Category Archives: Religious Liberty

A Lesson from the Chanukah Story

Chanukah has just ended. In honor of the holiday, a Buddhist cousin sent me a story from the Huffington Post titled “The Real History of Chanukah is More Complicated than you Probably Thought.”

It actually was.

In Sunday School, we were basically taught that Judah Maccabee led a successful revolt against Antiochus, whose Seleucid empire had taken over Judea and was forcing the Hellenization of the Jewish people. (I dimly remember something about pigs in the Temple…). The Maccabees won, and when they commenced clean-up of the Temple, discovered that there was only  enough oil to light the holy menorahs for a day—but a miracle happened, and the oil lasted for eight days, just long enough to allow a runner to obtain more.

If my recollection is hazy (it is), my defense is that Chanukah (spelled however you like) was a very minor holiday until Christmas, celebrated around the same time of year, became so commercialized, and we Jews didn’t want our children to feel left out. The lesson of Chanukah was the importance of religious liberty, which was duly noted, and then we moved on….

According to the Huffington Post, real history was a bit more complicated. Initially, a number of the Jews embraced aspects of the Seleucids’ Hellenic culture.

“The initiative and impetus for this often came from the locals themselves,” said Shaye J.D. Cohen, professor of Hebrew literature and philosophy at Harvard and author of From the Maccabees to the Mishnah. “They were eager to join the general, global community.”…

The rising influence of hellenism was not immediately a source of open conflict within the Jewish community. In fact, hellenism permeated even the most traditional circles of Jewish society to one degree or another. A typical Judean would have worn Greek robes and been proficient in the Greek language whether he was urban or rural, rich or poor, a pious practitioner of the Mosaic faith or a dabbler in polytheism.

“Becoming more hellenized didn’t mean they were less Jewish as a result,” said Erich Gruen, an emeritus history professor at Berkeley and author of Diaspora: Jews Amidst Greeks and Romans. “Most Jews didn’t see hellenism as the enemy or any way compromising their sense of themselves as Jews.”

The rebellion came only when Antiochus pushed the more pious Jews too far, engaging in a campaign of radical hellenization–prohibiting fundamental Jewish practices, and introducing foreign rites and practices in the Temple.

“They actually rebel only when the religious persecution reached a level they could no longer tolerate,” said Cohen, who also chairs Harvard’s department of Near Eastern languages and civilizations. “The line in the sand seems to have been the Torah and the [commandments], and the profaning of the ritual of the Temple.”

Cohen characterizes these Jews not as zealots, but as “realists.” Until then, they had embraced many hellenistic norms in their own lives and accommodated the spread of practices to which they objected — such as foreign worship — among their co-religionists.

There certainly is a lesson here, and it actually goes well beyond the importance of respecting religious differences/liberties in a diverse society. Ironically, it is a lesson taught by the early Greeks—the importance of moderation, of aiming for the “mean between extremes.”

These days, we might say “Don’t push your luck,” or “Pigs get fed; hogs get slaughtered.”

When will working Americans decide that they are being pushed too far? When the Walmarts and their ilk continue to resist paying a fair wage? When their wholly-owned politicians work tirelessly to deny medical care to those who are struggling financially? When their lobbyists argue for cutting social programs in order to give the rich greater tax breaks? When the bankers who precipitated the Great Recession continue awarding each other obscene bonuses…???

How far is too far?

Happy Chanukah…..

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This Is a Test

History doesn’t exactly repeat itself, but close enough.

Yesterday, a friend sent me a link to an article from the LA Times that began

The year was 1915, and the strange new newspaper in Aurora, Mo., had grown so quickly in its first four years that rail officials had to build extra tracks for all the paper and printing materials suddenly rolling into town.

The Aurora post office, according to one account, more than tripled its staff to handle mail to and from the publication’s astonishing 1.5 million weekly subscribers — a circulation that dwarfed the largest daily newspapers in New York and Chicago.

Hatred had become big business in southwestern Missouri, and its name was the Menace, a weekly anti-Catholic newspaper whose headlines screamed to readers around the nation about predatory priests, women enslaved in convents and a dangerous Roman Catholic plot to take over America.

Eventually, that virulent anti-Catholicism (and the anti-Semitism that usually accompanied it) subsided.

Racism–America’s “original sin”–has proved harder to eradicate. When President Obama took office, racist sentiments that had largely been confined to family dinners, “humorous” emails and small town bars once again erupted into so-called “polite society.”

And that racism has now joined with seething anti-immigrant, and especially anti-Muslim, xenophobia.

Yesterday, at Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall posted a thoughtful–and frightening–piece about Donald Trump and the pernicious influence of the Fox News “worldview.”

