Does this sword have two sides? Muslim Exceptionalism and the Christian Right

Submitted by Jake Orlowitz (United States), Dec 23, 2006 at 19:02

Yet, is it in dispute that many Christians would like this country to be run by Christian law? Or the already dubious claim that our legal system is in essence based in the Bible as opposed to the widespread liberal sentiments that swept through Europe in the 1700's that widely suggest our morality to be modern rather than biblical and democratic rather than Christian?

Is it really in dispute that our political mores have little to do with our Christian ones, and that those that the ones that have been gradually swept from our political body (i.e. slavery, female suffrage, alcohol prohibition, sodomy, abortion, etc.) are the Christian parts not the modern, democratic, republican ones? Is there any dispute that many Christians want our politicians to ban abortion, gay marriage, sodomy, wide-spectrum sex education, and school-prayer prohibition not because they believe in religious freedom, but because they believe in Christianity?

And to the extent that they believe in Christianity without outright alleging that the US must be exclusively Christian, are they really any different than other religious fundamentalists who want to promote their own parochial views?

Finally, considering this is the case, then do we not have here rather than a war in the sense Christians would like us to believe but a debate with a new point of view. It may be a disagreeable point-of-view but it is no more so than those many political secularists view express towards Fundamentalist Christians. The plague of Muslim exceptionalism—the approachable though historically insane notion that only Muslims can commit politically atrocious acts—is a tempting one for many who are afraid of our most recent enemy. But a reasoned concern about political security is a far cry from the blatant excuse many Fundamentalist Christians have made of the situation, to further their own agendas into our political arena...As if the point of America was to keep out Muslims rather than to keep both Muslims and Christians and their inflexible, insular, democratically-incompatible parts at least far enough away from our laws and our constitution.

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