The Annual Argument

At least once I year I go to my father's house for Thanksgiving or Christmas and we have an argument. This year it started when he start crowing proudly about the signs he had put on the highway in front of his house. It was a quote attributed to Barack Obama from 2006, "We are no longer a Christian nation."

Of course, every time my dad says something like this he gets it off the Internet. It turns out that this quote is pulled from a longer speech, and it's the result of Obama making a mistake reading the speech. The original speech read, "We are no longer just a Christian nation." When delivered, Obama misspoke, saying, "We are no longer a Christian nation -- at least, not just." (See FactCheck.org for the details.) The gist of Obama's remarks is that America is no longer a nation of Christians alone, but of Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, atheists, agnostics, and so on. And there's not just one brand of Christianity: there are Catholics, Baptists, Mormons, Evangelicals -- some of whom have more vehement disagreements among themselves than they have with Muslims or Jews.

The reality is that the United States has never been a Christian nation. England is a Christian nation-- the queen is the official head of the Anglican church -- and the Puritans fled Christian England because of religious persecution. The Constitution doesn't mention god at all. The Declaration of Independence speaks of "Laws of Nature and Nature's God" -- which sounds more like some kind of Druidical naturist deity -- and that men are "endowed by their Creator" with inalienable rights.

There is no mention of Christ, and a subsequent amendment forbids the establishment of an official state religion. The founders were deists and many were Christians, to be sure, but the whole point of coming here was to escape the religious tyranny of Europe.

So, not knowing at the time that he was selectively quoting Obama, I took the bait and asked, "Since when do you care about Christianity?"

No one ever talks about it, but from what I understand, when my dad was a teenager he and his mother were in an a sanitarium for a time with tuberculosis. This was before antibiotics were in use. They eventually left and my dad turned out to be fine, but his mother was dying. Ultimately she committed suicide rather than suffer a horrible death. In the standard fashion everyone told him that God had taken her and that she was in a better place, but he had seen first hand what torture she had been through. He was bitter, came to hate God, never attended church and wanted nothing to do with religion. I can sympathize completely.

Fast forward twenty years. A Jehovah's Witness comes to the door of our house, talks to my mom, gets her to study the bible. After a while she starts talking about not celebrating birthdays or Christmas, says that the bible disallows blood transfusions and certain . . . private practices. This is too much for my dad. After a thorough search for the right church (he went down the block from his office) he got biblical arguments from a pastor. My parents had numerous knock-down drag-out arguments about religion right in front of me. In the end my dad won, because of various admonitions in the bible for wives to be submissive to their husbands: he turned my mother's religion against her.

After that my dad went to church sporadically and after a while stopped completely. When one of my sisters was married at the Church he had convinced my mother to join (the one next to his office) he refused to go because my other sister -- the one who had married a Hispanic guy from Texas -- was in attendance. Hence, my question: "Since when do you care about Christianity?"

Acknowledging my point, he says, "I'd rather have Christianity than Muslims. They're a vicious, violent people. In Saudi Arabia they stone adulterers and cut off the hands of thieves. They killed all those people on 9/11. They're animals." And he proceeds to talk about how there are three billion Muslims and what a danger they are. I'm not sure why the number three billion is important -- that would be almost half the world's population, which he is apparently advocating going to war with. (According to various sources, there are about 1.5 billion Muslims and 2.1 billion Christians.)

So I ask him who was responsible for the Oklahoma City bombing, the bombing at the Olympics in Atlanta (he'd forgotten about that one), various abortion clinic bombings in the US, the assassination of American abortion doctors (one in a church!), the IRA bombings in England, the burning, drowning and crushing of witches in Salem and Europe, the Crusades, and so on. He brushes that all off, saying only some Christians do that, and it was a long time ago. When I point out that harsh punishments aren't meted out in most Muslim countries for minor crimes -- Turkey, Indonesia, Egypt, Iraq (before we invaded), etc., etc. -- he looks puzzled. Apparently this wasn't in the script from the Internet. Turkey doesn't even have the death penalty.

