God would roll His eyes III
: Blog Done With Mirrors has a wonderful commentary on what is becoming known as the Hewitt-Jarvis debate on religion in America this Christmas season. This is the best of blogs: Hugh and I (and others) have a good and respectful discussion and others join in with good thoughts.
If you close one eye and look at America, you can see basic ideas of right and wrong — a bulwark of a robust, free people — eroding under attack from reckless and embittered relativists. Close the other eye and you see just as clearly blind fundamentalist morality on the march, threatening to enshrine an un-democratic Old Testament creed as the higher law.
Open both eyes, then, and see what Madison saw. The tension, the negotiation, the struggle for consensus and a common view, is the unscripted balancing act that keeps America safe.
But the best thing about this Hewitt-Jarvis discussion is what it isn’t. So far, the focus isn’t on government and religion. That’s in there, but the posts are largely about We the People and our faiths and our joint ownership of the nation. I like that. Too often talk of religion in America presumes Americans are passive little leaves buffeted by the whims of a few fundamentalists in the corridors of Congress, or a few secularists on the 9th Circuit Court.
We’re citizens, not subjects.
: ON THE OTHER HAND: There is the Lileks–Wolcott debate.
: MORE: Michael B
