And God rolled His eyes
: There is a debate supposedly emerging -- even raging -- in this country:
One side says that religion is under attack in America.
Another side says America is under attack from religion.
I say both sides are trivializing faith and the First Amendment. And what would God say? I think He would roll His eyes.
There are too many places on this earth today where religion is most certainly under attack: start with China. There are many nations under attack from religion: start with Iran and Saudi Arabia. And, Lord knows, there are too many places where people are attacked because of their religion: try being a Jew or a Christian in the wrong place; try being the wrong flavor of Muslim in the other guy's turf.
Here in America, we are fortunate enough to have a First Amendment that guarantees our freedom to worship -- or not -- without government interference, a guarantee millions around the world would die -- yes, die -- to enjoy. And yet we squander that fortune, that blessing, with silly, egotistical, show-off squabbles.
Here in America, some people think a fight over a creche in the town square is a fight over religion. No, it's a fight for the sake of a fight. On the one hand, we do enforce separation of church and state -- to guarantee freedom of religion from government -- and so there is no divine right to put a creche in front of the city hall; I want to tell those folks, put it anywhere else. On the other hand, the bureacrats who stop it as if they are standing between America and jihad are being just as ridiculous; a creche or a Christmas tree next to a mennorah is harmless and is part of the diverse culture of America. Similarly, it's right for a school to prohibit proselytizing but it's silly to disallow an instrumental version of a Christmas ditty, as recently occurred in New Jersey. You want to slap both sides in these annual squabbles and just tell them to grow up and count their blessings.
Then there are those in the so-called Parents Television Council who argue that any joke that mentions God is an attack on religion. That's just crap. Freedom of speech goes hand-in-hand with freedom of religion -- that's why they are both protected in the First Amendment -- and there's nothing with a joke about God. It's not a sign of a war on God.
And then there are those who say that America has been taken over by a red-state religious jihad because the other side won the election and because a bogus made the insulting presumption that some of us don't have moral values and because the afore-dismissed PTC manufactured complaints about pop culture the way Tootsie makes Rolls. The truth, as I proved, it that it is a phantom army of the few on the fringe.
I want to slap them all back to their senses. But I also want to slap the media who act as if all these alleged religious wars are real news, worthwhile stories, true trends. No, the truth is that once a year, we get the fake stories about wars over Christmas carols; whenever the PTC puts out another press release or the FCC another fine, we get the fake stories about religious outrage at indecency; whenever the right wins an election, we get the fake stories about the revolt of the religious conservatives. All these stories act as if America -- you, me, and your neighbors -- changed overnight into surburban Sunnis vs. Shiites.
There is no religous war in America. That ended more than two centuries ago. And now we enjoy the benefits of that struggle. We should be grateful for that and stop squandering it with squabbles.
: There is plenty of reading material on the topic from just the last few days:
: Here is The New York Times Week in Review asking whether Christmas needs to be saved:
But the demands to bring back Christmas are not simply part of an age-old culture war, with the A.C.L.U. in one corner and evangelicals in the other. There is also a more moderate force, asking whether the country has gone too far in its quest to be inclusive of all faiths. Why, they ask, must a Christmas tree become a holiday tree? And is singing "We Wish You a Merry Christmas" in a school performance more offensive than singing "Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel"? "It's political correctness run amok," said Lynn Mistretta, who with another mother in Scarborough, Me., started BringBackChristmas.org. "I'm not for offending anyone, but we're excluding everyone, and everyone feels rotten about it."
: Frank Rich in the same edition of The Times
argues soberly that there is a more serious religous confrontation brewing:
As we close the books on 2004, and not a moment too soon, it's clear that, as far as the culture goes, this year belonged to Mel Gibson's mammoth hit. Its prurient and interminable wallow in the Crucifixion, to the point where Jesus' actual teachings become mere passing footnotes to the sumptuously depicted mutilation of his flesh, is as representative of our time as "Godspell" was of terminal-stage hippiedom 30 years ago. The Gibson conflation of religion with violence reflects the universal order of the day — whether the verbal fisticuffs of the culture war within America, as exemplified by Mr. Donohue's rant on national television or, far more lethally, the savagery of the actual war that radical Islam brought to our doorstep on 9/11.
