Posted by
JDComments on Monday, December 18, 2006 7:42:31 PM
If you want to be shocked you must read this
article by Stephen Prothero, a professor [I guess. It just says he chairs a department] at Boston University who describes a US which is fighting a losing battle to justify its Christianity which is withering away. This is not the usual Liberal attempt to relegate religion to obscurity; rather it seeks to create a history of a US steadily changing in its spiritual beliefs and the picture drawn is just plain weird.
Firstly, according to Prothero, Nazism and Fascism gave Christianity such a bad name that we as a nation took to calling ourselves Christian -Judeo after WWII as opposed to just Christian. Now I have read alot of history, and am familiar with the charges against the Church regarding their lack of effort against Hitler, but NEVER have I seen a statement like this. I am not even sure what it's significance is within the context of Prothero's attempt to demonstrate the widening of the religious tent in the US since this would only seem to be a cosmetic change.
Next he says after 9/11 the inclusion of Islamic references, which had begun
before that date, only increased, so that we have become a Christian -Judeo-Islamic nation , or what he calls Abrahamic, since all trace back to Abraham and share monotheism and certain other characteristics.
So according to his theory we have in the last 60 years gone from Christian to Abrahamic with all that implies which for him means that we are denying the Buddhists, Hindu's and other non-Abrahamic religions their rightful due. in his words:
Or, as Supreme Court Justice William Douglas put it in 1965, we are “a nation of Buddhists, Confucianists, and Taoists, as well as Christians.”
That's right people, the 85% of this country that is Christian is just another sect among all the others, which we are oppressing by refusing to acknowlege their existence and importance. Rather we are lamely holding onto the fiction that Christianty holds a special position in our nation. Prothero is sure that this is futile and with time all these other faiths will demand and get their rightful place at the table.
As for me, I am not sure if I find this depiction more disturbing or the attempt to deny all religions which I have come to understand as the Liberal position. That at least is consistent with 250 years of Leftist ideology, while this rewriting of history and refusal to accept the fact that the vast majority of this nation is Christian seems more than delusional, it almost seems like a psychotic break with reality.
While the ignorance of this hypothesis is self evident, the fact that it is being made by a guy who chairs a religion department at a major university and is appearing on the WaPo website means it cannot just be brushed off. I guess we have to consider it another front in the multicultural war as academia again spins from whole cloth "truths" with no basis in fact. In the meantime enjoy Christmas which I guess only a few of us celebrate anymore.