-brimstone sermon at traffic and passerby. This was when I was still immersed in faith and church, but I stopped and chatted with one of the leaders. And what I told him was this: If the church was trying to win converts to Christ—it was—then the planter sermons were a bad idea. They were alienating far more people than they were attracting; the result being that by the church's own lights it was pushing more people away from Christ (and thus possibly condemning them to hell) than it was saving. This seemed alarming to me. It didn't seem to bother the street preachers.

In other words: What I say now is pretty much precisely the thing I was saying when I was a Christian.

Obviously, I'm not a man of faith anymore, so maybe I'm not the best person to counsel Tim Tebow about the effectiveness of his ministry. But if you look not-terribly-closely at what I wrote, some of the main thrusts were A) the Christ that Tebow worships seems to urge modesty in one's public displays of faith and B) evangelizing the way Tebow does might be counterproductive. I didn't tell Christians to shut up; in fact, I proclaimed that idea "undesirable." Given that I'm not a Christian, it seems likely that I was perceived as using Scripture to try to stifle Christians. I can see how it would look that way. From my perspective? I was evaluating Tebow by the standards of the Scripture he claims to adhere to. When you are so very public about your faith, that is going to happen. And it's often going to be people with a real antipathy to the faith doing the evaluating.

It legitimately grieves me that my Christian friends would perceive me as attacking their faith. I'm not sure what to do about that without forfeiting my option to write about issues involving Christianity—a bad idea in a still-quite-religious nation.

But I wrote in a provocative tone. And I provoked. I accept that some of my friends found that hurtful. I can't say I won't do it again. I will, however, be mindful.

Tim Tebow's ostentatious faith

National Review's Mario Loyola tries to get to the bottom of why Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow annoys people so much, and concludes: "People aren’t upset at Tebow’s God talk. They’re upset that he might actually believe it."

Meh. Tim Tebow doesn't bother me one way or another, though I admit to finding his success this season rather fascinating. (And I'm not really a football guy.) Nonetheless, when I see his ostentatious displays of faith on the field, I'm reminded of some old gospel verses: 

5 “And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. 6 But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. 7 And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. 8 Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.

Guy named Jesus supposedly said that. But I'm sure Tim Tebow knows better.

(Photo from Tebowing.com)

Forgiveness for Newt

I remember in the late 1990s when a conservative friend of mine made a strenuously felt case that Bill Clinton didn't deserve to be president because of Clinton's well-known philandering. "How can I trust him to keep his oath to the country when he can't even keep his vow to his wife?" my friend said, and indeed that seemed to be the rationale for a lot of evangelical Christians who weren't content to simply oppose the president, but expressed a great deal of contempt for him.

I was reminded of my friend tonight by Dave Weigel's Slate story about how Iowa evangelicals are trying, very delicately but unmistakably, to give their flock permission to vote for thrice-married (and multiple philanderer) Newt Gingrich. To be fair, those leaders acknowledge the problem. Says one pastor: “Do you vote for a Mormon who's had one wife, a Catholic who's had three wives, or an Evangelical who may have had an entire harem?”

There's a lot of talk about "forgiveness" in Weigel's piece—talk that, to my memory, was pretty well absent when it came to Clinton's transgressions a decade ago. What to make of this? A couple of options:

• That evangelicals were sincere in the late 1990s about their contempt for Clinton, but have been so beaten down by GOP sex scandals since then that they're bending and bowing to the larger culture's sexual mores—or at least, deciding those strict rules don't matter so much in the political realm anymore. I'd actually kind of hate to see that, bizarrely enough: I don't really share evangelicals' sexual morality, but I'd hate for holders of that morality to shrug and give into the culture out of weariness rather than conversion.

• Or maybe it's straight hypocrisy.

The truth, I suspect, is a little bit of both: A mixture of defeat and cynicism when it comes to our sexed-up culture. In any case, I'd love to hear some of these guys talk more about forgiving Clinton. They kind of have to, right?

Andrew McCarthy, Robert Wright, Moderate Islam and the Fundamentalist Mindset

The face of "real" Christianity?

Not long ago, National Review's Andrew McCarthy wrote something that has stuck in my craw for a few days. He conceded that there are many moderate Muslims while dismissing the possibility of moderate Islam itself. Here he is:

There is no moderate Islam in the mainstream of Muslim life, not in the doctrinal sense. There are millions of moderate Muslims who crave reform. Yet the fact that they seek real reform, rather than what Georgetown is content to call reform, means they are trying to invent something that does not currently exist.

In other words, McCarthy dismisses "millions of moderate Muslims" because -- even though those millions of Muslims live their lives in what we're calling "moderate" fashion -- Islamic doctrines aren't similarly moderate. And that makes little sense: It's like insisting that there are no Catholics who use birth control or Southern Baptists who dance, because the doctrines and practices of those churches prohibit or discourage such practices. We know that's not the case, though.

I have no idea what religion, if any, McCarthy practices and observes. But it seems to me that many of the people who insist that "real Islam" is the ugliest version of itself revealed in the Koran are people who -- like Florida Rev. Terry Jones -- are Christian fundamentalists themselves or, like the broader American conservative movement, often politically allied with fundamentalists.