Proposed Mosque Near Ground Zero

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by AtLastHome

Oh, I see what your saying. I just feel that the US has always been so Christian focused, it has influenced how we treat, interact and make policy about non-Christian nations which has caused so much alienation. The only country I can think of in which this different is Israel.

I also feel that the US lacks the capcity to understand governments in which religion is central to policy and their societal structures and values. I may not agree with them, either, especially in terms of the role and treatment of women in particular, but, I think our Christian focus (blindness?) keeps us from contributing to the kinds of things that can bring glocal piece. Although, this just isn't a simple situation. Looking at oil for example, certainly brings up a lot of things and most certainly was in play during Dub'ya's terms! Cheny as VP made that very clear.

I don't know that we've always had this Christian focus. If you read the Treaty of Tripoli, the US government under Jefferson bent over backward to show that the United States wasn't a Christian nation (it actually says that in the treaty) and has no quarrel with the "Musselmen" (the 19th century term for Muslims). It's only been since the Cold War that the US got so obsessed that we started moving in directions that can only be described as theocratic.

For very good reasons--and reasons I am actually enthusiastically in support of--Westerners (this isn't an American problem) have a bit of trouble understanding states run by religions because Western Christendom made a pretty clear break between church and state after the European Enlightenment. That simply has not happened in the Middle East and in parts of Southeast Asia so we're certainly going to have problems understanding why, for instance, Iran works the way it does. In fact, of the Western nations America is probably *best* positioned to understand it because we are currently actively flirting with the idea of religious-rule or at least sectarian rule with a veneer of secularism just to keep up appearances for the neighbors. It is only in the United States that, for instance, a candidate who--as far as we can tell from her public pronouncements--really believes that there are demons and that prayer can combat them and have that person be viable as a political figure. Sarah Palin wouldn't last and certainly wouldn't be a power-broker in, say, Sweden but she is viable in the 2012 GOP primary. It seems to me that France, England, Germany *all* would have a much more difficult time understanding the role that the belief "God says our nation should do X" or "God says our society should be ordered thusly" has in public policy than the United States. Those nations are pretty thoroughly secular while the United States has a non-trivial population that *genuinely* believe that Jesus is returning soon, that people will be raptured up when he does show up, and that the state of Israel must exist so that the Jews therein can be 'perfected' or, failing that, wiped out to hasten the battle of Armageddon. We have people in the last administration who believe that so fervently, in fact, that they designed foreign policy around that belief!

The American problem with understanding, for instance, Iran has much more to do with religious differences than in not understanding how the nominally secular government of Iran could be beholden to the religious authorities. We're most of the way there already and there are any number of public policies whose proponents can *only* justify them in terms of religion (prayer in schools, anti-Darwinism in schools, anti-gay, anti-abortion, anti-birth control and non-fact-based sex education being the main examples).

I'm curious, what do you think a less Christian focused view would do for the cause of world peace?

Cheers
Aj