Obama's Religion Problem

Our liberal friends have their knickers in a twist right now about the shocking finding that about 20 percent of Americans think that President Obama is a Muslim. Just to be on the safe side, they are blaming Rush Limbaugh for this.

The awful Rush, you see, started calling the president "Imam Obama" last week.

Earth to liberals: One of Rush Limbaugh's big secrets is hidden in the phrase "fun, frolic, and a serious discussion of the issues." The Rush Limbaugh Program features humor and wit--even extending to irony and sarcasm--as much as it features political analysis.

And I would suggest that calling the president "Imam Obama" is an instance of irony. Very advanced and sophisticated, irony. At least that's what liberals used to say. That was before their ox got gored.

It's not that surprising that 20 percent of Americans think Obama is Muslim. His father is Muslim. He spent a good part of his youth in Indonesia, a Muslim country. His middle name is Hussein. So what! Liberals put out confusing and unhelpful memes about conservatives all the time.

But Obama's problem is not really about Islam. Obama's problem is his political approach to religion in general. And that is what came through so loud and clear on the president's iftar speech.

When it comes to religion, Obama is a liberal. He is liberal in the way that he pronounces on the 9/11 mosque. He is liberal on the way that he condones the ugly black racism of Reverend Wright. He is liberal in the way that he talked about "my faith tradition" during the campaign. And of course he is liberal in the way that he has no regard for the religious beliefs of health care workers that may not want to be involved in abortion procedures or "death panel" decisions.

I don't know whether Obama is a Christian. I doubt if he is a Muslim. I do know that he is a liberal. If you are looking for his "belief system" then the answer is "liberal."

Liberalism is what we now call a "secular religion." It has all the hallmarks of a religion except a belief in God. It's a faith community. It has its articles of belief. It divides the world into us and them. It is militant, actively seeking converts, particularly in the government education system. It is intolerant towards non-believers.

This wouldn't be exceptionable, except for one thing. Liberalism wants to combine its secular faith, its church of liberalism, with the government. It wants its belief system to become a kind of state religion, but without God. This puts liberals into an interesting position. They are always quoting Thomas Jefferson and his call for a wall between church and state.

But they refuse to admit that their beliefs constitute a religion and that there amounts, in the United States, an establishment of liberal religion, officially supported and imposed by the government in a host of ways. Here's one. In the welfare state the government does a lot of things, like education, health care, and welfare, that used to be done by churches.

Obama's problem with religion is that, in a nation that's 40 percent conservatives, 35 percent moderate, and 20 percent liberal, he's forcing a minority world view on the majority.

That is not a situation that is likely to end happily.

What Conservatives are For

The last two weeks have been brutal for our liberal friends, and they just don't understand what went wrong.

Obviously, they said, this whole 9/11 Mosque controversy is about rights, the right of freedom of religion. Moslems have a right to worship and government has no right to circumscribe that right. Anyone who disagrees is a bigot. Period.

Our liberal friends, I reckon, were put on this earth for one great thing. They were put on this earth to midwife the civil-rights revolution. In their finest hour in the early 1960s they insisted on realizing the promise of the American revolution that all men are created equal. They insisted that the original sin of the American founding should be redeemed. They risked a lot in pushing through the civil-rights acts, and lost the South for a generation, just as Lyndon Johnson feared. Conservatives like Barry Goldwater and Bill Buckley didn't get it; they got all caught up in legalisms.

The trouble is that liberals, put onto this earth for that one thing, want to fit every issue into the civil rights mold. They are like the hammer: everything looks like a nail. They've made women's rights into a civil-rights issue, gay rights into a civil-rights issue. And now they want Muslims to be an historically marginalized group and apply the civil-rights solution to them too.

The conservative retort to liberals on the 9/11 mosque issue is simple, and it illustrates what conservatives were put on this earth to do.

Conservatives say to liberals: Yes, of course Muslims have a right to put up a mosque anywhere they want. The question is: should they exercise that right. Or should they think about the insult that such a mosque, so close to a site where 3,000 people, mostly Americans, were killed by Muslim terrorists, represents to New Yorkers and most Americans. Should Muslims, in a spirit of friendship and kindness, forbear to exercise their undoubted rights.

We conservatives are saying is that politics in particular and social relations in general are not just about rights and the rule of law. Life is not merely a mechanical thing about following the rules. Nor is it just an adversarial proceeding as in a court of law. Nor it is a blind application of bureaucratic rules. Life is give-and-take. Life is friendship. Life is restraint, holding back when you know you are about to hurt an acquaintance.