I know I’m preaching to the choir when it comes to noting the factual shortcomings of Fox News. But this is why this isn’t really about Trump. Trump’s genius — and I don’t use that word loosely — is that he is an intuitive. He can feel the public mood in ways that none of these others can. I don’t think Trump began his campaign with really any of this. “Mexicans” were his thing. But even that was I think largely shtick. Terrorism and Muslim-hating wasn’t his thing. But like a gifted jazz musician, he can pick up the rhythms of whatever group he’s sitting in with, adapt, improvise and take them further. Yes, he’s almost a Coltrane of hate and incitement. But it’s not about Trump. It’s about his supporters. A big chunk of the Republican base is awash in racism and xenophobic hysteria. And this is the food that they feed on every day. It’s a societal sickness and we can’t ignore it.

It’s one thing to discuss this emerging fascism in the abstract; it’s heartbreaking to confront it personally.

I have a young colleague who joined our faculty right after earning her doctorate about five years ago. She’s a sweet, delightful person–not only a good teacher and researcher, but an unfailingly collaborative and helpful co-worker. Since moving to Indiana, she and her husband have had two little girls.

She’s Muslim. And she’s terrified.

She’s gotten hate mail. In a masterpiece of understatement, she says she’s found the rhetoric “very hurtful.” She and her husband are increasingly afraid to go out. As she told me yesterday, people in her suburban neighborhood and at the University have been supportive and welcoming, but it only takes one –one (armed) unbalanced person to respond to the rhetoric and do the unthinkable.

She may stop wearing her headscarf. “I have small children.”

I came home and cried.

We are about to see whether Americans have learned anything from history–ours or others’. We are about to see whether we can isolate and contain this virus. We are about to see whether America is truly better than this.

Edmund Burke said it best: The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

This is a test.

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If Evidence Mattered…

Despite the fact that he has no legal authority to do so, Governor Pence has doubled down on his rejection of Syrian refugees. He continues to insist that he is just concerned for the safety of Indiana residents.

Indiana’s Governor lives in a wholly fact-free zone, of course. Refugees are highly unlikely to pose a threat to Hoosiers. (Unrestricted access to guns, however, which he enthusiastically supports, represents a huge and demonstrable threat…).

Not only have refugees proven to be virtually all law-abiding, but the danger posed even by genuine, avowed jihadists is actually quite low. Per The New York Times:

Despite public anxiety about extremists inspired by Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, the number of violent plots by such individuals has remained very low. Since 9/11, an average of nine American Muslims per year have been involved in an average of six terrorism-related plots against targets in the United States. Most were disrupted, but the 20 plots that were carried out accounted for 50 fatalities over the past 13 and a half years.

In contrast, right-wing extremists averaged 337 attacks per year in the decade after 9/11, causing a total of 254 fatalities, according to a study by Arie Perliger, a professor at the United States Military Academy’s Combating Terrorism Center. The toll has increased since the study was released in 2012.

Other data sets, using different definitions of political violence, tell comparable stories….

Meanwhile, terrorism of all forms has accounted for a tiny proportion of violence in America. There have been more than 215,000 murders in the United States since 9/11. For every person killed by Muslim extremists, there have been 4,300 homicides from other threats.

A colleague with whom I was discussing this data shared an interesting article from Slate about the venues supplying our home-grown terrorists. The article’s sub-head advised “Forget Syria. The most dangerous religious extremists are migrants from North and South Carolina.”

Today, Republican presidential candidates are climbing over one another in a race to block the entry of Syrian refugees. They’re doing this even though, among the nearly 800,000 refugees we’ve accepted since 9/11, not one has been convicted of—or has even been arrested for—plotting a terror attack in this country. (A few have been arrested for links to terrorism elsewhere.) Why do refugees have such a clean record? Because they have to go through an elaborate process: screening by U.N. evaluators, “biometric and biographic checks,” consultations with U.S. counterterrorism agencies, and an in-person interview with the Department of Homeland Security. On average, the process takes about a year and a half—or, in the case of Syrian refugees, about two years.

Terrorists from North Carolina encounter no such scrutiny. They just climb into their cars, cross the border, and proceed to Georgia, Kansas, or Colorado. They’re protected by Article IV of the Constitution, which, as interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court, guarantees citizens “the right of free ingress into other States.” That’s why, among the 27 fatal terror attacks inflicted in this country since 9/11, 20 were committed by domestic right-wing extremists. (The other seven attacks were committed by domestic jihadists, not by foreign terrorist organizations.) Of the 77 people killed in these 27 incidents, two-thirds died at the hands of anti-abortion fanatics, “Christian Identity” zealots, white anti-Semites, or other right-wing militants.

The writer concluded by wondering “why, as we close our doors to refugees who have done us no harm, we pay so little attention to our enemies within.”

Let’s be candid, even if the Governor isn’t: it’s because we fear those who don’t look like “us.”

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Your Religion, My Body….

