December 10, 2004, 1:14 p.m.
Secularism and Its Discontents
The debate over religion and politics is in desperate need of sanity.byline=By Ramesh Ponnuru

EDITOR'S NOTE: This piece appears in the December 27, 2004, issue of National Review.

The reelection of George W. Bush has provoked extensive debate, if not quite soul-searching, among liberals. For the most part, liberals have not fastened on the way foreign policy played out in the campaign, but on the way moral and religious issues did — even after the idea that the moral issues had a much larger impact in this election than in previous ones was largely debunked, and even though some of the debunkers were liberals attempting to deny any mandate for moral and religious conservatives. Some liberals have suggested that Democrats need to start speaking the language of faith, or at least of morals. More of them have denounced the backwardness of the religious conservatives who supported President Bush.

"The president got re-elected by dividing the country along fault lines of fear, intolerance, ignorance and religious rule," wrote Maureen Dowd on the day after the election. "W. ran a jihad in America so he can fight one in Iraq — drawing a devoted flock of evangelicals, or 'values voters,' as they call themselves, to the polls by opposing abortion, suffocating stem cell research and supporting a constitutional amendment against gay marriage."

The same day, her colleague Tom Friedman wrote: "[W]hat troubled me yesterday was my feeling that this election was tipped because of an outpouring of support for George Bush by people who don't just favor different policies than I do — they favor a whole different kind of America. . . . Mr. Bush's base is pushing so hard to legislate social issues and extend the boundaries of religion that it felt as if we were rewriting the Constitution, not electing a president."
But Garry Wills outdid both of these worthies:

The secular states of modern Europe do not understand the fundamentalism of the American electorate. . . . [W]e now resemble those nations less than we do our putative enemies. Where else do we find fundamentalist zeal, a rage at secularity, religious intolerance, fear of and hatred for modernity? Not in France or Britain or Germany or Italy or Spain. We find it in the Muslim world, in Al Qaeda, in Saddam Hussein's Sunni loyalists. Americans wonder that the rest of the world thinks us so dangerous, so single-minded, so impervious to international appeals. They fear jihad, no matter whose zeal is being expressed.

And those were just the liberals who wrote in the New York Times. The same sentiments were expressed elsewhere. In Salon, Sidney Blumenthal called the post-election Senate majority "more theocratic than Republican." Robert Kuttner, one of the editors of The American Prospect, complained that Democrats had not "warned mainstream voters of the danger of a theocratic president whose base rejects modernity." House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi was slightly less strident, saying that the Republicans "dangerously blurred the line between church and state."
These comments cannot simply be dismissed as an eruption of rage by the losers of an election against the winners. They express, if sometimes in hyperbolic form, liberalism's habits and reflexes, which are themselves based on respectable ideas.

Here is Robert Reich, writing months before the election:

The great conflict of the 21st century will not be between the West and terrorism. Terrorism is a tactic, not a belief. The true battle will be between modern civilization and anti-modernists; between those who believe in the primacy of the individual and those who believe that human beings owe their allegiance and identity to a higher authority; between those who give priority to life in this world and those who believe that human life is mere preparation for an existence beyond life; between those who believe in science, reason, and logic and those who believe that truth is revealed through Scripture and religious dogma. Terrorism will disrupt and destroy lives. But terrorism itself is not the greatest danger we face.

Few liberals are as hostile to conventional religious belief as Reich (or at least the Reich of that passage). Some liberals are religious themselves, and can presumably see that a belief in the political primacy of the individual is compatible with allegiance to God. But most liberals, including religious ones, do find Christian conservatism dangerous in a way that makes it similar in principle, if not in virulence, to the Taliban. Recall Anthony Lewis's December 2001 exit interview in the New York Times, in which he likened John Ashcroft to Osama bin Laden. Around the same time, three prominent Democratic strategists wrote a memo arguing that the war on "fundamentalism" would promote "tolerance" at the expense of Christian-conservative "fanaticism."

The idea that Christian conservatives and Islamofascists can be reasonably or fairly compared in this fashion is such a commonplace that people who propound it often do not seem to think that they are saying anything provocative...

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