Scary Sarah & Co.

"You can't say you are waging a war on religious extremism if you are trying to put a religious extremist a heartbeat away from the presidency." Sounds true enough, this, written by Juan Cole at Salon.com. He's applying this principle to McCain's selection of Sarah Palin, and by implication to millions of the secret theocratic Christians living in this country who are just as bad as any Islamic regime in the Middle East.

What's truly impressive about Sarah Palin, however, is the fact that she's been able to move Alaska toward a theocracy while the rest of the country has been snoozing. I think Mike Huckabee has done the same thing in Arkansas, since he's Baptist-type theocrat, too, who, for example, doesn't believe that science has really explained the origin of life and its path from first cell to man. In that he's just like the majority of Americans, unwashed imbeciles that they are. Thank G..., whatever, that smarter people can avoid them all and flyover such states. Well, they might get the government they deserve.

Seriously, there is an astounding knowledge gap possessed by certain elites about average citizens, especially small towners and even more so, those dreaded southerners. Philip Terzian, literary editor for The Weekly Standard, wrote in the September 15 issue about this sort of "misapprehension," and he gave an example during his tenure at the Los Angeles Times:

One day on of the editorial secretaries, a gay Jewish male, told he was traveling back East to visit his family in Philadelphia and Miami. I asked him if he planned to drive from Pennsylvania to Florida, and he literally reared back in horror.

"Are you kidding?" he exclaimed. "With my name?"

Comments

[TM]

Reminds me of the story of Jerry Garcia and Sandy Rothman traveling through the rural South in the 60's to listen to authentic bluegrass. To their surprise, they weren't lynched!

[Joe Long]

You know, out of context, he DOES have a point; we CAN'T wage a war on "religious extremism" and yet have believing leaders. (Or a First Amendment, or, frankly, a civilization.)

"Religious extremism", as far as I can tell, simply means actually believing your religion's tenets and acting, at least some of the time, accordingly. This could mean forgoing a convenient abortion, or waging war on the Jew and the infidel wherever you might find him - as the case may be, depending on your personal "faith tradition".

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>"Religious extremism", as far as I can tell, simply means actually believing your religion's tenets and acting, at least some of the time, accordingly.<<<

Not entirely, Joe. Take Christianity, for instance: there is nothing in the teachings of Christ, the Apostles, the Fathers or the early Church which permits the use of force to compel belief in Christ. Indeed, the early Church explicitly taught that true belief cannot be compelled. The first execution for heresy doesn't occur until the 5th century, and it is noteworthy that it was performed not by the Church, but by an Emperor acting in the civil realm. Until the Middle Ages, the notion that one could forcibly convert people, or that coercion could be use to enforce orthodoxy, was an anomaly, a distortion of what the Church actually taught and believed.

Yet it is also true that Christians, from the Middle Ages through the middle of the 18th century, began customarily resorting to violence to enforce sectarian uniformity, a shameful abuse that reached its peak in the 16th and 17th century wars of religion. Looking at these, and at the few remnants of self-identified Christians who continue to advocate the use of violence both to spread the faith and ensure that their own particular version thereof prevails, can justly be described as extremists--they carry their faith to extremes, beyond the boundaries of what the faith truly entails. The use faith to mask their own personal agendas.

The same might be said of the handful of radical Jews who believe that violence can be used to bring about the restoration of the Davidic Kingdom and the establishment of the third Temple: they use Torah to justify their actions, but their interpretation of Torah is contrary to that taught by the Rabbis since the third century AD.

On the other hand, I think a case can be made that Muslims who see jihad as ARMED struggle to bring the whole world under the sway of Islam are in fact teaching the true doctrine of Mohammed. They are extreme only in their tactics and their implacability. Tactically, there is no mandate for the use of suicide attacks in the Quran; similarly, there is no mandate for attacks that kill innocent Muslims, which the Wahabbis finesse by defining themselves as the only true Muslims, and all other schools of jurisprudence as being apostate; apostasy is of course, punishable by death. QED.

It is possible for a Christian or a Jew to live in accordance with the teachings of their faiths peacefully within a pluralistic society. I do not think it is possible for Muslims to do the same, since Islam teaches that the faithful will have both temporal as well as spiritual predominance. Situations in which Muslims are subservient to other codes of law besides Sharia are considered transient and anomalous, to be rectified as soon as practical. Non-Muslims living under Muslim rule can never be extended full and equal right with Muslims, but can only exist as Dhimmis. There are, therefore, basic differences in outlook regarding whether one can tolerate religious pluralism in a society, and under what conditions.