He's right that these are frightening ghosts of anti-Semitism and of terrorism. But, again, they are not of the mainstream.
Yet if you watch the news and listen to certain politicians, especially since Election Day, you'll hear an ever-growing drumbeat that Christianity is under siege in America....
What is this about? How can those in this country's overwhelming religious majority maintain that they are victims in a fiery battle with forces of darkness? It is certainly not about actual victimization. Christmas is as pervasive as it has ever been in America, where it wasn't even declared a federal holiday until after the Civil War. What's really going on here is yet another example of a post-Election-Day winner-takes-all power grab by the "moral values" brigade....
When even phenomena as innocuous as Oscar nominations or the lighting of a Christmas tree can be inflated into divisive religious warfare, it's only a matter of time before someone uncovers an anti-Christian plot in "White Christmas."
Rich has one side of it right -- ridiculing the war on Christmas -- but the other side of it wrong -- seeing an invasion of a moral values army. And he leaves out the other guilty party in this: the media who fan the flames.
: Here's James Lileks complaining that he can't say Merry Christmas anymore and here's Glenn Reynolds agreeing and here's James Wolcott gleefully baiting them both:
Every year we hear the eloquent whines of the "put Christ back into Christmas" chorus. Every year without fail we're told that Christmas itself has become a charged phrase, un-PC, fudged with euphemism. I'm not sure how we could put any more Christ into Christmas this year. Jesus was on the cover of Time and Newsweek, US News ran a cover story on The Power of Prayer, CNN is broadcasting a documentary tonight on "The Two Marys" (Madonna and Magdalene), and Mel Gibson's The Passion is at the red hot center of so many year-end roundup essays....
To read conservative pundits, you'd think everybody was wishing each other Happy Kwanzaa! and averting their eyes from oh so gauche Nativity scenes. I've got news: Even here on the godless, liberal Upper West Side, people wish each other Merry Christmas without staggering three steps backward, thunderstruck and covered with chagrin.
: Oh, lord, one post mentions Frank Rich, Jim Wolcott, James Lileks, Glenn Reynolds, Bill Donahoe, Mel Gibson, and God. Before various of you on various sides act like wolves on the scent of red meat, just remember: When it comes to religion in America, we are not at war. We are blessed. Let's act like it.
: And, in closing, here is a wonderfully generous column from Ed Cone inviting us all to wish him a Merry Christmas:
Merry Christmas. There, I said it, and I meant it, too.
You may tell me Merry Christmas in return, if you please. Or you can say Happy Holidays. That's an efficient little phrase, compressing best wishes for a whole range of events into one snappy alliterative package. Just don't tell me Happy Holidays because you worry that saying Merry Christmas to a Jew will cause him to melt into the floor like the witch at the end of "The Wizard of Oz."
Here's the thing about Christmas: It's an American holiday as well as a religious one.
To many people, it involves a deep spiritual meaning. To many others, it involves a day off and food and family and presents. And to a lot of us there is some overlap between those two meanings, and I say us because as a sentient being who lives in the diverse successor culture to Christendom, the philosophy if not the theology of Christianity, along with the commercial and celebratory rituals of its big December holiday, are an ineluctable and welcome part of my life. Scrooge, school vacations, eggnog, old Coke commercials, the giant Santa at Friendly Center, and a midnight Mass my wife and I once attended at Notre Dame de Paris all coexist peacefully with my own beliefs and practices.
Merry Christmas. And God bless us, every one.
: LATER: Hugh Hewitt disagrees.
It is too easy to say "everything is fine," and "chill." The place of faith in America is a crucial topic that deserves every bit of attention it receives, even when a particular battle seems overblown when measured against the persecution of the house church in China.
