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Don’t blame Islam for the Toulouse killingsEd West ("The Telegraph," March 21, 2012)

It’s always a mistake to comment on terrorist atrocities before all the facts are clear. Last summer when news emerged of a bomb attack in Norway, a country embroiled in the 2005 cartoon saga and with troops serving in Afghanistan, many assumed that the perpetrators must be Islamic.

Seven years earlier the murderous attack on Madrid was at first blamed on ETA, and the Spanish government’s wrong call helped lose them the election. Further back the Oklahoma bombing of 1995 was initially thought to be the work of Islamic radicals, who had bombed the World Trade Centre just two years earlier.

It’s easy to get it wrong because so many of the world’s varied extremists, whatever their motivation and however much they might hate each other, focus their anger and loathing on similar targets – the state, the city, modernity, capitalism, and the one group who embody all these complicating, unsettling changes in the minds of lonely, failed young men – Jews.

People often make the wrong call because that’s what they want to believe, because it fits into their narrative. The recent shootings in Toulouse are a case in point. Today’s Guardian editorial, for example, draws from this tragedy the following conclusion:

Campaigning has been suspended, but the shooting has already sent tremors through France’s presidential election. The first to say what was on everyone’s mind was not the Socialist challenger François Hollande but the centrist François Bayrou. He said the killings were the product of a sick society, with politicians who pointed the finger and inflamed passions. No prize for guessing whom he was talking about. Nicolas Sarkozy’s lurch to the right has included such claims as there being too many immigrants in France, and that the French were secretly ingesting halal meat. Alain Juppé, the foreign minister, fought back by declaring that Bayrou’s statement was ignoble. But it is must already be clear this part of the incumbent’s re-election campaign is dead. Currying votes from the extreme right is a two-edged sword, and Sarkozy could be about to feel its blade. The minister who has been most shamelessly xenophobic, Claude Guéant, is now the man in charge of the manhunt.

They are not the only ones. Yesterday’s Independent posed the question: “Did Sarkozy’s far-right rhetoric fan flames of ethnic hatred?”

No. So rather than these killings being a spur to countless reports on white terror by the BBC, always keen to warn of the dangers of xenophobia, state media is now quoting various Muslim leaders saying that this has nothing to do with Islam.

I agree. Many people kill in the name of jihad but they do not represent Islam or Muslims, the vast majority of whom will be horrified by the Toulouse killings. It is not religion that turns some young Muslim men in the West violent, but the sense of alienation and frustration that inevitably comes from being a second-generation immigrant. Confused and angry young men easily attach themselves to something greater than themselves, especially a strong, confident inter-national identity historically opposed to the West from which they feel so rejected.

Many of the campaigners who earlier blamed these attacks on a xenophobic atmosphere across Europe are now very keen to point out that they are nothing to do with Islam. Not because they care about Islam, but because their faith is “diversity”, the catchy term for universalism, the idea that all limits to human altruism are immoral.

Universalism is the basis of the post-war European moral settlement, and it has motivated two of its great revolutions – European integration and the creation of multi-ethnic societies. This followed two appalling nationalist-fuelled wars, and Europe’s universalist leaders believe that nations “lead to war”, in the words of EU President Herman Van Rompuy. Any opposition to universalism, whether to trans-national governments or open borders, is therefore racism, xenophobia or “far-Right rhetoric”.

And yet, as GK Chesterton put it, to condemn patriotism because people go to war for patriotic reasons, is like condemning love because some love leads to murder.

Islam is not to blame for the Toulouse killings. But had it been the work of white extremists, neither would patriotism have been the problem.

The European elite still uses the word patriotism, of course, but they mean patriotism for an idea – tolerance, fair play or other supposed national values – rather than in its truer sense of an exclusionary love of one’s homeland and a wish to be around people like ourselves.

This feeling, shared by almost all of humanity and most certainly ingrained, Western metropolitan elites cannot comprehend – which is why they take such joy when its more extreme adherents prove to be violent, hate-filled psychopaths. It is easier to see those aberrations as the norm, rather than recognise their views as being the pathological variation of a healthy, universal human need for “discriminating altruism”.