Indeed, if you try to reduce everything to a pound of flesh you will find that you inevitably end up committing one cruel injustice after another. The quality of mercy is not strained / It falleth as the gentle rain from Heaven.

This need to blend rules with the sentiment of mercy and friendship has been at the heart of modern conservatism since Edmund Burke railed against "sophisters, economists, and calculators" 220 years ago. Here is the full quote from his Reflections on the Revolution in France.

The age of chivalry has gone and that of economists and calculators has set in, and the glory of Europe has departed.

Perhaps Burke was a little overwrought that day.

In the next few years we will see conservatism applied to the moral and material mess created by the bureaucratic leviathan we call the welfare state. Conservatives will be doing what they were made to do: pointing out that you cannot reduce the social relation--the caring things like care of the aged, care of the sick, the education of children--to rules and bureaucracy.

That's what conservatives are on this earth to do. To show liberals where they went wrong.

They Just Don't Get It, cont.

What must they be thinking at the White House? Here's faithful liberal reporter Matt Bai talking it other with some Democratic bigwigs.

Democrats in Washington are divided and somewhat puzzled over President Obama’s fading popularity.

Somehow, they figure, the president failed to communicate his successes! It's all a problem of messaging.

Well, not exactly, says bigwig John Podesta. It's really all because the president has been focusing on big legislative accomplishments, assuming that he would get an "updraft" from an improving economy.

Notice what this delicately tip-toes around. The Obama administration made a choice to push its expensive big-government agenda in 2009 instead of pushing economic recovery. It "assumed" that the economy would revive.

So John Podesta is just beginning to admit, in a veiled manner to soften the blow for New York Times readers, that the Obama administration made the biggest political error of all time, assuming that it was business as usual in the aftermath of the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression.

The administration assumed that it could pile huge new costs upon the private sector without stalling the recovery. We now know that it was wrong. Dead wrong.

Here's another veiled admission from Podesta--on postpartisanship:

[P]art of the president’s significant appeal to voters — “a big part of the secret sauce of getting him elected” — was his promise to transcend perennial partisanship.

A more national, outward-looking strategy for creating a “postpartisan” dynamic might have included White House partnerships with Republican governors or even with conservative foundations or industry groups. Because the president effectively boxed himself in to a Capitol-Hill-only strategy, though, he handed the Republican minorities in Congress the power to sabotage his goal.

“Once you became a legislative president, which is arguably what you needed to do, you couldn’t deliver on the nonpartisanship promise,” Mr. Podesta said. “And it’s something people wanted.”

You see the misdirection here? What do you mean, John Podesta, "partnerships with Republican governors or even with conservative foundations?" You are trying to suggest that there was no chance that the president could have done a deal with the Republicans in Congress. But this is rubbish. In 2009 the Republicans were ripe for the taking if the president had made a even modest move in their direction. They were extremely reluctant to criticize the president--right until the grass-roots entry into the health care debate during the August town-halls. At any time until August 2009 the president could have picked off a few moderate Republicans with some token compromises to get a bipartisan health bill.

It's interesting to see John Podesta starting to wake up to reality. But he has a problem. He must be careful not to frighten the horses in the street otherwise the base Democrats will get so demoralized that the GOP will pick up 100 seats in the House in November instead of 80.

So he speaks in veiled terms, in nods and winks. If he were a Straussian, we could talk about esoteric talk versus exoteric talk, saying in the same words one thing to the initiated and another to the uninitiated.

But of course, John Podesta is a Democrat, so he can't possibly be a follower of conservative Leo Strauss.

One Step at a Time

Here in Washington State we had our primary yesterday. The result? Sen. Patty Murray is in trouble, since her vote about pegged equal with the Republican vote. And three Dem districts are in play, the 2nd with Koster against incumbent Larson, the 3rd, an open seat, and the 9th, maybe, with Muri against the incumbent Smith.

If a couple of those seats turn Republican then we'd get a 5-4 GOP advantage instead of a 6-3 Dem majority in the House delegation.

I said it back in 2008. The only way you get to win in politics is by letting the voters get a taste of the other guys. Disgust, the psychologists are finally realizing, is not just about avoiding rancid meat, but avoiding rancid ideas.

With President Obama we have the world set upside down. We have a war on the American economy, with a breathtaking program to seize a huge chunk of the economy and parcel it out to Democratic Party supporters. And we have a president who wants to pass on the great clash of civilizations, the question of whether the West shall prevail or Islam. It is all laid out today by Ayaan Hirsi Ali in The Wall Street Journal.

