Asma Uddin has recently published a nice book entitled When Islam is Not a Religion (link here, nice podcast about it here), a book discussing the many attacks from the right on Islam as a religion in the US these days.

The author has just posted a series of letters in the pro-Trump theocon journal First Things from January.  They respond to a provocative piece that argues, in short, that 

"Muslims in America are in a precarious position—caught in a dilemma between a false friend and an open opponent. Islam, at heart, aligns with neither right nor left in an American political context. It is unique and comprehensive, based on a specific view of the human being, rights, and the purpose of life informed by God rather than men. Only the future will tell to what extent American Muslims define a place for themselves in American political culture."

In the letters, Sherman Jackson, a well-regarded scholar of Islam, has some interesting things to say, but then also argues the following:

"I agree…that many Muslim activists and organizations have thrown their lot in with liberal allies, presumably as quid pro quo for defending Muslims. Personally (and I claim no monopoly on truth here), I believe this is a mistake; I do not believe we can preserve Islam in America without preserving religion. And I see the left as supporting only domesticated forms of religion that applaud the state and the dominant culture while never seriously challenging either. Yet religious conservatives—not just Evangelicals—tend to look the elephant right in the face but only curse his shadow. They act as if they can protect Christianity and America by keeping Islam and other non-­Christian religions at bay, while liberalism, secularism, and scientism continue to degrade religion’s plausibility structure to the point of threatening Christianity’s health and viability. In this context, one must wonder what opportunities actually exist for Muslims to ally with Christian conservatives and what advantage Muslims might actually gain from such a relationship."

I see the left as supporting only domesticated forms of religion that applaud the state and the dominant culture while never seriously challenging either. Yet religious conservatives—not just Evangelicals—tend to look the elephant right in the face but only curse his shadow.

Hmm. Two things here--the critique of religious conservatives offered here is . . . well, weirdly metaphorical and secondary, isn't it?  What exactly is the "shadow" that they "curse"?  We can tell what Jackson thinks the "liberals" are doing, that's for damn sure.  But how someone who studies Islam can write a letter--in First Things of all places!--and not mention Trump and what he represents (and how First Things supports him) is not, in my humble opinion, rightly assessing threats. 

You hear formulations like the first a lot these days, from people who are not so much theo-cons as, well, to borrow from the Cold War, "anti-anti-theocons."  "Decent" evangelical Christians and conservative Jews, for the most part, who shake their heads and purse their lips but effectively are objectively pro-Trumpist in every way that matters (just because they have lost no friends with the volubility of their anti-Trump statements, as for instance their more politically respectable religious fellow-travelers Michael Gerson and Peter Wehner have).  But I think they're governed by a recoil from an imagined opponent--or an opponent whose scale they imagine to be much larger than it is.

First of all, as in any argument, assess the terms of the argument that you are being invited to accept.  Evaluate some of the assumptions that I think are baked into Jackson's statement.  If there is a "the left" these days, I don't think anyone could say it's not "seriously challenging" that political entity called "the state."  I don't know what kind of mental gymnastics one would have to perform to be able to say that "the left" is not "seriously challenging…the state".  But those mental gymnastics would be impressive to study.

Secondly, is "the left" challenging "the dominant culture"??  Well, I suppose that would depend on what you think "the dominant culture" is.  Is it a "culture of death" in the sense of abortions?  Is it some kind of "radical hedonism" of sexual libertinism?  Is it some kind of continued assault on  "traditional family structures"?  It's possible to imagine that that is what "the dominant culture" is; in this imagination, it seems framed as a matter of sexuality and unconstrained voluntarism.

But consider if "the dominant culture" is defined not by wanton individualist libido but by the capitalist market, the social media "attention economy," and--more perduringly still--structures of white supremacy, and racial and gender domination.  Then, maybe "the left" is indeed challenging "the dominant culture."  Consider "Occupy Wall Street," "Black Lives Matter," #metoo, the ongoing tumult about "cultural appropriation" and "callout culture" and the like.  Then it looks like "the left" is challenging the "dominant culture" and people like the staff of First Things are simply bemoaning the loss of their own uninterrogated privileges.  

I believe we need a way of talking that can encompass a range of concerns, and work together to figure out the order in which we should address them.  Some of them will be orthogonal to both of these politically polarized visions. Some will straddle the visions.  Some will be on one side or the other of the visions.  I don't think there's a large-scale culture of divorce, and I don't think there's a crisis of the family; I think that there are vast economic pressures on lower-income Americans, and these pressures have fractured their ability to sustain marriages.  I don't think that capitalism is demonic or evil, and I don't think that we're all in the thrall of something called "neoliberalism"; I do think that the market needs to be governed by the polity, and that insofar as the market has more power than the polity, that needs to be reined in.  I wish there were many fewer abortions, because I suspect that some of the abortions are not undergone because people feel indifferent to their babies but because they feel trapped and can see no future where they would be able to raise the baby in a safe, secure, and loving environment; so a more "pro-natalist" policy would help much more than punitive legislation would, and a pro-natalist policy would involve expanding health care.  I wish when politicians called themselves "pro-justice politicians" they meant they were for justice, in terms of each individual being honored and respected and enabled to become the glorious person they are called to be--instead of those politicians meaning by "justice" that they are eager to put people in under-funded prisons which are little more than factories of criminality, and to spend more time and energy killing convicts rather than attempting to rehabilitate them.  And, by the way, this is my (partial) Christmas list of political aims, but I know that no one else is likely to agree with me on all of them; so I would be willing to work with others to make what can happen, happen.

As someone trying to be faithful to my (Christian) understanding of God, but who is, if I must pick sides, more on the "liberal" side of this, I'm so tired of the echo-chamber of First Things and their persistent argument that "liberals" are dead-set on destroying "religion" and thus must be opposed by Any Means Necessary. I don't think the true believers at First Things are all cynics, but I do think they are dupes for the theo-conservative's right's cynical appeal to "religious freedom"; that is a terribly corrosive ploy based on a ginned-up fear and weaponized to warrant any number of things, including Trump.

There are those of us on the "liberal" side who are trying to (a) expand the imagination of "liberal" to both the small number of liberals who are militant secularists and the far larger number of liberals who are religious, in order to (b) return the idea of "liberalism" to being understood, as I think it should be understoos, as a provisional, contingent, and structurally under-determined hosting device for multiple modes of life, religious and non-. If you want thinkers doing this in a wide-ranging way, I'd recommend looking at Jeff Stout's Democracy and Tradition, Amanda Anderson's Bleak Liberalism (for the psychology of "liberal"), and Cecile Laborde's Liberalism's Religion for an excellent effort in political philosophy. To be honest, Reinhold Niebuhr's The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness would also be useful, as the distilled wisdom of a previous generation of liberal religious figures fighting against reactionary ethno-nationalists.

Also, another set of potential friends are often in law schools, like my UVA colleague and friend Micah Schwartzman, whose paper "Jews, not Pagans" is worth a read; I attach a link to it here.

To be continued.