You cannot buck human nature, and universalism is an unsustainable, unworkable idea based on a utopian vision of humanity. One of the sadder ironies is that it is motivated partly by our revulsion over the Holocaust, yet this idea has helped to introduce Middle Eastern anti-Semitism into Europe (although I should add a caveat, that this may be exaggerated in some people’s imaginations. Jews and Muslims rub along perfectly well in north London, where I live, and it’s wrong to see European Muslims as raving anti-Semites).

But at the same time this universalism has become the moral basis for a worldwide intellectual assault on the state of Israel, whose citizens are charged with the crime of wishing to form a separate, Jewish state, an idea called “apartheid” by Europeans who have the moral good luck to be able to voice such absurdities without facing any consequences.

People should reconsider this idea, but as for the tragedy in France, it does not say anything about Islam, only of human nature and its potential for evil. All that matters ultimately is that three innocent children, a father and three young soldiers are now dead.

Story By: by Sonari Glinton

Rick Santorum signs Joe Boulus’ apron at a Lenten fish fry Friday in Michigan. Mitt Romney is ahead of Santorum among Catholic voters in the state, despite the fact that Santorum is Catholic.

Presidential candidates Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum are neck-and-neck in the polls in the run-up to the Michigan Republican primary on Tuesday.

One group that Romney appears to have an advantage with is Roman Catholic voters despite the fact that he is Mormon and Santorum Catholic.

The disconnect between faith and politics highlights differences among Catholics and shows that some religious voters are focusing more on other issues.

Declaring Faith

Santorum doesn’t shy away from letting people know that he’s a man of faith. He visited the Knights of Columbus hall in Lincoln Park on Friday. The Knights of Columbus is a fraternal service group, sort of like a Catholic version of groups like the Shriners. Santorum is a member, and his faith a central theme in his campaign.

“I’m a Catholic, and I’m told that one of the responsibilities of the Church is to care for those who are the least among us,” he said, “and I believe that, and that’s a real responsibility for all of us.”

According to Public Policy Polling, Santorum’s faith and image as a family man give him a boost in Michigan with Protestants, Evangelicals and those who consider themselves “very conservative.” Some national polls differ, though.

Romney leads the field with moderates, “somewhat conservative” voters and Catholics, according to the Public Policy poll.

“There’s a lot of complexity there,” says John Green, a political science professor at the University of Akron. “Religion and politics often line up, but they don’t always correlate perfectly.”

The Catholic Spectrum

Green says you can think of Catholicism on a continuum.

“There is … what we might call the orthodoxy of religious beliefs, and someone like Sen. Santorum is a very orthodox Catholic in terms of religion. He holds very closely to the traditional teachings of the Church,” he says.

That continuum moves from the very traditional to the nontraditional.

“Some Catholic conservatives, or liberals for that matter, may be turned off by a fellow parishioner or a Catholic candidate who is self-consciously a traditionalist,” he says.

Green says until the 1960s, regardless of where Catholics stood on that continuum, they tended to vote as a group for Democrats. But as Catholics — many of whom were recent immigrants — began to assimilate and become more accepted, their views on politics began to splinter. You can see that diversity of thought at almost any parish.

Religion Takes A Back Seat

Few things say “Midwestern Roman Catholic” like a Lenten Friday night fish fry. At St. William’s Parish in Walled Lake, Mich., nearly 1,000 parishioners and their friends line up for fish fry, shrimp and cheese pizza.

“It’s endless refills, so you can literally let the fat kid inside of you out and eat as much as you want,” says Katie Goebel, whose father runs the fish fry.

She’s not just here for the fish; she’s also here to see Santorum. Goebel hasn’t made up her mind who to vote for, but her faith plays a role.

“I will admit it does play a big role on issues like on contraception, abortion, things like that. But other things, like marriage and all that, I’m sort of up in the air,” she says. “You know, people more [in] my generation, we’re seeing things like gay marriage and stuff like that as OK.”

Jan Artushin and her husband both attend mass regularly, and they’re both undecided.

“I think we have to focus on the economy and jobs,” she says. “I think that the religious issues … [are] taking a back step because I think we’re in such dire straights right now.”

Green, the professor, says Catholics vote in many ways like other groups. Electability trumps faith — at least at this stage.