[Jenny Islander]

The problem with Governor Palin's religious views being placed one heartbeat away from the presidency is this:

In her eyes, you're not a Christian.

[Michael D. Harmon]

Jenny: If your comment has some deeper or satirical meaning, I guess I'm just too dull to get it. So, please, explain to me why I am not a Christian in her eyes.

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>In her eyes, you're not a Christian.<<<

On the contrary, I am pretty sure that I am.

[Jenny Islander]

Haven't you heard about her remark when she won an earlier election? "At last, our town can have a Christian mayor." She meant somebody from her denomination (Pentacostal IIRC). Her opponent was Lutheran, you see.

[Tony Esolen]

Transpose the ho-hum beliefs of Christian Ozzie and Harriet to the present day, dilute them a little, mix them up with some nonsense from popular entertainment, and you have the "extremism" of people like Governor Palin. People have short memories.

Forcible conversion even in the Middle Ages was considered invalid; that is, it didn't count for anything. Mostly what you got in that line was the mass conversion of people under a King who converted and expected his subjects to follow. And as for the religious wars, I think Stuart will agree that they don't even get off the ground without the nationalism that was their real fuel -- or at least the fuel for just about everybody except Gustav Adolph.

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>Haven't you heard about her remark when she won an earlier election? "At last, our town can have a Christian mayor." She meant somebody from her denomination (Pentacostal IIRC). Her opponent was Lutheran, you see.<<<

That's pretty weak beer, Jenny. You'll have to present a full transcript of her remarks (not someone's paraphrase, thank you), placed in its proper context. And then I would have to know something a little bit more about her opponent. There are Lutherans, and there are Lutherans, you know.

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>Forcible conversion even in the Middle Ages was considered invalid; that is, it didn't count for anything. Mostly what you got in that line was the mass conversion of people under a King who converted and expected his subjects to follow. And as for the religious wars, I think Stuart will agree that they don't even get off the ground without the nationalism that was their real fuel -- or at least the fuel for just about everybody except Gustav Adolph.<<<

Most certainly forced conversions were considered invalid, especially in the case of Jews, but they happened nonetheless, and were often accepted even if canonically improper. We could start, for instance, Charlemagne's conversion of the Saxons, which was about as voluntary as that offered by the Muslims to the pagans they encountered on their way out of the Middle East. That type of conversion was still going on into the fourteenth century on the Eastern Marches of Christendom, where the Teutonic Knights and other forces waged holy war against the pagan Prussians and Letts (and later against the Orthodox Russians, but that's another story).

I think it is a little anachronistic to speak of nationalism in a pre-19th century context, but certainly kings and princes saw soulcraft as an integral element of statecraft: it was a rare king indeed who wanted subjects whose religion varied markedly from his own, because the people might not then identify his right to rule with the will of God. Real problems emerged when those kings went off on wars of conquest and territorial annexation that brought new people under their rule, people who, when one is on the borders of civilization, would invariably be non-Christian, or at best, a different variety of Christian.

It really was Charlemagne who set the pattern in the West: the Cross follows the sword. Compare this with the earlier conversions of the Irish by Patrick in the 5th century, of the Engish by Augustine of Canterbury in the 7th century, or, in the East, the conversion of the Bulgars in the 8th century and of the Kievan Rus' in the 10th century. In those cases, the Cross went first, making conversion by the sword unnecessary.

[Truth Unites... and Divides]

One day on of the editorial secretaries, a gay Jewish male, told he was traveling back East to visit his family in Philadelphia and Miami. I asked him if he planned to drive from Pennsylvania to Florida, and he literally reared back in horror.

"Are you kidding?" he exclaimed. "With my name?"

I wonder what Juan Cole and this gay Jewish male would think of the editors, writers, readers, and commenters of Touchstone?

Neanderthal fundamentalist rubes?

[Michael D. Harmon]

Oh, dear, Jenny, it would be hard for me to have heard that Sarah Palin said that because she didn't. All I did was Google "Palin Christian mayor" to find a Washington Post story that attributed the quote to a local TV station (probably a low-power type) in reaction to her election.

You really have to have a bit more skepticism about the stuff you read on the Internet. Did you know she banned Harry Potter from the library years before it was written? And she shot wolves from a helicopter, except she didn't do that either. Oh, and did you know that her youngest child was really her pregnant daughter's?

Sigh.

[labrialumn]

That is the danger in calling this war with Al Qa'eda "a war on extremism" as the President has at times done. To the Left, WE are the extremists, as Joe Long so ably points out.

