The historical blindness, moral obtuseness, and self-satisfied pomposity of this op-ed by Timothy Egan is only the most recent in a long line of New York Times pieces meant to incite hatred of religious believers. But it’s the last one I’ll read. I have canceled my subscription and will no longer read anything published in that newspaper, with the exception of columns and blog posts by my friend Ross Douthat.
Read it all and take note to breathe hard if you choose to read the Timothy Egan piece which I debated posted on the blog but decided to leave aside.
Amen. There needs to be a lot more pushback like this. Alan Jacobs and Rod Dreher are absolutely right.
And the irony is that our foes on the left routinely accuse US of being divisive and polarizing. That would be comical if it weren’t such a serious problem.
Richard John Neuhaus nailed the problem long ago with his classic book [b]The Naked Public Square[/b]. The fact is that societies, like nature, abhor a vacuum. If Christianity is driven out of the public square and confined to ghettos, as the Jews were in the Middle Ages, that doesn’t leave the public square empty for long. Some other ideology will rush in to fill the vacated space. You can call it whatever you prefer: secular humanism, pluralism, egalitarianism, or what not.
What we see happening all over this country, and not just in hotbeds of Liberalism like NYC, is a form of what I call ideological affirmative action. Namely, intentional discrimination against a former privileged group to try to create a level playing field. A growing number of opinion-shapers, especially in our elite universities and above all in the mass media, openly admit to adopting what I call the A-B-C approach to public life: Anything But Christianity. The implicit idea being that after about 1500 years of Christianity being culturally dominant in the West and especially in North Atlantic cultures, it’s high time to deliberately favor other religions, or none, in the supposed interests of fairness and social justice. Prejudice against conservative Christians, and above all against Roman Catholicism, has become the last acceptable prejudice for “liberal” elites and their sympathizers.
David Handy+