Story By: Talk of the Nation

Bishop Harry Jackson, senior pastor, Hope Christian Church
Reverend Delman Coates, senior pastor, Mt. Ennon Baptist Church

A bill that could legalize same-sex marriage has cleared the Maryland House and is expected to pass in the Senate. A majority of black clergy in the state argue that same-sex marriage conflicts with the teachings of the Bible, but some pastors have spoken out in support of the bill.

Reinforcing the church-state wallJim Burkee ("Los Angeles Times," March 1, 2012)

USA – American conservatives are deeply divided about Thomas Jefferson. His Democratic-Republican Party embraced many bedrock conservative principles, favoring states’ rights, opposing attempts by the Federalists to strengthen the federal government and generally promoting individual liberty and freedom. And for those things he remains a hero and a paragon to the modern Republican Party’s fiscally conservative, libertarian and tea party wing.

But many religious conservatives are less comfortable with Jefferson. America’s third president was a deist, at best, who authored his own interpretation of the New Testament, removing all references to Jesus’ divinity. More significantly, he penned the phrase many social conservatives have in recent decades denounced, advocating a steadfast “wall of separation between church and state.”

Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum revived the debate about separating church and state this week when he talked about a 1960 campaign trail speech given by the nation’s 35th president, John F. Kennedy.

Kennedy gave the speech to address fears that he, as a Roman Catholic, would answer to the pope rather than the U.S. Constitution. In it, he said that he believed in “an America where the separation of church and state is absolute; where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote; where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference; and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.”

That was a sentiment, Santorum said, “that makes me throw up.” He excoriated Kennedy, saying that he had “for the first time articulated the vision saying, ‘No. Faith is not allowed in the public square.’”

Santorum was off historically by more than 150 years in his assertion that Kennedy was the first American president to advocate a wall between church and state. And his clear misreading of Kennedy’s statement also exposes a deeper misunderstanding by social conservatives of the exceptionalism of American church-state relations.

Keeping government and religion separate in no way has meant that America is not a religious nation. Among advanced Western nations, only the United States continues to experience steady rates of church attendance. Each week, roughly 40 percent of Americans attend religious services, according to most recent surveys.

In Western Europe, by contrast, Christianity is moribund. In Nordic Europe, 3 percent to 5 percent of the population goes to church regularly. In Britain, 1 in 10 attend. In France, 12 percent go to church. And in Germany, home to Martin Luther, 13 percent attend.

Yet in European countries there is a long history of intertwining church and state. In the 19th century, Lutherans came to the United States to escape the arm of state-supported churches. While some European states are now officially secular, to this day the British monarch must be a Protestant, and Norway and Denmark remain officially Lutheran.

The American experience has, at least since the Revolution, been markedly different. The steady strength of America’s Christian denominations is their existence in a religious marketplace where, as religious scholar Martin Marty argues, they have consistently had to adapt to a changing cultural and spiritual marketplace or die. The same creative destruction that shapes corporate America also guides American Christianity: Those most responsive to the changing needs of Americans survive and grow, while those who fail to adapt quickly fade.

Christianity does well when the state stays out of its business and allows this marketplace of ideas to thrive. Historically, it has thrived in the face of benign or even oppositional states, from Imperial Rome to modern China. And it’s strange that so many conservative Christians – people who typically defend a free marketplace and oppose government overreach – don’t get this.

When the state and religion become intertwined, religion suffers. Across America this year, attorneys for America’s largest Christian denominations will be warning their pastors to avoid talking politics from the pulpit. Why? Because most churches accept the federal government’s 501(c)(3) nonprofit status, allowing the state to place restrictions on what their pastors and priests can say. Christian colleges that accept federal aid subject themselves to similar restrictions. If you take state money, you risk federal involvement. It’s one reason some conservative colleges are now refusing all federal aid, and some of America’s best religious-based charities and missions do the same.

Both major political parties are plagued by deep inconsistencies. Democrats who advocate for a strong, regulatory state are often social and cultural libertarians, while free-market, laissez-faire Republicans too often support robust state intervention on social issues.

Conservatives would do well to remember that although Jefferson was inconsistently liberal (he enslaved fellow human beings, after all), he was consistent in his belief that for government to be small anywhere, it has to be small everywhere.

Conservatives should reinforce that wall separating church from state. It is one of the primary reasons American Christianity remains so vibrant.