According to an article on christianexaminer.com, Billy Graham’s son Franklin is eagerly jumping on the bandwagon of conservatives denouncing Obama for bringing up church history and reminding us that not all Muslims are terrorists.
Franklin Graham said former New York City Mayor Rudy Guiliani “has taken a lot of heat” for questioning whether President Obama loves America, and declined to weigh in on whether it was “true or not.” But Graham said what he did know is “the president defends Islam and chastises Christians, rebukes our allies and befriends our enemies, and fully supports gay marriages and abortion but denies the religious freedoms of those who don’t agree.”
Got to love that bit about not passing judgment on whether it’s really true or not. Who cares about truth when there’s rabble to rouse, eh Frankie?
Panderin’ Frank’s post on Facebook was immediately popular, with many agreeing that, whether or not Guiliani’s accusations were true, both Graham and Guiliani were right.
Graham’s social media commentary received more than 127,000 likes in less than half a day, with statements affirming Giuliani’s “guts to say what the rest of us have thought” and expressing agreement “with both these men.”
Ignoring Obama’s many denunciations of terrorists and terrorism worldwide, Graham went on to chastize him for failing to identify them as Islamic terrorists.
The day before, he commented on the Muslim terrorist group Al-Shabaab’s call for attacks on malls in Europe and the United States, asking, “When will our president call them what they are—Islamic terrorists?”
Ok, so referring to Crusaders as Christian Crusaders is bad, and referring to terrorists as Islamic terrorists is good. Even though the Crusades were an organized effort by both church and state in Christian Europe, while terrorist organizations are renegade minorities within the larger Islamic context, and even though some of our “allies” in the Middle East are secretly supporting and funding some of these terrorist organizations. Gotta blame the whole religion for the acts of a few extremists, unless it’s the Christian religion.
But of course, even though Muslims are all just a bunch of terrorists, they can still be saved.
Speaking on the Sean Hannity show in January, Graham interrupted the interview to address “all the Muslims who may be watching this, who are confused and are afraid themselves…””… they don’t have to die in a jihad,” Graham continued, looking straight into the camera. “They don’t have to kill somebody else to please God. God loves them and He will accept them through faith in His son, Jesus Christ.”
So in contrast to that liberal, America-hating perspective that acknowledges that not all Muslims are terrorists and that Christians haven’t always been the most peaceful folks on earth, the conservative Christian perspective is that all Muslims are out to kill us, and only Jesus can talk them out of it, by converting them to Christianity.
This is what you call “a Christian worldview.” Don’t weigh in on whether it’s true or not. Don’t get bogged down in any actual historical facts. Just stick to the narrative, make everything black vs white and us vs them. And keep those “likes” and comments rolling in.
I love your writing, it is so clear and so thought-out.
My sense is that these comments, from Franklin Graham in particular, are a desperate attempt to keep themselves and Christianity relevant. The worst thing people can do is pay attention to someone who is desperate for attention. It makes them feel that this is the sort of thing they should be doing because it successfully gets attention.
Insofar as Franklin Graham is concerned, he will always be in his father’s shadow, so he has to strain that much harder to plead his relevance. He was not personally appointed by God.
If I were still a Christian, I would be pointing out to any Christians paying attention to this that they lack Discernment.
I know what you’re saying, but the catch is that they’ve pretty much always talked and acted like this. It only seems desperate because it’s increasingly ineffective.
I don’t see how such an interpretation could apply before 9/11. When i was a Christian no one mentioned Muslims at all. Christianity continued to have growing influence after I rejected my faith, up until reaching a plateau between mid-2005 and late 2007. By late 2007 the cracks were really showing with the emergence of the crazy “tea party” and the whole 2008 Presidential election cycle was every kind of crazy on continuous display from Christians and the right wing. It’s been a non-stop crazy train since then. Desperation is the emotional response to ineffectiveness when people start saying and doing anything hoping that something will work. I never saw anything like this in my time in the church. People I know who used to be reasonable turned into raging lunatics. The sane ones still in the Church are quiet and try to pretend that the crazies are just horsing around.
Obama is just the wrong person to take advantage of this weakness in the Christian right. He didn’t push his advantage when he had it. He doesn’t have the character and it was obvious people just wanted him to be soft and unthreatening to the right, but that can’t work. He insists on doing what the Republicans would have done if they had kept power and Christians pretend like he can’t do anything right even though a Republican president, particularly if it had been Mitt Romney with his RomneyCare, wouldn’t have done a single thing different. It’s just not a Republican president doing it, so they feel out of control and powerless, but most importantly shame and disgrace for actually being responsible for their failure and incapable of being responsible. If Obama actually acted like a left-wing leader, right wing Christians might have something meaningful to say, but they would still have that shame and disgrace drilling into their brains.
