I thought for sure Hugh Hewitt, among others, would be up in arms over Nicholas Kristof's latest venture in Christian eschatology. Here's a bit from Saturday's NYT:
If the latest in the "Left Behind" series of evangelical thrillers is to be believed, Jesus will return to Earth, gather non-Christians to his left and toss them into everlasting fire:
"Jesus merely raised one hand a few inches and a yawning chasm opened in the earth, stretching far and wide enough to swallow all of them. They tumbled in, howling and screeching, but their wailing was soon quashed and all was silent when the earth closed itself again."
These are the best-selling novels for adults in the United States, and they have sold more than 60 million copies worldwide. The latest is "Glorious Appearing," which has Jesus returning to Earth to wipe all non-Christians from the planet. It's disconcerting to find ethnic cleansing celebrated as the height of piety.
If a Muslim were to write an Islamic version of "Glorious Appearing" and publish it in Saudi Arabia, jubilantly describing a massacre of millions of non-Muslims by God, we would have a fit. We have quite properly linked the fundamentalist religious tracts of Islam with the intolerance they nurture, and it's time to remove the motes from our own eyes.
In "Glorious Appearing," Jesus merely speaks and the bodies of the enemy are ripped open. Christians have to drive carefully to avoid "hitting splayed and filleted bodies of men and women and horses."...
This matters in the real world, in the same way that fundamentalist Islamic tracts in Saudi Arabia do. Each form of fundamentalism creates a stark moral division between decent, pious types like oneself--and infidels headed for hell.
No, I don't think the readers of "Glorious Appearing" will ram planes into buildings. But we did imprison thousands of Muslims here and abroad after 9/11, and ordinary Americans joined in the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in part because of a lack of empathy for the prisoners. It's harder to feel empathy for such people if we regard them as infidels and expect Jesus to dissolve their tongues and eyes any day now.
Evangelicals, many of whom do not subscribe to Tim LaHaye's particular eschatology even if they read his books, will no doubt respond that Kristof's rhetoric is unfair. Evangelical Christianity does not encourage terrorism or ethnic cleansing. To the contrary, evangelism is persuasion, not coercion; conversion must be sincere and voluntary; the only evangelical crusades involve not blood but Billy Graham's preaching; there's no history of evangelical pograms. For all its militant visions of Christ, which did not start with 9/11, evangelical Christianity is a peaceful (though not pacifist) religion.
In all these ways, Kristof is indeed unfair. But his outsider's eye does raise a serious question that evangelicals seem never to ask themselves: Why would you worship such a God? What makes you think a deity who would consign righteous unbelievers (or even bad guys) to never-ending torture--a bully who makes the most vicious dictator look like a nice guy--deserves adoration and praise? Do you really believe this stuff? Would you believe it if you hadn't heard it all your life?
The Christianity preached in the Left Behind books may make for rolicking, high-stakes fiction, but it's morally repulsive. And I suspect few American evangelicals truly believe it. The "salvation inflation" noted by Alan Wolfe isn't a soft-headed play for popularity. It's a deeply moral response to living among good people who don't share one's theology.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on July 19, 2004 • Comments
Reader Seth Chasin writes, "I just saw a commercial for this, and thought of you right away. York air conditioners are now available in a variety of colors. Is there anything less sexy than an air conditioner? And yet...check out their web site, the intro ad says it all..."
Posted by Virginia Postrel on July 16, 2004 • Comments
The Texas Republican Party platform (download here, see p. 8) "affirms that the United States of America is a Christian nation." (You can imagine how welcome non-churchgoers feel in Texas.) In her column, Cathy Young skewers this formulation and the defense that the party is merely saying Christians are a majority. She notes, for instance, that it would be equally accurate to declare that "America is a white nation."
Inspired by Cathy, Electric Commentary suggests some other, equally data-based descriptions, starting with "America is a fat nation." Contribute your own in the comments section. I'm still looking for the stats, but I'm sure America is a brunette nation (though L.A. is a lot more brunette than Dallas).
Posted by Virginia Postrel on July 16, 2004 • Comments
Historic preservationists often appeal to aesthetics: We should save this old house, or old neighborhood, because it's beautiful. (I discuss aesthetic land-use conflicts in chapter five of The Substance of Style, excerpted here.) But what if the old house is not so attractive, even ugly, or at least in bad taste? That's the question raised by this NYT article on the latest land use conflict in Woodside, California:
HAVE you ever yearned to live in Spanish Colonial Revival splendor, rattling around a 17,000-square-foot, 14-bedroom, 13 1/2-bath baronial mansion with deliciously thick stucco walls and an impeccable provenance?
If so, Steve Jobs may have a deal for you.
In what could become America's highest-profile tear-down, Mr. Jobs, the Apple and Pixar chief executive, is seeking this town's permission to hit the delete button on the 1926 Daniel C. Jackling estate, a moldering manse designed by George Washington Smith, the architect who created the look of Montecito and Santa Barbara in the 1920's.
