Sep 5, 2022 05:19 PM
(This post was last modified: Sep 5, 2022 05:49 PM by C C.)
Biden is failing to defend religious freedom abroad
https://thehill.com/opinion/congress-blo...om-abroad/
INTRO: This past Thursday there was an interesting exchange between White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and a correspondent for the Catholic Eternal World Television Network. When Jean-Pierre was asked about the White House’s reaction to the latest persecution of Catholics in Nicaragua — the abduction of a bishop, incarceration of priests and seminarians, and the shutting down of Catholic radio stations — her answer was baffling:
“There has been a dramatic deterioration of democratic principles and human rights by the regime in Nicaragua including the imprisonment of democratic leaders, members of the political opposition, students and journalists. The Biden-Harris administration finds this unacceptable and condemns these actions.”
Wait, what? Madam Press Secretary, did you not hear the question?
Don’t get me wrong. I agree that Daniel Ortega and his thugs are trying to silence “political opponents, students and journalists.” And I’m relieved that the Biden-Harris administration finds this “unacceptable and condemns these actions.”
But there is something different going on here that cries out for a response. I’d really like to know what our country’s second Catholic president has to say about Daniel Ortega’s war against the Catholic Church... (MORE - details)
The Islamic Republic Is Killing Islam in Iran
https://www.thebulwark.com/the-islamic-r...m-in-iran/
EXCERPTS: . . . It’s been more than a decade since I left Iran for good, and the country has changed. I’m in touch with a few friends—secular people who represented the minority viewpoint alongside me—and they sometimes update me on our old peers.
The young men who would tell you to shut up when criticizing religious policies and religion itself have now turned into proud blasphemers, cursing at Islam and its vanguard regime. It’s a shame I can never go back to Iran, because it sounds like it’s much improved since I left.
[...] GAMAAN, a Netherlands-based center run by two Iranian political scientists that tracks public attitudes in Iran, reports that 67 percent of Iranians reject the idea of theocracy, and 72 percent reject having a religious figure as the head of the state. A 2020 report by the same organization found that only 32.2 percent identify as Shi’ite Muslims, with another 5 percent identifying as Sunni. (Contrast that with the CIA World Factbook, which reports that 90–95 percent of the country is Shi’ite.)
Nearly half identified as some form of irreligious—none, agnostic, spiritual, or atheist. A whopping 7.7 percent called themselves Zoroastrian, far higher than the 0.03 percent of the Zoroastrian population inside Iran.
It’s not that Shi’ite Iranians are converting en masse to the religion of their pre-Islamic forbears—Zoroastrianism doesn’t accept converts. The better interpretation is that a significant number of Iranians claim the ancient Persian religion as a method of identifying as Persian and shedding the Muslim identity they’ve come to hate.
Iran’s plummeting fertility rate gives more evidence of its declining religiosity. Iranians have been poor in the past, but they still had high fertility rates despite being high on the misery index. The return of poverty doesn’t alone explain why the fertility rate has fallen to 1.7 children per woman of child-bearing years, but it makes sense when one considers the rise of “nones.” Religiously unaffiliated people, on average, have fewer children than religious people. In 1989, when I was born, Iran’s average fertility rate was 5.1.
The “Free the Hair” movement is another sign of how Islam is on the defensive. Iranian social media is replete with videos of women publicly rejecting the compulsory hijab.... (MORE - missing details)
Trump should fill Christians with rage. How come he doesn’t?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/...democracy/
EXCERPT (MIchael Gerson): . . . From one perspective, the Christian embrace of populist politics is understandable. The disorienting flux of American ethical norms and the condescension of progressive elites have incited a defensive reaction among many conservative religious people — a belief that they are outsiders in their own land. They feel reviled for opposing gender ideology that seems to have arrived just yesterday, or for stating views on marriage that Barack Obama once held. They fear their values are under assault by an inexorable modernity, in the form of government, big business, media and academia.
Leaders in the Republican Party have fed, justified and exploited conservative Christians’ defensiveness in service to an aggressive, reactionary politics. This has included deadly mask and vaccine resistance, the discrediting of fair elections, baseless accusations of gay “grooming” in schools, the silencing of teaching about the United States’ history of racism, and (for some) a patently false belief that Godless conspiracies have taken hold of political institutions.
Some religious leaders have fueled the urgency of this agenda with apocalyptic rhetoric, in which the Christian church is under Neronian persecution by elites displaying Caligulan values. But the credibility of religious conservatives is undermined by the friends they have chosen to keep. Their political alignment with MAGA activists has given exposure and greater legitimacy to once-fringe ideas, including Confederate nostalgia, white nationalism, antisemitism, replacement theory and QAnon accusations of satanic child sacrifice by liberal politicians.
