Fight nonsense with sense

James Lileks' occasional rants or "screeds" as he likes to call them, are so popular that he has created a new blog entirely devoted to "screeding". Today Lileks looks at a quote he pulls from Hugh Hewitt, who has located an offensive leftist at USC. Not that anyone is at all surprised. What is really shocking is that the someone from the LA entertainment industry, who are usually a bit more sensitive to how things will play in Peoria, would ever think that such a statement could do anything but embarrass himself and the institution that pays his salary.

The professor in question, Martin Kaplan, "director of the Norman Lear Center at the Annenberg School of Communication at USC" loses Lileks, me, and a good number of his potential readers right away by referring to Christians as "Christers." Suddenly I understand just a bit how African-Americans feel about the "N" word. That has to go right to the top of my How to Know When to Stop Listening list. Liberal writers have developed a strange fetish for offensive nicknames. Perhaps it all flows out of a few closed-in communities like Democratic Underground and DailyKos. I'm sure you've seen it. Whenever a writer drops one of those vile little quips, click away quickly. I especially address this advice to Democrats or centrists who might not find the terms particularly offensive. You need to find the technique offensive. Deny these people the attention they seek and force them to clean up their act, or find yourself discredited along with them.

Back to Kaplan. The USC Prof. goes further demonstrate that he is ignorable by immediately dropping the "f-word" (...you know, "fascist") and decrying the rise of "theocratic oligopoly." That's a third strike for Kaplan, use of big words to describe an empty concept. Let's just drop him from our memories. The quote I wanted to bring to your attention is not what Kaplan had to say, which we know to be valueless. Rather, take note please, of Lileks' suggestion for a response.

In fact I suspect that if a groundswell of moderate-to-liberal Christians fought back the “fundamentalists” and used spiritual language to make common cause with the secularists, there would be little talk of theocracy or religious fascism, even if the motivations were equally devout.

He's right, I believe, about the shameful lack of response from moderate-liberal Christians. It is out there, most notably these days from Jim Wallis and Sojourners, and a few others, but we've been too shy. Spokespeople from my Episcopal Church are generally so liberal that they are too easily dismissed. Many seem to have forgotten how to "use spiritual language" in a conversation outside of church (or even in it, I'm afraid), and we are not taken seriously by most of the more conservative Christian groups. Even an Episcopalian, however, can reach a more or less secular or vaguely "spiritual" audience, which is most of the country if the polls are to be believed.

The point is not only to defend our political processes from religious bullying, but also to defend Christianity from the highly distorted and politicized image that a few Christians are presenting, and that the secular world has enthusiastically embraced. Moderate and liberal Christians ought take care when we make common-cause with the secularists. Folks like Kaplan are not friendly to us or our way of thinking. They are as bigoted and narrow minded as the "fundamentalists" (a misused word) who they to attack. They both like to present God as an angry tyrant; it suits both their programs.The answer to bad-Christianity cannot be bad-secularism. I'd rather see the "other Christians" assert the traditional (as in "apostolic") vision of God and the Church, and honestly express their widely varied and generally quite reasonable political views. The news isn't that Christians are liberal, but that the set of all American Christians closely resembles the set of all Americans. We waste much too much of our attention on the voices coming in from either extreme. We'll learn nothing from them, and get nowhere we would want to go.