The rant then becomes general, about losing the United States to foreigners, bemoaning the fact that half the kids in California are Mexican. He complains that kids can't even fly the American flag anymore. I'd never heard of this. My brother-in-law explains that a principal in California sent some kids with American flags on their t-shirt home. Looking at the Fox News report on the incident, it appears the principal told the kids to go home on Cinco de Mayo because he suspected their wearing the American flag on their shirts was an attempt to start a fight with Mexican kids by disrespecting their "day." (I think the principal was out of line, but can understand the action: wearing the flag like gang colors is not patriotism, it's thuggery. The kids were not punished and free to wear American flags on other days, according to an NBC affiliate.)

Then he goes into full rant mode. The illegal immigrants should have no rights. They're stealing jobs from Americans. They're destroying our way of life. They have everything given to them. "Filthy jobs like picking tomatoes that Americans won't do because they pay too little?" I ask. "Aren't the people paying the illegals just as guilty as the illegals, if not more so?" But somehow he just shrugs that off.

"In a poll 58% of the American people said they are against illegal immigration," he says. "I'm one of them," I answer. But he doesn't hear me. "This is supposed to be a democracy, and Obama's not doing anything about illegals." In fact, Obama has been doing more about it than Bush ever did -- more arrests, more punishments of employers, etc. But my dad pays no heed to all that.

Then he says, "I think we should shoot them when the cross the border. They're committing a crime." I ask him if really means this, and he says he'd do it himself.

So now we come full circle. Muslims are monstrous animals because they amputate the hands of thieves and stone adulterers. Yet my dad has no problem shooting someone in cold blood who's just trying to find a better life and feed their kids doing grunt field work for almost no pay that no one else in the United States is willing to do.

And it's not just my dad who's demanding death if he doesn't get what he wants. Conservatives threaten civil war if they don't get certain electoral and legislative results. What, you ask? When did they do that? Republicans in both Alaska and Texas have talked about secession over and over. And of course, secession from the Union is simply not possible, and will certainly cause civil war.

Conservatives uniformly favor the death penalty, and expanding the crimes that are covered by it, and rolling back appeals in capital cases. Conservatives like Palin are always bragging about hunting and killing animals. Hunting isn't wrong, and I don't oppose it -- but it's certainly more violent than not hunting. Conservatives are always trying to expand the presence of guns in everyday society. They support laws allowing people to freely shoot trespassers. The conservative answer to violence appears to be the threat of more violence.

And then my brother-in-law chimes in, saying that the only problem with nuking the whole Middle East is that we'd have a hard time getting the oil out. (The same brother-in-law who had to explain his "Obama trap" joke to his mother. You know, the piece of watermelon under a box propped up with a stick.)

And then there are the calls to nuke Iran from Cheney and regime change in North Korea from McCain, and, well, you get the picture.

American conservatives who are constantly advocating violence in all its high and low forms have no moral high ground when they complain about Muslims being a violent people.

So I ask my dad why he thinks Muslims hate us. He has absolutely no idea. It's obvious he's never considered it for even a second. I tell him that bin Laden started his jihad because of the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia after the Gulf War.

Just like my dad thinks that Muslims and Mexicans are destroying the American way of life, the Muslim terrorists in Pakistan, Yemen and Saudi Arabia believe we are destroying their very way of life. We are invading their countries -- Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Kuwait -- even more overtly than Mexicans are invading our country by attacking and stationing troops there. We are perverting their culture -- spreading English, Christianity, loose morals, obscene dress, money lending -- just like Mexicans and Muslims are speaking Spanish and Arabic and building mosques in America. Mexicans are stealing American jobs, Americans are stealing Muslim oil.

Conservatives in the Middle East are upset about societal change and foreign influence, and they advocate violence to stop it. Conservatives in the United States are their mirror images, taking the bait that their counterparts in the Middle East are throwing them.

We really need to take into account the sentiments of people in other countries when we interact with them. I'm not saying that we should kowtow to terrorists. But there's very rarely only one solution to any given problem. In retrospect it was obviously a bad idea to leave troops in Saudi Arabia after the Gulf War -- the parallels to the Crusades are just too stark. We wound up taking our troops out of there in 2003 anyway. Important lessons can be learned here with Iraq and Afghanistan.

Radicalized Muslims are intentionally inciting conflict with the United States. They want us to lump all Muslims together and attack Muslims in general so that they can claim they were right all along about the "crusaders" trying to destroy Islam. When American conservatives advocate violence against all Muslims and turn our conflict with a few Muslim terrorists into a broadside against all Islam, the terrorists win.