Sadly, I don't have time to write more of a response to Hugh so go read his and I'll try to get some blogtime later.
d
: Since I am getting links to this post from both Hugh and Glenn Reynolds and -- considering the topic -- there may be new readers here who haven't been subjected to my bio before. So, in the interest of transparency and context: I'm a Congregationalist (not of the UCC flavor but, yes, liberal); I'm co-head of my small church's board and I teach Sunday school and occasionally get wrangled into giving a sermon (to which I have subjected my blog readers). My smarter sister is a Presbyterian minister (I was raised Presbyterian). So I am a Christian and I do not feel under attack in America. I feel free in America -- and I am grateful to both God and the Constitution for it.
A blogal citizen
: I like to call this new medium of ours citizens' media. "Citizen" connotes belonging and that is why I like the word as a substitute for the old-fashioned, one-way notions of readers, viewers, listeners, consumers. Citizens belong. Citizens join. Citizens own. Citizens act.
So I ask myself: Citizen of where? Citizen of what?
A personal irony is that after September 11th, I began to think of myself more as an American citizen than I ever had. It's not that I didn't have pride in the land of my birth before, but it was passive and I was wary of the dangers of putting nation over humanity. But once I was attacked because I was American, I found new belonging, new pride, new resolve. I hang a flag on my lapel and my front fence as a matter of defiance.
At the same time, I started blogging and I came to more new answers to the question, citizen of where? This new medium has, at once, made me feel more local and more global. There are neighbors in town I rarely get to speak with who read and sometimes comment on this blog. And, of course, I've had the privilege of building some bridges to other countries and of crossing the bridges others have built. It was honestly thrilling at Harvard to meet the people on the other sides of those spans: Hoder from Iran, Omar and Mohammed from Iraq, Jeff from Maylasia... I hope at the next one, I get to meet more from Germany, Russia, eastern Europe, Asia....
But before I start talking like a citizen of the globe, I have to answer the next question: Citizen of what? In meeting all those good people and joining with them was I truly acting like a global citizen or simply like a blogal citizen? (And, yes, I do enjoy the anagrammatic fun of that.) Which community mattered more? Was one community possible only because of the other? This is not just about blogging as a special interest. This is about feeling a sense of citizenship -- belonging, power, responsibility -- in blogs as a result of the world and in the world as a result of blogs. The internet (and blogs) make that possible.
: As I continued to mull the importance and impact of last week's Harvard session, I read Timothy Garton Ash in Friday's Times practically declare the death of the nation-state:
Why is it that Americans do not understand the power of the European Union? Is it because they are simply not well informed by reports from Brussels and other European capitals? Or is it because, as citizens of the world's last truly sovereign nation-state, Americans - and especially American conservatives - find it difficult to acknowledge the contribution of a transnational organization based on supranational law? It's as if they can conceive of power only in the old-fashioned terms of a classical nation-state.
Old-fashioned? The world's last sovereign nation-state? I think Ash is getting a bit ahead of his times ... but perhaps not too far ahead.
Garton Ash isn't completely off: New means of creating alliances -- nation to nation, or person to person without regard to nationality -- mean that the the nation-state as the globe's organizing principle begins to fade, perhaps. And our own sense of citizenship -- and our relationship to other citizens -- broadens to include more people, more places, and more dimensions.
Some will say that this ability to find people of like minds and goals will create "echo chambers." The corollary in media is the complaint that more choice creates "fragmentation." These people see these as bad things.
I don't. I see them as positive developments. More choice in media equals more control for citizens. More communication, information, and conversation across boundaries and interests online equals more connections among citizens and a greater connection for each citizen to a broader (and, at the same time, more local) world.
That is what I witnessed and experienced last weekend at Harvard and before. That is why I am so excited -- and optimistic -- about these bridges and the effort to expand the tools that build those bridges to anyone and everyone in the world.
Then we can move one step beyond Garton Ash's premature prediction: Nations won't be sovereign. Citizens will be.
Is it premature for me, too, to predict all this? Of course, it is. But a blogger can hope, can't he? And are there dangers? Of course, there are. But I have to trust my fellow citizens -- of wherever and whatever -- to use these tools of speech and freedom, in the end, for good.