Shame is such an essential component of religion, and all of the leaders are tainted by it, even now. No new, untainted faces have emerged, and it may take up to a generation for that to happen. They need to show that the alternative is much, much worse than themselves to justify their own quest for power, but Obama doesn’t give them anything to work with.
Well, I don’t really disagree, and maybe it has become more widespread among believers in recent years. I think, though, that you can still find the same sort of thing going back much farther than 9/11. I saw it happening for years before I finally deconverted in the year 2000. Sure, the name of the boogeyman was more likely to be “liberal” or “secular humanist” than “Muslim,” but the rhetoric was pretty similar.
I will grant you this: the tone of the rhetoric has ratcheted up significantly since Obama got elected. I suspect that there are two main reasons for this. Number one is latent racism taking offense at having a non-white Supreme Leader of the Western World, and number two—and probably the more significant—is conservative rabble-rousers exploiting this racism to try and make America’s first black president seem like the Antichrist, as a tool for energizing their conservative Christian base.
But Christianity has always been irrelevant to real life, because there isn’t any real God behind it. That’s why Christianity has always needed scapegoats to blame God’s failures on. The choice of scapegoat varies from Jews to witches to Muslims back to Jews to atheists back to witches, and so on. Today it happens to be Muslims. Blaming real people for God’s failures is the go-to method for Christian apologetics. The more people in general become aware of God’s essential irrelevance to everyday life, the more believers need to rabble-rouse by inciting hatred against the scapegoat-du-jour. Graham et al may sound more shrill today, and maybe they even are more shrill than what you and I are used to hearing, but the basic script they’re reading from is as old as the Bible.
D.D. Ok, so referring to Crusaders as Christian Crusaders is bad, and referring to terrorists as Islamic terrorists is good. Even though the Crusades were an organized effort by both church and state in Christian Europe, while terrorist organizations are renegade minorities within the larger Islamic context, and even though some of our “allies” in the Middle East are secretly supporting and funding some of these terrorist organizations. Gotta blame the whole religion for the acts of a few extremists, unless it’s the Christian religion.
I think you’re ignoring the fact that the Crusades were a counter-offensive.
Jihad came before the Crusades,and Herem before either.
D.D.But Christianity has always been irrelevant to real life, because there isn’t any real God behind it. That’s why Christianity has always needed scapegoats to blame God’s failures on.
Isn’t this equally true of Judaism and Islam?Aren’t they equally irrelevant to real life if there is no God?Don’t they look for scapegoats, like worshipers of Baal,or infidels? or “sinners” in general?
And isn’t this a common human failing?
Didn’t Leftist in Maoist China and Leninist/Stalinist Soviet Union blame reactionaries and counter-revolutionaries for their failure to realize their ideals?Rather than entertain the possibility that their theories on human nature were flawed and doomed to failure?
And in the contemporary West(like here on your blog),aren’t Christians,whites,conservatives just the boogeymen Leftist invoke to rally their “true believers”?or to attempt to build an alliance between those who are none of the above?
The problem with all the Monotheistic Abrahamic faiths is their moral absolutism and universalism,not their Metaphysics.
It is these features which they share with Secular Humanism,Progressivism,Liberal Socialism and other views promulgated by the Left.
Of course, you don’t see it that way because you Secular Leftist have found the ‘Real Truth’
Sounds like a Number 774 to me. You are correct, though, about all theists being more or less equally in need of human scapegoats to deflect attention away from the failures of their non-existent gods. In that respect their theologies are indeed, as you point out, no different from any other failed, imperfect ideology.
You are a bit off on your history, however. The crusades of the eleventh century and later were 300 years too late to be a counter-offensive to the 8th century Muslim conquest of Palestine. And in fact the papal promises of indulgences to crusaders were not limited to those who fought Muslims. For example, the Fourth Crusade, advertised as a war to liberate Jerusalem, went instead and ended up sacking Constantinople, the Christian capital of the Byzantine Empire and arch-rival to Rome and its pope. Meanwhile, the “People’s Crusade” in 1096 took time to massacre Jews in the Rhineland on their way to Constantinople, and other crusades in the 14th century took on the Mongols and Lithuanians and Finns and “political opponents of the papacy”—all under the auspices of Christian “holy war” and the promise of heavenly rewards for participants.
The US Naval Academy web site has (for some reason) an interesting timeline of the Crusades, including material on the ecclesiastical justification for Christian holy war. It’s quite fascinating, if you’re into that sort of thing.
With political correctness and identity politics leaving our false leaders too afraid to put a name on the West’s most pressing problem, there is no way they will bring themselves to take the required actions to neutralize it.
While not all Muslims are terrorists, almost every terrorist is an Islamist Muslim. It is time to govern ourselves accordingly.
There is a terrible lie being spread in these parts, and the truth is that not all cultures and worldview are equally valid. The culture that I enjoy, the American way of life, is far superior to any other, and we must strive to preserve it against those who hold no respect or love for it.