Stuart, I don't think that the Left is defining 'religious extremism' as meaning you believe in conversion through force, but rather as Joe says, that you actually believe your religion is objectively true, and your religion isn't the same one as the Left's.

Don't forget Count Tilly, Tony Esolen.

[Bill R]

"Haven't you heard about her remark when she won an earlier election? "At last, our town can have a Christian mayor." She meant somebody from her denomination (Pentacostal IIRC). Her opponent was Lutheran, you see."

Sigh! Ah, Jenny, you make it so difficult for those of us who like to crack jokes, because you're so much funnier when you're serious...

'Scuse me, I'm off to my "Lutherans for Palin" meeting.

[Matthias]

And don't forget, Michael... she named her children after the witches on a TV show... several years before the show was produced. Burn her!

[Kamilla]

Bill! I thought you were Presbyterian . . .

Kamilla

[Jenny Islander]

And don't forget, Michael... she named her children after the witches on a TV show... several years before the show was produced. Burn her!

Wow, I hadn't heard that one. Burrrrnnn herrr!

Although aren't we supposed to throw her in a pond or something first?

Having been around Scandalaskans all my life, I was a bit boggled when people on another site thought that the weirdest name she had given her children was Trig. Good name. Solid. I wouldn't have used the other names she chose, but they're not my kids.

[Jenny Islander]

OK, I checked my facts; the Governor did not in fact make those remarks herself, and it there is no evidence that her campaign did so either; mea culpa.

However, even if the current flaps over Troopergate and her apparent inability to remember her own stance on the "Bridge to Nowhere" turn out to be paper tigers, and even if she does in fact have more going for her than people skills (which helped get some wheels unstuck in Alaska but Alaska is to the Big Chair as poker is to heart surgery)--she's in the McCain campaign. And I think that four years as his VP would not be good for her. It's just a bad match.

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>Stuart, I don't think that the Left is defining 'religious extremism' as meaning you believe in conversion through force, but rather as Joe says, that you actually believe your religion is objectively true, and your religion isn't the same one as the Left's.<<<

That's certainly true, and nowhere more than in Europe. I remember quite keenly a meeting I had with a charming fellow at the British MOD, who was explaining to me why George Bush and Tony Blair got on so well:

"It's because they're both fundamentalists, you know".

Well, if two milquetoast guys like Bush and Blair are fundamentalists, I thought to myself, what would he think of me if I expressed my religious beliefs? But to him, "fundamentalism" consisted entirely in believing that one's religion was true and should inform one's actions in the public sector.

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>Although aren't we supposed to throw her in a pond or something first?<<<

Or we can see if she weighs less than a duck.

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>And I think that four years as his VP would not be good for her. It's just a bad match.<<<

TR was a bad match for Bill McKinley.

[Bobby Neal Winters]

>>TR was a bad match for Bill McKinley.<<

And look what happened to Bill McKinley. Oops. Wait. Forget I said that.

[William Tighe]

"And as for the religious wars, I think Stuart will agree that they don't even get off the ground without the nationalism that was their real fuel -- or at least the fuel for just about everybody except Gustav Adolph."

On the contrary, and whatever he may have claimed towards the end of his life, GA launched his campaigns to bolster the standing of his usurping family. GA's father (a Calvinist at heart, and a reluctant Lutheran), Duke Karl, as Regent in Sweden in the 1590s for his Catholic nephew King Sigismund, king of both Sweden and Poland, had gone about systematically to undermine his nephew's authority until it came to armed conflict in 1598, and in that conflict he had defeated his nephew, and gone on to seize the throne and execute his nephew's most prominent councillors and supporters. It was a bloodier version of what happened in Britain in 1688, with this exception, that the prospect of Sweden reverting to Catholicism under a Catholic king was much more real in 1598, than in England in 1688, as Lutheran "reforms" had made little impact at the popular level, and so Duke Karl had to invoke xenophobic fears of a "Polish conquest" to rouse opposition to Sigismund. Sigismund, however, remained King of Poland to his death in 1632 (and his two sons reigned successively in Poland to 1668) and insisted to his dying day that he was the rightful King of Sweden; and there was a substantial Swedish exile community in Poland until the 1640s. (I have seen the tomb in Vilnius Cathedral of a Lutheren minister turned Catholic priest who followed Signismund into exile.)