There has been another attack on a Planned Parenthood clinic–this time, in Colorado. I’ve never quite understood how ostensibly “pro life” men (and they are almost always white Christian men) justify killing for life, but however they understand their Deities to compel these acts of domestic terrorism, their incidence has been growing since the release of the doctored Planned Parenthood tapes.

Ironically, these murderous attacks are far less effective at limiting abortions than the considerably more mundane and seemingly inexorable consolidation of hospitals around the country.

For example, the experience of women needing medical care in Michigan is increasingly being replicated throughout the U.S.

In October, the ACLU and the ACLU of Michigan filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of their members against Trinity Health Corporation, one of the largest Catholic health systems in the country, for its repeated and systematic failure to provide women experiencing pregnancy complications with appropriate emergency abortions as required by federal law.

In response to the lawsuit, the hospital submitted a brief arguing that state and federal law allow Trinity to “refuse to allow abortions to be performed on hospital premises,” in the context of emergency miscarriage treatment when the woman’s life or health is at risk.

Trinity is legally exempt from having to perform elective abortions. But emergency situations such as those that triggered the ACLU’s lawsuit are another matter; indeed,  refusing to provide emergency care in these situations is medical malpractice. (I couldn’t find any information in a cursory search, but I would be surprised if doctors refusing to adhere to a medical standard of care in such situations aren’t being sued.)

The policy question is simple, although the appropriate resolution is anything but.

Virtually all hospitals depend for their existence upon federal dollars. Those dollars come from taxpayers of all religions and none. Are such institutions entitled to deny people medically appropriate care on the basis of their own religious doctrine? The question is gaining urgency as more and more of the nation’s hospitals have become part of Catholic health-care systems–currently, 10 of the 25 largest hospital systems in the U.S. are Catholic. As the ACLU’s Reproductive Rights project newsletter noted

We know, for example, that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which sets the rules for all Catholic hospitals, has said that its hospitals should let a woman die rather provide an emergency abortion. The bishops made their policy crystal-clear when a Catholic hospital in Phoenix defied the bishops’ rules and saved a woman’s life by providing an abortion. The bishops excommunicated a nun who was on the committee that approved the abortion, and the hospital was stripped of its Catholic status.

There are plenty of doctrinal questions raised by such examples, but those are matters for internal Catholic debate. The question for the rest of us is the same question that is raised in other conflicts pitting civic equality and access to public services against the religious beliefs of people claiming their faith exempts them from treating others as they would wish to be treated–as autonomous persons entitled to make their own moral decisions.

That question is: at what point do the obligations of citizenship in a diverse nation that celebrates civic equality override the “sincerely held religious beliefs”of those who believe they are entitled to be more equal than others?

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First World Problems

I know I’m going to get a load of blowback for this, but I’m posting it anyway.

In Bangladesh right now, religious extremists are murdering advocates of secular democracy. Recent religious conflicts in East Timor, the Ivory Coast, Bosnia, Ireland, India and many other countries have been persistent, vicious and bloody.

Meanwhile, here in the good old U.S. of A., college students are irate over insensitive Halloween costumes and fundamentalists are whining about Starbucks unadorned coffee cups.

I have to agree with Asher Miller, who wrote in a recent Resilience column

If offensive Halloween costumes and throwaway holiday coffee cups can generate this much discord and animosity, what happens when Americans are faced with far more complex and challenging situations? I’m afraid that in the coming months and decades there will be no shortage of these …

In this our mainstream media and politicians are doing us no favors, as they feed on anger, resentment, and an “us vs. them” mentality to capture eyeballs, votes, and dollars. Nor is modern communication technology, which fosters an expectation of immediate gratification and instant answers, while allowing us to filter information and interactions to those that reinforce our cognitive biases.

What is really worrisome about our homegrown conflicts is not that they exist, nor that they reflect different perspectives on our common culture. We live in a diverse society, and we should expect–and to the extent possible, accommodate–such differences. What is troubling is the lack of proportion.

So many of these “culture war” conflicts–some manufactured out of whole cloth, some vastly overblown–are what my youngest son calls “First World Problems.”

Let me stipulate that people have every right to criticize clueless folks who appropriate others’ identities or insult minorities by their choice of Halloween costumes. It’s insensitive and tasteless behavior. In the scheme of things, however, it ranks considerably behind machete-wielding in Bangladesh (or for that matter, racist bullying and gay-bashing in the United States).

Coffee cup hysteria is harder to justify. When people’s real lives and liberties are so secure that they have to go looking for offense at Starbucks, we can only assume that they have a very tenuous relation with reality and a deep-seated psychological need to see themselves as victims.

Americans can and should discuss differences in our perceptions and approaches. We should try to understand each other, and appreciate where other folks are coming from.

But we also need to recognize the difference between actual threats to personal safety and/or liberty, and First World Problems.

Americans need to get a grip.

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