A few disjointed points from some media things I've been gathering:
First, Brookings is studying Muslims as the "other" throughout the West. This seems a good idea, as it is obvious that so much of the present fraughtness of politics in Europe and the United States has attached itself to Muslims. In this way Islamophobia really is becoming a kind of fresh parallel to antisemitism, and the question of Islam's presence in these societies is posing fundamental challenges about racism, identity, religious toleration, and the nature of what these countries aim to be. And the story of Muslims coming to live in these countries--a story as rich and as complicated as any other immigrant community--is important for the future of Islam as well.
Our current condition is sad, and astonishingly different than what it might have been, at least in the United States. Once upon a time, American Muslims were among the most pro-GOP demographics in the United States. Over 70 percent of Muslims voted for George W. Bush in 2000. But we know what happened. It is an astonishing thing today, to imagine that Bush could have--some signs suggest he intended to--created a big tent GOP, open to traditional immigrants (esp Latinos but also Muslims), whose crucial feature for the GOP would have been their tradition-mindedness, not their immigrant status, or their skin color or religious "otherness." A GOP that could have executed that move would have opted for "traditional values" over traditional melanin levels. I sincerely believe the Bush-wing of the party (Jeb included) represented that future. But I suppose by 2003 it was pretty much impossible. Maybe it was always impossible. It would always have been pretty unlikely.
Second big point: are Democrats really "godless"? By no metric is this true. Indeed, a poll in September posts some amazing numbers. 76% of Democratics say they are absolutely or fairly certain of God's existence; 70% say religion is a significant part of their lives.
But there is a reason why an aroma of "godlessness" hangs about them. Or actually, two reasons. First, Democrats offer an ideology of religious inclusiveness, including of non-believers. (Their ideological exclusiveness is not about religion or "family values," but about other issues, like race and economics and sex and gender.) This religious inclusiveness is in itself not bad for American religious believers; but the extension of that inclusiveness to non-believers is problematic, especially when most religious Americans are older than the average American, and thus are more vigorously inhabiting a post-Eisenhower era where godlessness is immorality. (In America, the most politically suspicious class, particularly for people over 40, is atheists. My friend Penny Edgell has a great piece on this, entitled "Atheists as 'other'"; I urge you to check it out.) Of course, American anxieties about godlessness has a long and distinguished pedigree. And Republican elites have played upon these long-term anxieties, and the way they were weaponized in the Cold War, to convince their voters that the Democrats are more likely to engage in a Black Mass, or just collectively go smoke clove cigarettes and wear turtlenecks and berets, than attend a church; as the piece above says, "according to the YouGov data featured in the study, Republicans estimate 36 percent of Democrats are atheist or agnostic. The actual amount is 9 percent."
The second reason that Democrats have this atheistic reputation is more contestable, but I do believe it has some truth to it. I think they have it because they have still not fully articulated a value-laden narrative of their agenda. This is not a matter of them not having value-anchored reasons for the positions they profess. It is, I suspect, that they do not know how to negotiate the tensions between professing convictions which will be inevitably particular (which in this sense means, however you articulate them, not shared by everyone) within an ideological framework where one of the central virtues is inclusiveness.
Can Democrats do better? Indeed they can. Sometimes they do. I need to be a bit telegraphic about this (but anyone who wants to know more can find my views in very many places): it is possible, not only to work together when everyone doesn't have the same views, it may actually be useful, illuminating, educative, even for our understanding of our own views themselves, to have to work out how they are distinctively ours, what they enable and what is harder for us to affirm because of them; and everyone in a coalition, whatever their views, will face a similar, useful, challenge. (All this will be the topic of many more posts by me, I suspect, in the coming election year.)
Third, what is the Trump presidency, or this larger era of White conservative Christianity--White Evangelicalism and the Whiter components of Roman Catholicism--doing to the public impression of religion? It is not good. Tim Egan, a commentator for the New York Times, makes the case that it is making people hate religion. That is disturbing to me. But it is not actually wrong, I fear; the kind of religion that is most voluble and most publicly visible in our world is a religion that is easy to hate. It worships power, and it seeks a kind of dominion that we ought not to give it. I agree with those who think it's actually unholy. It's also civically (and in terms of sheer numbers, evangelically) counter-productive; no wonder that Millennials seem to be attending churches at much lower rates than previous generations. (This is what's called a "cohort effect," and it is not good, for the Millennials or for society as a whole.)
Fourth and finally, a bit of hope. American White Evangelicalism is not actually the future of Protestant Evangelicalism at all; in fact it is rather unusual compared to other kinds of Protestant evangelicalism around the world, even though those other kinds were often "seeded" where they grew by earlier generations of American evangelicals. Of course, this will mean that the GOP's booty-call relationship to older whites who are suspicious of brown-skinned people will eventually put an unbearable tension on the very ideology of the GOP's base. But "eventually" does not mean today, and as Bob Dylan sings, tomorrow is a long time.
Happy Friday! Sort of.