Wars between the two branches of the Vasa family continued almost uninterruptedly until 1629, and it took a great deal of French diplomacy and money to persuade the Poles and Swedes to make a truce in 1629 -- a truce that the French desired in order to be able to redirect the Swedes into Germany to defend the Protestants and fight that Habsburgs, subsidized in this by the French. The French themselves were not willing to intervene, as there was a strong "devout party" at the French court that advocated that the French and the Habsburgs should resolve their differences peacefully, and then join in a common Catholic alliance to destroy Protestantism in both France and Germany. Also, the French king, Louis XIII (born 1601; king 1619-1643), an able ruler but one with strongly debilitating psychological characteristics and a deep but tormented Catholic faith, and unhappily (and until 1648 childlessly) married to the Spanish king's sister, swung irresolutely back and forth between "the devout party" and their opponent, Cardinal Richelieu (who thought that a showdown between France and the Habsburgs was inevitable and necessary, and that France needed to ally with Protestant powers to win it), until he came over decisively to Richelieu's side and dismissed the leaders of "the devout party" in 1632.

Lutheran Germans were not about to spurn their "saviour" in the early 1630s, but a lot of Lutherans didn't like the way that he treated Calvinists and Lutherans as "equal" in their Protestantism, nor how he had previously welcomed Calvinists to Sweden and allowed them to have Calvinist churches independent of the Lutheran State Church. In the longer run, too, GA may be held to have laid the groundwork for the supine status of the modern Church of Sweden vis-a-vis Swedish government and society, as it was he that effected the complete institutional subordination of the Church of Sweden (which had strongly resisted his father's attempt to calvinize it) to the State, in a way that English kings (with the passing exception of Henry VIII) were never able to effect, and which served as a model for Peter the Great's dealings with the Russian Church from 1700 onwards.

"Don't forget Count Tilly, Tony Esolen."

Now there was one real mensch, a chivalric and devoutly Catholic military commander. It was a pity that it was he, and not Wallenstein, who was killed at Breitenfeld in 1631.

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>And look what happened to Bill McKinley. Oops. Wait. Forget I said that.<<<

"Now that damned moose hunter is in the White House!"

[Michael D. Harmon]

OK, Jenny, now we can have a real discussion, if you wish. I wrote in a different venue that you can substitute for experience by engaging qualified advisors, and there are plenty available to any leader. Choosing the right ones is the challenge, and that is just as much dependent on a person's character and principles as anything else.

And Sarah Palin seems to have character and principles of a fairly high order, possibly because she hasn't been a politician for all that long. So what's not to like?

[ChrisB]

"In her eyes, you're not a Christian."

So what? Why do I care what she thinks about my religion?

[Joe Long]

Stuart, I would say that there is a difference - a "fundamental" one, indeed - between a man of extreme views who is also Jewish, or Christian, and a "Jewish extremist" or "Christian extremist". Conversion by violence is extreme, but far from "extremely Christian"; rather it is pretty clearly a deviation. (Similarly, the proper samurai of some periods of Japanese history was fanatical, and Buddhist and/or Shinto, but rarely fanatically either...too busy with feudal clan warfare. Later, the bizarre Shinto of the 29th century produced actual "Shinto extremists" of the militant sort. There was inherent aggression in that modern emperor-worship variant of the religion - as there is in Islam.

Bottom line as I perceive it: you have to bend Christianity's rules, or Judaism's, to undertake violent religious conquest; you have to bend Islam's rules, NOT to. Thus the extremist of one religion is safer, and the other's extremist more dangerous, than the garden-variety fellow.

[labrialumn]

Count Tilly? Are you jesting Dr. Tighe? He has a reputation as a commander of raping and burning mercenaries, fighting for the sake of money, plunder and loot, I sure hope that those aren't the desired characteristics of a Roman Catholic gentleman.

Do you truly support the military conquest and rapine of Protestant regions? I wouldn't think so, but there seem to be some radtrads who do. I know that the Vatican does not support such things any longer.

Joe, 29th Century? Are we talking Starship Yamamoto era, or Gundum?

[Joe Long]

Mea culpa. But if the 29th century does, in fact, see a resurgence of expansionist Japanese emperor-worship, I certainly want credit for my foresight. (And we can at least look forward to really, really impressive lightsaber technique.)

As for Count Tilly...it was an era of murdering, raping mercenaries, but such creatures bolstered all of the armies of the time; if they favored Tilly, it was because he looked like a winner. Obviously they were not Catholic gentlemen - or any other sort - but when gentlemen are in such short supply, the limited influence of the occasional exception is certainly welcome. God grant that a Moslem gentleman or two might gain some influence with the Saracen hordes!