Judeo-Christian or Abrahamic - media PC obscures reality. CAIR and similar groups have started a discourse challenging the ongoing use of Judeo-Christian to describe the US. Expect to hear more about it as part of our ongoing culture wars as time goes by. Also expect no one to discuss the real issues.
Adding the Judeo to Christian is the same sort of PC feel good that adding Islamic to make it a triad or calling it Abrahamic would be. There are two separate issues here and this mashes them together.
The first concerns the acceptance of Islam in the US polity and culture. There is resistance based on a mixture of nativisim and national security. We have a nativist streak. The original Anglo settlers resented the Scotch-Irish. The British Protestants resented the Catholics [mostly German and Irish]...this is an old story. What makes the Islamic issue different is the Saudi funded hate mosques, the Nation of Islam and Middle East politics / Al Qaeda / 911. How many Saudi funded mosques preach hate is not something I expect ever to be settled. We don't allow the sort of surveilence that would give a real answer [as a national security state fascist I would allow it but then I highly doubt many would find the US of my dreams pleasant - fortunately for one and all my last elective office was in HS student government so there is quite little danger of anyone taking my ideas seriously - at least not without two or three more WTC's and a few million dead - my stand on the order / security v liberties spectrum is a tad too cold blooded for 99.9% of the US]. The Nation is to Islam what the Aryan Nations are to christianity and objectively shouldn't count. That leaves Middle East policy...Here again the mainstream media completely misstake the situation. The jihadis and the secular Arab / Muslim nationalists do not hate us for our current and future policy decisions. They hate us for who we are and things that already happened. It doesn't matter how many Kosovos, Somalias and Bosnias there are or will be. See the reaction when Bush used the word Crusade to describe our war against Al Qaeda. Muslims can use the word jihad and we are supposed to understand their meaning not the dictionary one. We use the word Crusade and we are expected to censor it because of the historic meaning they gave it regardless of what our dictionary or common usage say it means. There is a message here folks. This is about their historic greviences. Their fall from grace from the Mongols onwards. The Arabs being replaced by and subjugated to the Turks. About Christianity daring to try and reconquer lands that Islam once held [and actually getting away with it in Iberia, Sicily and the Balkans]. It is about colonialism, imperialism, failed states, the seculars picking the losing side in the Cold War, the oil princes blowing the money instead of building a new Caliphate. Palestine is a symbol rather than an end in itself. If the USMC held down every Israeli in the world while Arafat disembowled them live on Al Jezera the sense of historic grevience would remain. There may have been other choices after World War Two. In 2003 the hatreds are too set. So some portion of the internal Islamic community will remain a security threat and many others will remain a permanent dissident force against our foreign policy irrespective of what we do abbout Israel, Palestine, using the word Abrahamic...Nature of the beast. History is not about rationality.
However the real context of the issue is not any of the above. It is about the real religious war in the US - believing Christians v secular humanists. This was originally a Christian European nation. It is still far more Christian in belief and action that the rest of the European settled world. The secular humanists are not merely not Christian. They are actively hostile to Christianity. They find its expression in pubblic space or by public officials profoundly distasteful. Their version of tolerance is that the believers must tolerate everyone else and the believers must also tolerate the seculars distaste for the believers. So the seculars will use converting the duo to a trio as a way to ban still further public Christianity. The believers will fight every concession given to the Muslims that is not given in equal or greater measure to them as a matter of right. Welcome to the real culture wars.
posted by scott 9:59 AM