Megan McArdle, theologian, attacks liberals for treating Christian religious iconography the way an actually serious Christian would.
What's amazing about all of this, of course, is that it means the people who are upset about comparing Barack Obama to the devil are the ones taking Christianity seriously. Douthat and McArdle and others are saying that Christian religious iconography has no real-world value. If explicitly comparing Barack Obama to the anti-Christ and Satan is just a joke, just a little partisan ha-ha, then those concepts have no meaning, at all. Douthat, a self-styled devout Catholic, is mocking people for taking the symbols of his religion seriously.
McArdle says "Liberals wonder why they are parodied as out-of-touch secularists who mix near-total ignorance of traditional Christianity with a seething, idiotic attempt." Religious Christians wonder why people like me point out the basic intellectual poverty of the Christian right in this country. Someone who actually believes in Satan or the anti-Christ wouldn't treat these symbols as the instruments of humor. This imbroglio doesn't reveal how "out of touch" liberals are with Christian America. It reveals the fundamental emptiness of much of Christian America's faith, something which is constantly asserted but constantly undermined by stuff like this. You can't expect me to take your religious superstitions seriously if you don't take them seriously yourselves.
By the way, when did Ross Douthat become just another liberal-scolding Republican apparatchik? I like Ross's work, I think he's very bright, and I am used to disagreeing with him. But I'm not used to him writing so much Redstate-style anti-Obama, anti-Democrat boilerplate. It's been increasing in frequency and decreasing in intellectual honesty and integrity, quite quickly.
Update: This is the same phenomenon as the cover of Jonah Goldberg's book. Who is it that really takes fascism and its threat seriously? The person putting a smiley face with a Hitler mustache on the cover of his book as a joke? Or the people getting upset about it? Who treats fascism as a threat that merits our continued vigilance?
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2 comments:
Is the point not that MM and RD believe that anyone who actually belives that BO is the anti-christ is an active nutjob and that liberals, by reacting in a seething and sicerely upset fashion fail to treat the position as the nutjobbery that it really is and therefor deserve to be scolded? Also, doesn't treating ppl who cal BO the anti-christ seriously only unnecessarily validate they're clearly unhinged claims?
i liked it when you came off as more thoughtful and less self-righteous.
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