The New York Times' Thomas Friedman is an accomplished reporter, having picked up a couple of Pulitzers for his work from Lebanon in 1983 and from Israel in 1988. He became the foreign affairs columnist for the paper in 1995, and when he writes on the Middle East, he is well worth reading as an accurate reflection of the thinking among this country's left-of-center foreign policy elites.
Friedman gets into trouble when he strays too far from the territory he knows so well. He did so last week in a column entitled "The Real War." It would be an extremely offensive column if Friedman had intended the insult he delivered to hundreds of millions if not billions of sincere believers around the world. I suspect, however, that he has no idea of how this column reads in the hands of a person of confirmed religious ideas.
I skip a lot of Friedman columns, but the title of this one may have lured me in, as it is the title of the book I worked on with Richard Nixon in 1979 and 1980. That "Real War" concerned the strategic competition between the West and Soviet totalitarianism. Friedman's real war, however, is between deists and everyone else – at least that's what it says when you cut to the chase.
I have spent a decade covering religion and writing about it. In a 1996 series for PBS, "Searching for God in America," I traveled across the country interviewing a very diverse group of believers about the nature of their faith and why they held it. I have done dozens of similar interviews for the Los Angeles PBS affiliate KCET and on my radio program. Over and over again I have posed the hardest questions, including the one that troubles Friedman: the question of "exclusivity."
"Exclusivists" of all faiths believe that there are indeed a God and a heaven, and that gaining heaven and thus eternal life with God depends upon believing very particular things. For exclusivists, there is only "one way up the mountain," and you had better pick the correct path because eternal separation from God is the cost of choosing the wrong "path." To be blunt: Worship the wrong god or not at all, and you go to Hell.
Until fairly recently, this was the orthodox Christian view, and it remains the theologically orthodox view in most Christian denominations. It is certainly not the view of Buddhists, (or so the Dalai Lama told me, so I have to go with that). Some Islamic authorities and some Jewish authorities are exclusivist, others are not. In short, this is an area riddled with controversy and overlaid with history and theology.
This hard truth is willed away by Tom Friedman. He asserts that the U.S. is not fighting terrorism, but rather religious totalitarianism, "a view of the world that my faith must reign supreme and can be affirmed and held passionately only if all others are negated." What does Friedman mean by this? Evidently that exclusivists who cling to their beliefs are religious totalitarians: "Can Islam, Christianity and Judaism know that God speaks Arabic on Fridays, Hebrew on Saturdays and Latin on Sundays, and that he welcomes different human beings approaching him through their own history, out of their language and cultural heritage?" Thus the New York Times meets the Celestine Prophecy. And a sillier line Friedman has never penned.
For surely Friedman means that any claim to be "the Way, the Truth, and the Life," is a claim by a totalitarian. Thus, the claim that "I am the Lord your God, and thou shalt not have strange gods before me," is the claim of a totalitarian god. And the idea that "there is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his Prophet" must be in the same, very big category established by the columnist.
Friedman wants nothing less than the repeal of belief – sincere belief at least. He has found a rabbi who agrees with him, and there are surely thousands of others who do as well. But there really is no debate here. Friedman's Pax Deism is not here and it isn't coming. Indeed, to wish for its arrival is to wish for the sort of iron totalitarianism that could enforce such a pipe dream, because without a police state there can be no ending of religious diversity, much of it exclusivist.
It is too bad that Friedman failed to consult his own backyard for the answer to sectarian dispute. It is called the First Amendment and that amendment's religion clauses: the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause. These twin prohibitions on erecting a state church or interfering with anyone's beliefs have allowed a vigorous and honest religious pluralism to develop. That pluralism is not premised on all religions, like aspirins, being alike. Instead it is premised on the bedrock assurance that that state will protect every sort of belief against suppression by majorities arrayed against it. No American is obliged to worship in secret or to abandon belief. We instead revel in our contentions but do so within a civic commitment to persuasion and not power. Thus we can all evangelize each other, but none may use a gun to do so.
This is the solution the West has developed, and Friedman's abandonment of genuine religious pluralism is nothing less than shocking. Does the New York Times' star columnist really mean to label John Paul II a "totalitarian"? That is the label he must wear in Friedman's world for if we believe his writings, then the Pope believes his Church to be the one, true church. And what of Solzhenitsyn? Under Friedman's analysis, the author of "The Gulag Archipelago" is also a religious totalitarian. So, too, were Washington and Adams, and so too is the current president.
Friedman may earnestly wish for "weakening religious passion," and for a universal agreement that "God speaks multiple languages and is not exhausted by one faith," but it is a lot like rooting for Ptolemy's comeback. It is worse than fruitless, though, because it is dangerous. And there is the great fault in the column.
There is no greater intolerance than the dismissal of sincere belief. To insist that I abandon my faith is to insist that I become a slave to your world view. That is the sort of demand that begins wars, not ends them.
Towards the end of his piece, Friedman mutes his hot talk. He holds up "equal recognition of alternative faith communities" as a goal for Islam. That is a phrase that can be parsed a couple of ways. The First Amendment not only allows for, it protects such "equal recognition." But it does not insist that these faiths abandon their claims to absolute truth. Perhaps in a future column, Tom Friedman can explain how his attack on exclusivists as religious totalitarians squares with his advice to Islam.
Or perhaps he'd be well advised to stick to his reporting on war and diplomacy. Those are less complicated subjects, and ones for which his experience has prepared him.
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