Religion

When I was an Episcopalian it seemed to me the name summed up the core belief that held the church together: they believed in bishops. It was pleasant being a bishop, it should be pleasant being a bishop, and if you didn’t go along with that you didn’t belong and you should go someplace else. Of course, there was more to it than that. Episcopalians also believed in relationships. People should be nice to each other, and accept and affirm each other in their mutually affirming whateverness, so long of course as the various whatevernesses stayed mutually affirming.

The effect was that you could think and do whatever you wanted as long as you approved of everyone else thinking and doing whatever he wanted, and you otherwise didn’t make waves. The Episcopal Church was thus a religion formed on the model of the politically correct managerial consumer society. Everybody pleased himself by following his own pursuits, within a structure that ruled quite effectively without seeming to do so because nothing could ever become an issue. How could anything be an issue, after all, when everything was either private taste, amusement, happy talk about celebrating otherness, or arranged by higher-ups over whom there was very little control? The only real issue was how to redefine apparent issues as non-issues as smoothly as possible. To make anything else an issue was to show you weren’t really an Episcopalian, because you had violated “Anglican comprehensiveness.” And besides, it wasn’t nice.

Here’s a brief interview with historian Thomas Madden, who makes some obvious points on what the Crusades were really like: Part 1 and Part 2. If a belated counterattack 900 years ago against Islamic military expansion and oppression is on the short list of the sins of Catholic Christendom, then Catholic Christendom looks pretty good.

An example of what happens if the struggle against radical Islam is recast as a struggle against “fundamentalism” (that is, against every serious form of religion): French “headscarf” law bans priests from schools. Priests wear Roman collars, after all, and Roman collars are just like headscarves. The problem’s a general one.

Robert Reich was a class ahead of me at college, and at the time he stood out for his knack at picking out positions that were (1) somewhat ahead of the curve, so he could get a leg up as representative of The Next Big Thing, but (2) not too far ahead, so those in power could bring him into their efforts to deal with events and bring them in line with the needs of orderly management and their own interests.

How religious issues present themselves to the mainstream press in conservative red-state America: according to the Salt Lake Tribune,

Keeping abreast of the times:

• It seems the ban on Vlaams Blok didn’t become final quite fast enough. The right-wing party came in second in the recent EU vote, beating the party of Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt (who is most likely the next EU president). In the aftermath: the other parties are fussing about whether to talk with them, and the state-run Flemish broadcaster is in hot water with academics and other journalists for failure to take a strong enough anti-VB line. Nothing like the marketplace of ideas!

A review of Diane Ravitch’s The Language Police in The New Pantagruel brings out the nature of “celebrating diversity” in school textbooks: since almost anything one might assert, suggest or mention would be more favorable to one group or culture than another, the only things that can be asserted, suggested or mentioned are things like elderly marathoners and the personal problems of immigrants. “Diversity” always turns out to mean “sameness and irrelevance.” Since the same problems appear in college textbooks, choice of which normally lies with individual instructors, the issue isn’t formal political pressure so much as the voluntary decision of our whole intellectual class to prefer multiculti to anything intellectual.