Comment Rescue: One More Time

Source: http://www.pineviewfarm.net/weblog/?p=3025

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(Slowly catching up on comments.)

In a comment to this post, a reader describes the post to which I linked, over there
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as containining “mindless prejudice” against Christians.

Because the reasoning in my comment is closely related to other posts I have put on the front page, I decided to put my response on the front page. I suggest you check out the earlier post first, or what’s below won’t have any context.

By the way, I have never met the author of that post over there.

The post to which I linked was a polemic, not an academic study. Polemics are inherently one-sided.

Just as much that I write is not scholarly analysis, but rant.

Though I might not have expressed my reaction to the news story in question in quite the same way nor with with same reasoning, his primary point is correct: Attempting to censor or punish valid science reporting in the name of faith is not a godly act and that what it reveals is the censor’s of the suppressor’s faith.

And, if there is a mindless prejudice against Christians in the political scene, much of it is an emotional reaction to persons, who in the name of Christianity, have preached hatefulness or lived hypocrisy or, too often, both.

I would also note that prejudging someone is not necessarily a mark of bigotry, not in the sense of “mindless prejudice” as you use the term..

I’ll tell you a story.

When I was very young, I spent my junior year of college in England in an exchange program. The Johnson Administration was in its last years and European hostility to the Viet Namese War was high.

More than one person I met prejudged me because, as an American, I represented to them the Viet Namese War. Many many times persons said, after getting to know me a little, “Well, you’re not so bad, after all,” despite that war. (Fooled them!)

Persons who reacted like that were not prejudiced against Americans because of race, creed, color, sex, age, sex, national or handicapped status (the protected classes in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as amended) or some inherited cultural bias; many of them appreciated and admired things America had done in the past.

They were prejudiced against Americans because of something America was doing at the time. (Much like now.)

I have had similar experiences recently when I have met some of my more liberal acquaintances: persons are surprised that I attend church.

Now, I don’t wear it on my sleeve, but I don’t fear talking about it. And I have gotten funny looks when I start a story with, say, “I was talking to my pastor . . .”; I’ve had someone ask, “You have a pastor?” (I usually just say, “Sure,” and keep right on going.)

Now those funny looks are not because the persons were raised with bigotry against Christians. Many of them, in fact, were raised going to church and Sunday school or synagogue, just as we were.

I submit to you that the poster whom you characterize as “mindless(ly) prejudice,” as well as others who express similar beliefs, is not inherently prejudiced against Christians for being Christians.

They have become prejudiced against Christians because of the antics of some who loudly proclaim themselves to speak for American Christianity, and, when they do speak ex cathedra, speak the language of hate, persons who say “The Bible says . . .,” when in fact it does not say that at all and can be made to say that only by ignoring this, or who say, “Christ believes . . .,” when they more properly should say, “I believe . . . .”

Many of the persons of the cloth who have established themselves as stalwart spokespersons of the “religious right,” (as distinguished from Christianity as a whole or from the larger community of persons of faith) dishonor the faith through their words, deeds, and actions. They are Father Coughlins, not Billy Grahams.

I’m not going to bother to list them. I don’t have the time, and you know who the type of whom I speak.

It is the absence of love in the discourse of the nutcase religious right that shames them and shames the rest of American Christians who have been too long quiet about it.

In other words, it is not, as you characterize it, a “mindless” prejudice.

I fear instead that it is quite a mindful prejudice.

To be blunt, the nutcase religious right brought it on themselves.

And they have brought it on the rest of us, too.

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