Surveying the transgressive malevolence of the radical right, one is forced to conclude: If this is not moral ruin, then there are no moral rules.
The division between progressive and reactionary America does not fall neatly along the urban-rural divide. There are conservative megachurches in liberal strongholds, and Democratic-leaning minority groups in parts of rural America. But the electoral facts reveal a cultural conflict worsened by geographic sorting.
For decades, population density has been increasingly associated with partisan identification — the more dense, the more Democratic; the less dense, the more Republican. America might be united by its highways, but it is politically split along its beltways. Islands of urban, liberal blue dot a vast sea of rural, conservative red. And because the mechanisms that produce U.S. senators and electoral college electors skew in favor of geography over population, rural and small-town America starts with a distinct political advantage — the ability to transform fewer votes into better outcomes.
All this leaves portions of the nation boiling with righteous resentment. Many progressives feel cheated by a political system rigged by the Founders against them. Many religious conservatives feel despised by the broader culture and in need of political protection. In the United States, grievance is structural and is becoming supreme.
Anxious evangelicals have taken to voting for right-wing authoritarians who promise to fight their fights — not only Donald Trump, but increasingly, his many imitators. It has been said that when you choose your community, you choose your character. Strangely, evangelicals have broadly chosen the company of Trump supporters who deny any role for character in politics and define any useful villainy as virtue. In the place of integrity, the Trump movement has elevated a warped kind of authenticity — the authenticity of unfiltered abuse, imperious ignorance, untamed egotism and reflexive bigotry.
This is inconsistent with Christianity by any orthodox measure. Yet the discontent, prejudices and delusions of religious conservatives helped swell the populist wave that lapped up on the steps of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. During that assault, Christian banners mixed with the iconography of white supremacy, in a manner that should have choked Christian participants with rage. But it didn’t.
Conservative Christians’ beliefs on the nature of politics, and the content of their cultural nightmares, are directly relevant to the future of our whole society, for a simple reason: The destinies of rural and urban America are inextricably connected. It matters greatly if evangelicals in the wide, scarlet spaces are desensitized to extremism, diminished in decency and badly distorting the meaning of Christianity itself — as I believe many are.
To grasp how, and why, it’s important to begin at the beginning... (MORE - missing details)
https://thehill.com/opinion/congress-blo...om-abroad/
INTRO: This past Thursday there was an interesting exchange between White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and a correspondent for the Catholic Eternal World Television Network. When Jean-Pierre was asked about the White House’s reaction to the latest persecution of Catholics in Nicaragua — the abduction of a bishop, incarceration of priests and seminarians, and the shutting down of Catholic radio stations — her answer was baffling:
“There has been a dramatic deterioration of democratic principles and human rights by the regime in Nicaragua including the imprisonment of democratic leaders, members of the political opposition, students and journalists. The Biden-Harris administration finds this unacceptable and condemns these actions.”
Wait, what? Madam Press Secretary, did you not hear the question?
Don’t get me wrong. I agree that Daniel Ortega and his thugs are trying to silence “political opponents, students and journalists.” And I’m relieved that the Biden-Harris administration finds this “unacceptable and condemns these actions.”
But there is something different going on here that cries out for a response. I’d really like to know what our country’s second Catholic president has to say about Daniel Ortega’s war against the Catholic Church... (MORE - details)
The Islamic Republic Is Killing Islam in Iran
https://www.thebulwark.com/the-islamic-r...m-in-iran/
EXCERPTS: . . . It’s been more than a decade since I left Iran for good, and the country has changed. I’m in touch with a few friends—secular people who represented the minority viewpoint alongside me—and they sometimes update me on our old peers.
The young men who would tell you to shut up when criticizing religious policies and religion itself have now turned into proud blasphemers, cursing at Islam and its vanguard regime. It’s a shame I can never go back to Iran, because it sounds like it’s much improved since I left.
[...] GAMAAN, a Netherlands-based center run by two Iranian political scientists that tracks public attitudes in Iran, reports that 67 percent of Iranians reject the idea of theocracy, and 72 percent reject having a religious figure as the head of the state. A 2020 report by the same organization found that only 32.2 percent identify as Shi’ite Muslims, with another 5 percent identifying as Sunni. (Contrast that with the CIA World Factbook, which reports that 90–95 percent of the country is Shi’ite.)
Nearly half identified as some form of irreligious—none, agnostic, spiritual, or atheist. A whopping 7.7 percent called themselves Zoroastrian, far higher than the 0.03 percent of the Zoroastrian population inside Iran.