The president's hope was that moderate Muslims would eagerly accept [his] invitation to be friends.

The president is a One Worlder, a devotee of the fashionable idea that the fall of Communism meant the "End of History" according to Francis Fukuyama. No it isn't, wrote Samuel Huntington in The Clash of Civilizations, and Ali agrees.

The West's universalist pretensions are increasingly bringing it into conflict with the other civilizations. most seriously with Islam and China.

The future of the West depends upon a successful defense against these challenges, according to Ali. Ordinarily, as far as Islam is concerned, it shouldn't be a problem, since the Islamic countries are "ruled by despots of various stripes."

China is a bigger problem, but here there is hope--that China is reinventing itself as a Christian country. Huh? Here is a Chinese Christian describing to David Aikman in Jesus in Beijing how China has looked at the West over the last two centuries.

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.

There are thought to be about 100 million Chinese Christians in house churches in China, but nobody knows, because the house churches are more-or-less underground. So China may in fact be in the process of modeling itself on the West, rather than challenging it.

The great thing about the Obama administration is that all the ideas that the center left has been pushing for the last half century are going to be utterly repudiated by the American people in the next few years. Not because the American people will have done an exhaustive analysis on them, but because they are associated with Obama and the failures of the Obama administration.

And it all starts in the House districts in play this November in Washington State and elsewhere.

Because we are looking right down the barrel of an 80 seat pickup for Republicans in the House. That will be the biggest pickup since the 75 seat swing in 1938, and it will change the rules, starting on November 3, 2010.

Liberals Defend Religion!

Sometimes our liberal friends astound us. We conservatives have suffered for half a century as liberals have pointedly pushed religion out of the public square. No prayer in schools. No religion on campus. No religious symbols on government property.

But then out of a clear blue sky, liberals are all hot to prove their devotion to the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of religion--to Muslims. And when President Obama, in an address to Muslims, affirms their right to build a mosque right next to 9/11's Ground Zero, liberal pundit hearts go aflutter here, here, and here.

Oh yeah? So when did a liberal heart ever go aflutter over celebrating the right of Christians to put up a church right next to a liberal shrine?

Liberals certainly don't seem too happy about Glenn Beck and his Restoring Honor rally at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, the anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech.

OK, it's clear how liberals get to supporting the 9/11 mosque. Muslims are anti-American; liberals approve of that. Muslims are anti-Christian; liberals like that. Muslims are victims in Palestine; liberals rally to that. Muslims in America are a minority; liberals like that. Hate groups might attack Muslims; liberals must rally against that. And so on.

As for me, I notice that the mosque issue fits into my culture of compulsion/culture of friendship template. Liberals are saying as enlightened elitists that government must compel the American people to allow Muslims the right to build mosques wherever they want. Conservatives agree that Muslims have the right. But in the spirit of friendship, conservatives say, surely Muslims would not want to build a mosque so close to a site where Muslim extremists killed thousands of Americans.

"There is such a thing as society. It's just not the same thing as the state." Scratch a liberal, and you'll find someone that doesn't get it.

Cordoba House vs. St. Patrick's Cathedral

Once upon a time in New York City there was an immigrant group determined to show the powers-that-be that they were a force to be reckoned with.

No, I am not talking about Muslims and the Cordoba House project led by imam Feisal Abdul Rauf. I am talking about the Irish Catholics led by Archbishop John "Dagger" Hughes.

John Hughes was an immigrant gardener at the gardener and stonemason at Mount St. Mary’s College and seminary in Emmitsburg, Maryland. Then, through the intercession of Mother Elizabeth Bayley Seton--canonized later as America’s first native-born saint--he went to the seminary, became a priest and the first Catholic Archbishop of New York. You can read his story here. In the 1850s Archbishop Hughes conceived of a project to build a new cathedral in New York City. Here's how William J. Stern wrote about it in City Journal.

As the 1850s wore on, the archbishop began to conceive a plan that would give magnificent, concrete expression to the rise of New York’s Catholics. He would build a great cathedral, financed by the Catholics themselves, as proof to the Protestant elites that the Irish, too, knew how to make New York the premier city of the world.

And he would build it right on Fifth Avenue, right where the Protestant swells and the Astors and the Vanderbilts lived and right where they could see it every day.

