It's pretty scary when people, who should know better, declare that Christian fundamentalism poses a greater threat than radical Islam. The level of ignorance -- or is it pure unmitigated bigotry? -- is quite breathtaking. As I said, this is truly scary. Click here to read Jonah Goldberg's response to a Bryan Burrough review of Andrew Sullivan's book, The Conservative Soul. Goldberg rightly refers to the Burrough review as "silly." I've reproduced Goldberg's response below. [See also my earlier post On the Subject of Theocons...]
Sunday, October 22, 2006
Silly Review [Jonah Goldberg]
The Washington Post Book World reviews Andrew Sullivan's new book today. I'm pretty much done with my review for next issue so I'm free to read everybody else's guilt-free. Some of the positive reviews I've seen are perfectly fine with me. But the Post's is really stupid. The author, Bryan Burrough, admits he knows next to nothing about Washington politics and seems to be signalling he doesn't much care about philosophical disagreements generally. And then he burns off his credibility with this statement:The pathogen he identifies is Christian fundamentalism. The Conservative Soul, in fact, is one of several similar books issued this fall that collectively serve as a call to arms to American elites to put down their New York Times crossword puzzles and their glasses of Fumé Blanc and wake up to the idea that the fundamentalists most dangerous to our future are not Islamic and foreign but Christian and homegrown. Sullivan's is at once an obvious yet much-needed siren; his text calls to mind the book Mary Lefkowitz wrote several years back, Not Out of Africa , to rebut charges that the foundations of ancient Greek culture were built by black Africans. Afrocentrism was so nutty that most intellectuals couldn't be bothered to answer it. The same, I fear, is true for Christian fundamentalism. Its political tenets are so addlebrained and its leaders so difficult to take seriously that it's only now — after the country has been run by a born-again Christian for six years — that thinkers like Sullivan realize that it's time for reasonable people to do something about it.
Me: Put aside the fact that Burrough sees Sullivan's work as of a piece with much of the leftwing scare-mongering drivel we've been subjected to in recent years (a not altogether unfair observation). Never mind the scandalous slander — made no less scandalous by its constant repetition — that American fundamentalist Christians are a greater threat to our nation than terrorists seeking to kill and/or convert us. Forget that he falls for Sullivan's two-dimensional portrayal of monolithic Christian fundamentalism in the United States (which David Brooks does not do in his NYT review). What is staggering here is that Burrough honestly thinks Christian conservatism or social conservatism actually represents something as goofy and intellectually illegitimate as Leonard Jeffries style Afrocentrism. That's self-discrediting.
To this Byron York weighs in saying,
One of the more amusing parts of Bryan Burrough's review of the Sullivan book is his line that the full extent of the danger posed to the United States by fundamentalist Christianity has only become obvious now, "after the country has been run by a born-again Christian for six years."
Where was Burroughs in the 1990s, when Bill Clinton called himself a…born-again Christian, and Al Gore called himself a…born-again Christian? And Burroughs might be astonished to learn that it didn't even start there, that born-again Christians — some of them Democrats — were running the country even earlier than that.