It’s not that Shi’ite Iranians are converting en masse to the religion of their pre-Islamic forbears—Zoroastrianism doesn’t accept converts. The better interpretation is that a significant number of Iranians claim the ancient Persian religion as a method of identifying as Persian and shedding the Muslim identity they’ve come to hate.
Iran’s plummeting fertility rate gives more evidence of its declining religiosity. Iranians have been poor in the past, but they still had high fertility rates despite being high on the misery index. The return of poverty doesn’t alone explain why the fertility rate has fallen to 1.7 children per woman of child-bearing years, but it makes sense when one considers the rise of “nones.” Religiously unaffiliated people, on average, have fewer children than religious people. In 1989, when I was born, Iran’s average fertility rate was 5.1.
The “Free the Hair” movement is another sign of how Islam is on the defensive. Iranian social media is replete with videos of women publicly rejecting the compulsory hijab.... (MORE - missing details)
Trump should fill Christians with rage. How come he doesn’t?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/...democracy/
EXCERPT (MIchael Gerson): . . . From one perspective, the Christian embrace of populist politics is understandable. The disorienting flux of American ethical norms and the condescension of progressive elites have incited a defensive reaction among many conservative religious people — a belief that they are outsiders in their own land. They feel reviled for opposing gender ideology that seems to have arrived just yesterday, or for stating views on marriage that Barack Obama once held. They fear their values are under assault by an inexorable modernity, in the form of government, big business, media and academia.
Leaders in the Republican Party have fed, justified and exploited conservative Christians’ defensiveness in service to an aggressive, reactionary politics. This has included deadly mask and vaccine resistance, the discrediting of fair elections, baseless accusations of gay “grooming” in schools, the silencing of teaching about the United States’ history of racism, and (for some) a patently false belief that Godless conspiracies have taken hold of political institutions.
Some religious leaders have fueled the urgency of this agenda with apocalyptic rhetoric, in which the Christian church is under Neronian persecution by elites displaying Caligulan values. But the credibility of religious conservatives is undermined by the friends they have chosen to keep. Their political alignment with MAGA activists has given exposure and greater legitimacy to once-fringe ideas, including Confederate nostalgia, white nationalism, antisemitism, replacement theory and QAnon accusations of satanic child sacrifice by liberal politicians.
Surveying the transgressive malevolence of the radical right, one is forced to conclude: If this is not moral ruin, then there are no moral rules.
The division between progressive and reactionary America does not fall neatly along the urban-rural divide. There are conservative megachurches in liberal strongholds, and Democratic-leaning minority groups in parts of rural America. But the electoral facts reveal a cultural conflict worsened by geographic sorting.
For decades, population density has been increasingly associated with partisan identification — the more dense, the more Democratic; the less dense, the more Republican. America might be united by its highways, but it is politically split along its beltways. Islands of urban, liberal blue dot a vast sea of rural, conservative red. And because the mechanisms that produce U.S. senators and electoral college electors skew in favor of geography over population, rural and small-town America starts with a distinct political advantage — the ability to transform fewer votes into better outcomes.
All this leaves portions of the nation boiling with righteous resentment. Many progressives feel cheated by a political system rigged by the Founders against them. Many religious conservatives feel despised by the broader culture and in need of political protection. In the United States, grievance is structural and is becoming supreme.
Anxious evangelicals have taken to voting for right-wing authoritarians who promise to fight their fights — not only Donald Trump, but increasingly, his many imitators. It has been said that when you choose your community, you choose your character. Strangely, evangelicals have broadly chosen the company of Trump supporters who deny any role for character in politics and define any useful villainy as virtue. In the place of integrity, the Trump movement has elevated a warped kind of authenticity — the authenticity of unfiltered abuse, imperious ignorance, untamed egotism and reflexive bigotry.
This is inconsistent with Christianity by any orthodox measure. Yet the discontent, prejudices and delusions of religious conservatives helped swell the populist wave that lapped up on the steps of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. During that assault, Christian banners mixed with the iconography of white supremacy, in a manner that should have choked Christian participants with rage. But it didn’t.
Conservative Christians’ beliefs on the nature of politics, and the content of their cultural nightmares, are directly relevant to the future of our whole society, for a simple reason: The destinies of rural and urban America are inextricably connected. It matters greatly if evangelicals in the wide, scarlet spaces are desensitized to extremism, diminished in decency and badly distorting the meaning of Christianity itself — as I believe many are.
To grasp how, and why, it’s important to begin at the beginning... (MORE - missing details)