The house, built for Mr. Jackling, a copper magnate who died in 1956, sits on six wooded acres that Mr. Jobs, then 29, purchased in 1983. Preservationists have deemed the house historic, an important example of Spanish Colonial Revival architecture, one that currently stands empty and derelict at the end of a stone-lined cul-de-sac. Mr. Jobs, however, can't abide the place. He recently described it publicly as "one of the biggest abominations of a house I've ever seen."
Posted by Virginia Postrel on July 16, 2004 • Comments
As I mentioned below, I'll be on Tucker Carlson: Unfiltered this evening, Saturday, or Sunday, depending on your local schedule. I've just heard from Jonathan Rauch that he's the other featured guest, talking about gay marriage. Sounds like a fun show. You can get your local schedule here.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on July 16, 2004 • Comments
A while back, I blogged about a bill that would require California banks to cash paychecks for free. I later posted a representative reader note arguing that the bill was only fair, a guarantee that paychecks are negotiable. Well, according to SFChron columnist David Lazarus, a bill booster, the measure has been amended to death.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on July 16, 2004 • Comments
I never realized they came in so many varieties until I saw the Traffic Cone Preservation Society's site. According to Liquid Treat, the site was created by UCLA film and animation students.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on July 16, 2004 • Comments
Red state or blue state? Take Slate's quiz and find out where you belong. In my case, nowhere--or everywhere.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on July 14, 2004 • Comments
My new NYT column examines some of the many fascinating insights and examples in William Lewis's new book, The Power of Productivity.
An educated work force is not essential for economic growth. Neither is a high saving rate. Manufacturing is not the most influential economic sector.
These contrarian conclusions come from a new book by William W. Lewis, the founding director of the McKinsey Global Institute, a division of the McKinsey & Company consulting firm. Since 1991, the institute's researchers have conducted the most comprehensive international studies available on productivity by industry sector.
In "The Power of Productivity," published by the University of Chicago Press, Mr. Lewis pulls together some results of that decade-long research.
The book helps explain why the American economy has done better - and Europe and Japan have done worse - than most people predicted in the late 1980's. It also offers a simultaneously hopeful and depressing view of economic conditions in poor countries, focusing on Brazil, India and Russia.
Read the rest here. For even more on the book, see Dan Drezner's posts here and here. If you're willing to put up with ackward navigation and free registration, the studies on which the book is based are available on the McKinsey Global Institute site.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on July 14, 2004 • Comments
Bruce Bawer's beautifully written, sophisticated, often funny, and quite dynamist essay is a must-read. Here's the lead:
I moved from the U.S. to Europe in 1998, and I've been drawing comparisons ever since. Living in turn in the Netherlands, where kids come out of high school able to speak four languages, where gay marriage is a non-issue, and where book-buying levels are the world's highest, and in Norway, where a staggering percentage of people read three newspapers a day and where respect for learning is reflected even in Oslo place names ("Professor Aschehoug Square"; "Professor Birkeland Road"), I was tempted at one point to write a book lamenting Americans' anti-intellectualism--their indifference to foreign languages, ignorance of history, indifference to academic achievement, susceptibility to vulgar religion and trash TV, and so forth. On point after point, I would argue, Europe had us beat.
Yet as my weeks in the Old World stretched into months and then years, my perceptions shifted. Yes, many Europeans were book lovers--but which country's literature most engaged them? Many of them revered education--but to which country's universities did they most wish to send their children? (Answer: the same country that performs the majority of the world's scientific research and wins most of the Nobel Prizes.) Yes, American television was responsible for drivel like "The Ricki Lake Show"--but Europeans, I learned, watched this stuff just as eagerly as Americans did (only to turn around, of course, and mock it as a reflection of American boorishness). No, Europeans weren't Bible-thumpers--but the Continent's ever-growing Muslim population, I had come to realize, represented even more of a threat to pluralist democracy than fundamentalist Christians did in the U.S. And yes, more Europeans were multilingual--but then, if each of the fifty states had its own language, Americans would be multilingual, too. I'd marveled at Norwegians' newspaper consumption; but what did they actually read in those newspapers?
That this was, in fact, a crucial question was brought home to me when a travel piece I wrote for the New York Times about a weekend in rural Telemark received front-page coverage in Aftenposten, Norway's newspaper of record. Not that my article's contents were remotely newsworthy; its sole news value lay in the fact that Norway had been mentioned in the New York Times. It was astonishing. And even more astonishing was what happened next: the owner of the farm hotel at which I'd stayed, irked that I'd made a point of his want of hospitality, got his revenge by telling reporters that I'd demanded McDonald's hamburgers for dinner instead of that most Norwegian of delicacies, reindeer steak. Though this was a transparent fabrication (his establishment was located atop a remote mountain, far from the nearest golden arches), the press lapped it up. The story received prominent coverage all over Norway and dragged on for days. My inhospitable host became a folk hero; my irksome weekend trip was transformed into a morality play about the threat posed by vulgar, fast-food-eating American urbanites to cherished native folk traditions. I was flabbergasted. But my erstwhile host obviously wasn't: he knew his country; he knew its media; and he'd known, accordingly, that all he needed to do to spin events to his advantage was to breathe that talismanic word, McDonald's.
Read the whole thing here.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on July 14, 2004 • Comments