Dartblog

The condescending ways in which secular media juggernauts like The Washington Post and The New York Times will attempt to discuss religion—and ‘to discuss’ most often means ‘to analyze the sloop-shouldered cro magnons who go to church’—are sundry. But in an “On Faith” feature at WashingtonPost.com, Professor Wendy Doniger at the University of Chicago’s Divinity School does a keen job of aping it all in one concise paragraph:

I don’t care a fig about our next president’s personal religious views. The candidate can worship the Great Pumpkin, for all I care, as long as he or she doesn’t assume that the rest of us do too, and that the Great Pumpkin told him to do things such as, to take a case at random, invade Iraq.

Isn’t that just adorable? She said “Great Pumpkin” instead of “Christianity.” And then she suggested that mystical forces, whispering in George W. Bush’s ear, caused him to engage a sovereign in international warfare.

David Adesnik puts this well: “If Prof. Doniger was trying as hard as possible to reinforce the stereotype that liberal academics belittle and trivialize the faith of others, she most certainly succeeded.”

But wait, there’s more. We next have the pleasure of witnessing the good professor’s take on the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause.

But I certainly want to know what any presidential candidate thinks government should and should not do to protect freedom of religion and freedom from religion. … I pledge allegiance to the first amendment, which I interpret to mean that government shouldn’t traffic with religion—neither promote it nor persecute it—and this means that, in the public arena, the candidate should not use religious rhetoric…

Let’s take a gander at the ol’ First. It’s the only place in the Constitution that religion is invoked, except for all those other places in the Constitution and in our various founding documents that talk about “our Lord.”

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;

As you may have noticed, the First Amendment speaks to neither freedom of religion nor freedom from religion. Instead, it simply denies the federal government agency as regards the practice of religion. Which is the most basic, most potent way of enshrining religious freedom. (It also, by the bye, allows entirely for prayer in public school.)

Professor Doniger: You are living and teaching inside a basically Judeo-Christian country. You are in the minority. That doesn’t mean you’ve lost any rights, because those are protected for you by the (thoroughly pious) drafters of the Constitution. But it does mean that, from time to time, you might be uncomfortable. None of our foundational documents promises you comfort. The next time you craft a blog post, you might make it an assay at gratitude; gratitude that you live in a majority Christian nation instead of—let me just pick a random example—a majority Islamic nation. The minority, such as you, in those countries is labled as “kafir,” which means “infidel.” They live in dhimmitude, and are afforded only those rights that “kafir” deserve. The corpus of those rights—and they are minimal—is called “sharia.” Give it a shot, and report back.