Fast forward to 2010 and the Cordoba House project. Imam Rauf, like Archbishop Hughes before him, wants to show to the world that Muslims are a force to be reckoned with. Unfortunately the project is not right where the the dominant liberal swells couldn't miss it. It is right next to the hallowed ground of 9/11's Ground Zero.

The Cordoba Project might have made sense when the Twin Towers were standing, when they represented the cultural power of the United States. But not now, not after 9/11. The Cordoba project doesn't represent the ability of Muslims to contribute to the glory of New York City. It just shows the tone-deafness of America's elite Muslims.

There are other differences too. Back in the 1850s the rich New York Protestants clearly represented the cultural elite heart of New York City. But now the cultural elite is the educated progressive elite of liberals. Thus the Muslims are not an insurgent group of dirt-poor Irish laborers and "nymphs of the pave" desperately working their way up from famine and indigence. They are, on the contrary, the darlings of the liberals. Liberals are pontificating up and down the land about the "right" of the Muslims to put a mosque any where they want. (Do not spend too much time waiting around for liberals to assert the right of Christians to put a church anywhere they want.)

What we are seeing is liberal street theater with the usual rent-a-mob. Also, it appears, Cordoba House is not getting funding from dirt-poor Muslim cab-drivers in Manhattan but from rich Saudi and Kuwaiti princes. Next thing we'll learn that George Soros is a contributor!

In the 21st century, if you want to prove you have hair on your chest, it's absurd to come into the public square as a liberal darling. You need to be a real grass-roots movement that must overcome every day with the scorn of the liberals. You know, like the Tea Party.

A Culture of Friendship

If liberalism is the culture of compulsion, then what should conservatism's culture be?

Simple. It should be the culture of friendship, and not just because Aristotle wrote that friendship was the basis of politics, indeed all social bonds.

We could also all it the culture of involvement, of engagement, of voluntary cooperation. All this is just trying to say one thing. The culture of reason, of laws and regulations for everything, of experts declaiming from on high, of politicians dividing us, of bureaucratic busy-ness has failed. It is not kind, it is not generous, it is not thoughtful, it is not human.

Also, it does not understand the huge "diversity" in humans that complements our undeniable sociability. This is not just a question of justice, that people should have a right to be different, but a question of survival. A field of genetically identical wheat will be devastated by a single infestation of wheat rust. But a diverse population will respond to pestilence, or indeed anything, in lots of different ways. Some will perish, others will survive, still others will thrive.

This means that instead of everyone following the single ruling-class-approved trajectory of life, the road of government custody in schools followed by government supervised work and government-dependent old age. In the culture of friendship people would choose different trajectories, providing only that they did not harm the lives of others.

Let us examine how this would work in the realm of social services that form the core of government function in this age of the administrative welfare state.

Instead of the rigid governmental social structures, the government school, the government welfare, the government health care, the government pension, people would obtain these vital social goods in a web of friendship and social service. People would provide social services to others and receive social services from others in appropriate measure.

How might this work in the simple case of the government pension? In the current culture of compulsion each worker is forced to pay a jobs tax that goes to pay the pension of an older person. This plan, we now know, is doomed to failure because people have demanded and politicians have legislated benefits that cannot be paid.

But in the culture of friendship, middle-aged people save from their income. They save so that, in due time, they will accumulate enough capital that younger persons can use it to work and create enough wealth to leave the older person a share of this wealth creation as interest on the capital saved and invested in the younger generation. Thus we have a double exchange of friendship. The older person prudently saves, not wishing to be a burden on the young generation, and gives the accumulation of this saving to the youngsters for them to work and found new families. The young generation gives back a dividend from the wealth created by the combination of capital and work in a spirit of friendliness to the old 'uns.

There is not just one trajectory here, but many. Some will work in large organizations and accumulate capital in the financial markets. Others will establish businesses and sell them, as they get older, to the younger generation. Or they may hand them down to their children. Others will build up businesses that can be operated by younger people while providing them with an income.

There is, of course, a natural flexibility in this arrangement. If the older person saves a lot, he can retire from work early. If there is a banking crisis that reduces the value of investments then the older person must plan to work a little longer. If the younger person turns the investment into an extraordinary success then all benefit.

Thus does the culture of friendship triumph over the culture of compulsion.

We will see in future episodes how the culture of friendship triumphs over the culture of compulsion in the other great social functions: health care, education, and the relief of the poor.

This is not rocket science. It is merely a recognition that we humans are social animals, and that our greatest asset is our sociability, our capacity for friendship, for wishing good things not just for ourselves, but for others.