If this works, we don't just change the world. We redefine the world.
: As Jay Rosen would say, here is some after matter:
: See Jay's wonderful post about all this, including links to Olav Anders Øvrebø, a former editor from Netzeitung (whom I believe I met there) and Nettavisen, pathfinding European online news"papers" -- who now find themselves as citizens of the world of media criticism. Øvrebø impressed Jay -- and me -- by calling English "the latin of our age." There was a bit of predictable controversy at the Harvard session when I kept talking about translating things into English; it was too anglocentric of me, I'll confess. But some agreed with Øvrebø that translation into English also enables conversation and connection and that is good. See the rest of Jay's post about the globe and then his followup about local, inspired by Ed Cone.
: See Rebecca MacKinnon's report on the Harvard event -- magnificently led by Rebecca and Ethan Zuckerman -- at Personal Democracy Forum.
: See also the manifesto (I prefer to think of it as a compact) of the movement that came together at Harvard. (And see Dan Henninger's affirmation in the Wall Street Journal that it is, indeed, a movement.) The latest version includes some of my wiki edits (so blame me if this one makes no sense):
We believe in free speech: in protecting the right to speak -- and the right to listen. We believe in universal access to the tools of speech.
To that end, we seek to enable everyone who wants to speak to have the means to speak -- and everyone who wants to hear that speech, the means to listen to it.
Thanks to new tools, speech need no longer be controlled by those who own the means of publishing and distribution, or by governments that would restrict thought and communication. Now, anyone can wield the power of the press. Everyone can tell their stories to the world.
We seek to build bridges across the gulfs that divide people, so as to understand each other more fully. We seek to work together more effectively, and act more powerfully.
We believe in the power of direct connection. The bond between individuals from different worlds is personal, political and powerful. We believe conversation across boundaries is essential to a future that is free, fair, prosperous and sustainable - for all citizens of this planet.
While we continue to work and speak as individuals, we also seek to identify and promote our shared interests and goals. We pledge to respect, assist, teach, learn from, and listen to one other.
We are Global Voices.
: See John Palfrey's provocative and wise working
hypothesis for the confab.
: If you want to do something about all this, you can: Read and quote and, if you can, translate other citizens' media. And support the Arabic blogging tool.
: LATER: Jay Rosen adds:
I want to add one thing. You speak of creating alliances and communication "nation to nation, or person to person without regard to nationality." The Arab blogging tool, it seems to me, is a case of polity-to-polity exchange (or civil society to civil society) which a different thing from state-to-state or person-to-person. Different, and possibly more potent.
The complaint factory
: CNN/Money's site has a year-end piece on the indecency kerfluffle this year and with it came this chart demonstrating nothing more than the efficiency of the so-called Parents Television Councils' complaint factory and certainly not any change in the essence of pop culture or American values. It's simple testimony to the easy of clicking the "send" button.
National Public Blogging
: Terry Teachout says that arts commentary will move on, to blogs, as mainstream media loses interest in (and the ability to afford) it. He's waiting for money to support the habit.
We spend a lot of time talking about how advertising revenue will shift toward citizens' media.
Terry made me think that grant money may follow the same path. Why shouldn't some of the underwriters who support public broadcasting now consider underwriting citizens' media? It's simple, less expensive, more direct.
Whoever takes this job: Think podcasts!
: PaidContent tells us that Audible is hiring an online editorial director.
This person, whoever it ends up being, should think podcasting.
I've had problems in the past with Audible but I also recanted now that I have it working and I listen to This American Life and books. I've been impressed how Audible quickly puts up news events, like the conventions and 9/11 Commission hearings. I'm about to start downloading stuff from Audible.de to work on my German.
My complaint with Audible has been that there still isn't enough content. Enter podcasts. They could provide tons of good content and Audible could encourage the best. But I will suggest that they don't put out everything in the Audible format: Put out MP3s as well and let the people distribute them freely and every one will be a promotion for Audible.
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