"“Love” and “Punishment” for Muslim Others"

Here are some of my thoughts about vulgar and sophisticated Islamophobias and their liberal alternatives in Contending Modernities.

Thinking for the Future

In the media, the start of the school year often means more than pumpkin-spice recipes and recommendations. It often means it's time to repeat concerns that today's college students are either too soft or too confrontational, for tolerant, high-minded debate that is supposed to be the admission-right of higher education.

This week, I have a different perspective on two editorials promoting Columbus Day against the kind of empty "identity politics" purported to be the only thing the left on campus cares about.

One appeared in the Wall Street Journal, remolding Silicon Valley as a colonial venture and touting Columbus as a bold, curious disruptor who didn't succumb to the haters. While imagining the inventor of modern imperialism as a intellectual progenitor of neoliberal plunder is a plausible, if unintended, reading of this white backwash, it's just absurd to believe and its desperation for modern esteem and relevance is obvious.

The other is from the Times (of course), and it's only slightly more serious. It points out, correctly, that like Confederate monuments, venerating Columbus isn't something that dates from anywhere near his own time. It comes rather from the turn of the 20th century, when Italian Americans, and immigrants in general, were widely vilified as others in this country and sought a symbolic connection to the story of white settlement used to exclude them. That the xenophobia felt against Italian people is now felt about others speaks to the success of this strategy.

But neither speaks to any serious reason anyone has questioned the uncritical celebration of America as exploration. 

When my Introduction to Islam class talked about the complications of religious identity, and I brought up Columbus Day, nobody fell for an argument like any present in the Times or Journal. It was the shortest Socratic exercise we've had. I even threw in the claim you don't hear much of anymore that disrespect to the explorer is also disrespect to believing Christians in the Americas, who see Columbus as Columba, a bringer of the faith.

The problem with any of the apologetics, is none of them responds to a first-person account of what Columbus actually did. None of them seriously registers the plain historical fact that violence, slavery, and dispossession were the defining features of Columbus' exploratory mission as so many after. 

Justifications need to refer to representation or something even more abstract like intellectual adventurousness. That both of these are defining values invoked by modern universities is no accident. Many people, at least the people who write in centrist news media, learn to argue in college. They learn, or ought to learn, that an argument is only an argument when it proceeds from shared understandings, when both sides are arguing about something. When one side is only arguable ignoring the other's positions it can't refute, not much is going on intellectually.

I'm not claiming the students or scholars I work with completely comprehend indigenous perspectives or have come to terms with colonialism over the long term, far from it. But at least in this instance, the young people whose ability to stand up and confront ugly realities we worry so much over seems to be growing and thriving. 

Dealing with Whose Devil

If you've ever been to a wedding and not cared much for either of the people getting married you have two choices, depending on the bar situation. You can either roil in resentment and wonder who is worse, or you can raise a glass and say that they deserve each other.

From the frequently-repeating thinkpieces in distressed confusion over the Christian right's support of Donald Trump, it's clear that liberals have made the latter choice for entertaining themselves.

Sometimes the article takes the form of denouncing the right's hypocrisy for embracing the pharaoh and his cheap pyramids- and the outrage couldn't be phonier. There's not much point in that kind of consternation because they only people who read it already agree. 

Other times the article is more analytical and ponders over what this means about the right's religion or religion in general. Addressing this, as much as Frances FitzGerald or Robert Jones could elaborate what Trump means within the context of American religious traditions and their future, I doubt there is that much to say about why some people choose to be partisan actors and what they do when they're not acting in that capacity.

Is there any more concise summary than the one provided by James Dobson, that the religious right keeps its moral judgments to one side of its calculations of what leader can achieve its ends? They sound different when they're in the their witch-burning moods is undeniable, and it's possible those alternatives will flip with the predictability of senators changing their minds about protocols of confirming judges.

In other words, they have set the terms of their cooperation. They've made a Faustian pact, and while it must irritate progressives that so many on the left can't or won't do this with the Democrats, that is not enough to give this particular political collaboration the sinister status it's often attributed.

This is only particular cause for alarm if you hold to a "civil religion" model in which the (white, mainline Protestant) church is the common ground of social politics. Now that common ground has become party territory.

This is a complicated theoretical debate, but to summarize what I think, religion in the US has never steadily guided consensus, not over the slavery, not over civil rights. Religion has been more plural and disjoint. It has been patterned into the tensions and fissures of American history, which have never been determined along religious lines alone.

So does the alignment of so many white people in the US who identify as Christian with Trump mean anything significantly sinister for them, or the rest of us?

To a certain extent, the religious right imagines us going back to some Julian Fellowes kind of society where you could wipe your feet on women and the poor. They romanticize this way of life by invoking dowdy values like forbearance and deference, thinking the patriarchs on top of it all were incorruptible caretakers carrying the greater good with pious concern.

The more their romance fixes on a person like Trump, our actual good ol' boy, they more the fantasy will be discredited, like propaganda outside its own country. 

If we are worried about the punitive ideology the Christian right represents finding a powerful ally in Trump, there are real reasons. However, there is little novelty or characteristic insight in this rendition of Faust's bargain.