People who want to become American citizens need to renounce former ties and assimilate themselves and become Americans.
Actually, most terrorist attacks in the US since 9/11 (and even before) have come from attackers who were politically conservative and ethnically Christian. In other words, most terrorists worldwide are conservative theists. I think if conservative leaders were saying that “while not all theists are terrorists, almost every terrorist is a conservative theist,” it might be easier for some people to understand what’s wrong with overly broad generalizations.
No worldview is valid. The word doesn’t even mean the same thing to religious people, who mean something to be projected upon the world and balk at real events as if they were mere opinion. And it’s unfair to taint the word culture with religious implications. That is something religious people do because it makes it seem as if their faith is inextricable from their culture and it also helps them to demean other cultures on the basis of their opinion of the popular religion.
Is that part of your worldview?
My worldview, if you really want to talk about that, is merely the scope of the universe that I am exposed to, and so my worldview can only be “valid” for the very small amount of it which I actually choose to process. The difference between my worldview and the worldviews of religious people is that their worldview is restricted, denied, and fabricated yet only processed to fit a model accepted by them by whoever they deem to be an authority; and as such cynics as they are, assume that my worldview is likewise restricted, denied, and fabricated because they presume I live under an authority just like theirs only evil.
So when you question my worldview, all you are doing is suggesting to me that you are a religious person. The only honest way to question another person’s worldview is to ask them if they have considered some specific element of reality. Religious people never do that because reality is the thing which is questioned, not the worldview.
Tige, your elaborate if oblique response indicates your answer is ‘yes’.
If so, your contentions are based on something you believe to be invalid, by your initial proposition.
(I do note you appeal to degrees of invalidity as justification)
I fail to see how assuming my answer satisfies you in any way. Criticizing someone’s worldview is fundamentally flawed way of arguing based on the notion that the models from which the worldview is derived are authoritative or suspect, when reality laughs in the face of the notion of authority. I don’t have a mere presupposition that humans collectively don’t possess 99% of the knowledge necessary to validate something as broad as their entire worldview. It would be a different story if you asked about an expert’s view of their professional subject, but even then no expert is authoritative outside their narrow scope of practice. The very thought of presuming one’s worldview to be valid is hubris on stilts, since from that you must presume to dictate to others because your ideas are valid on any and all subject matters.
I know that my own worldview isn’t really valid and I’m not going to beat anyone over the head with it as the Christians commonly do, but usually when someone is talking at me about MY worldview, what they are actually referring to is some event in reality which they don’t want to process because it’s inconvenient for them. What inconvenient subject are you trying to skulk around with your questioning of me?
Your words have this strong smell of Christianity, as a typical Christian thinks he is catching me in something. I don’t know about you, but I actually have to deal with Christians who repeatedly do what you are doing. They believe that they have a right to be insulated from other “worldviews” (actually the reality which their worldview blocks out) and all they really have to do is declare “that’s your worldview” as their full response to whatever I say. To them, worldviews are a special problem for worldly people. You can tell because it has the word “world” in it.
It’s unreasonable to expect everyone to be an expert in everything such that we can pat each other on the back for having valid worldviews. Being able to metaphorically walk in others’ shoes can open up the worldview and suffering can artificially constrict the worldview, yet we don’t have direct control over either of those conditions. Suffering matters to us, but in the grand scheme of the world, suffering is only a tiny (and shrinking) aspect of reality. We all focus on it as an exceptional component of our worldviews and we use it as rationalization to block out a lot of the rest of reality or often to block out suffering itself. Anything we block out of our worldview is something we actually focus on, whether it be evolution or climate change, these are not things that are absent from Christian worldviews, they are intricate, ornate components of it. A lot of care goes into not knowing what you don’t want to know. The duty of the shepherd is not to prevent the sheep from knowing that there are wolves, but to make sure that the sheep focus more on wolves than on the endless pastures beyond the fence.
It was you who asserted that “No worldview is valid.”
Do you really not see that as criticism of everyone’s worldview?
If you don’t consider your own worldview as valid, whence your spruiking of it?
You wrote the equivalent of “everyone is wrong”, but you did it as if you imagined you were right about it.
Again: if you honestly find your own worldview invalid, why do you spruik it?
(Because if you don’t, you are contradicting yourself)
Your acumen is remarkable, but not in the way you imagine. 🙂
Heh. You might focus on suffering, but if you imagine that everyone else does, too, you are deluding yourself.
(I note that imagining that focusing on suffering is a way to block suffering seems rather perverse to me… but then, I’m not you)
This is incoherent; you can only take care not knowing what you don’t want to know if you know what you don’t want to know.
The actual duty of a shepherd is not to lose any more sheep than necessary.
(Sheep are rather stupid, as I know from first-hand experience)