It’s a lovely, blustery October day here in Washington, DC, and I am peering into my magic crystal ball which shows me the future. What are you discussing next week? What is every newspaper and TV news show talking about 24/7? The crystal ball says we will all be discussing Ann Coulter telling Donny Deutsch that Jews need to be “perfected” into Christians. (Watch it on YouTube.)
You realize, of course, that this is the end of Ann Coulter’s career. She is probably realizing that right about now too. There’s no mea culpa that covers something like this. Even Sean Hannity will be wrapping his defense of Ann Coulter in statements like, “Now, of course what she said about the Jewish people is shameful and anti-Semitic and horrible and wrong, but [insert hapless attempt to change the subject to a criticism of Hillary Clinton].”
I’m going to admit something that you will find shocking: I kinda like Ann Coulter. I agree with very little that she says, but she generally is funny. Left-wingers (and centrists) don’t get that she’s a humorist, just like right-wingers take everything that Al Franken and Bill Maher say as straight-faced screeds of liberal intolerance. Dude, they’re jokes. Sure, Coulter goes too far — sometimes quite a bit too far — but she’s entertaining and she provokes political debate. I thought her calling John Edwards a “faggot” was priceless, even if it’s a somewhat peculiar slur considering the fact that he’s one of the nation’s preeminent devoted husbands (and opposed to gay marriage too). As for using a nasty slur against homosexuals, I’ve made my feelings about such epithets known before.
Coulter’s biggest crime with the thing about “perfecting Jews into Christians” is that it wasn’t funny. There were a couple of amusing quips — asking Donny Deutsch if he wanted to go to church with her made me chuckle — but she quickly fell into the trap of trying to say these things with a straight face.
The funniest thing of all? She’s absolutely right.
Not about Jews needing to be perfected into Christians, of course. That’s silly and absurd. But she’s right that this is what Christians believe essentially what the New Testament says. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John didn’t agree about everything that Jesus did while he was alive, but I think they were all pretty clear about a few key points. There’s nothing that I’m aware of in the New Testament that says Jesus is your Lord and Savior, unless you choose to ignore everything he had to say and continue practicing the Old Testament the way you’re used to practicing it, in which case no problem! No, according to the book, God sent his kid down here to tell the whole world that humanity has messed up pretty seriously and we need a reboot, so pay attention. (Of course, Jesus also had a lot to say about being tolerant of others — something about casting stones, I think? — but never mind that.)
(There’s also a lot of modern debate about whether Jesus actually said anything about being the son of God. If I’m correct about this — and someone will need to point me to the right place to back this up — there are only one or two passages in the New Testament where Jesus directly claims he’s the One True Savior, and some scholars believe those passages were misinterpreted or inserted later. Take out a couple of sentences, and the things Jesus was saying become quite different.)
I find it amusing to see public religious figures in the media soft-pedaling the differences between their faiths. As if none of those differences matter as long as we all believe in one all-powerful, omnipotent God. Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Mormons, we’re all essentially heading in the same direction, aren’t we? So let’s all get along! What’s that? What about the Hindus, Buddhists, Native Americans, Confucians, Wiccans, and whomever else that don’t believe in one God and aren’t headed in the same direction? No problem! Just agree with our basic precepts of morality, and everything’s hunky-dorey. Wait, some people out there don’t respect those either? Fine, then just don’t hurt anybody. Please.
Someone’s got to explain this to me. Does everybody go to Heaven, provided that they’re following their deeply held faith? Who goes to Hell then? Just the vicious, unrepentant murderers? That’s a pretty low bar to set.
The pundits and scholars on TV dance circles and try to convince us (and themselves) that all the bad, hateful, spiteful, ridiculous things in the holy books were put there by ignorant monks or biased priests back in the Dark Ages. When the Bible says that homosexuality is an “abomination” (Leviticus 18:22), God didn’t really mean it. Either that, or we’re misinterpreting his words. He never actually said those words. He said them to a primitive audience, and so he had to phrase things differently. It’s an artifact of the translation.
But the Ann Coulters of the world blow this lovey-dovey mushiness right out of the (holy) water. They tell us in strident words that the Jews are going to Hell (Jerry Falwell) or that Muslims are justified in taking the lives of innocent infidels (Osama bin Laden) or that the Palestinians should be forcibly ejected from the land of Israel (Meir Kehane). They tell us that these books pretty much say what we think they say, and that there’s no rationalizing your way around it.
Fundamentalists have a right to be worried about the secularization of their traditions and institutions. Once you stop believing in the infallible truth of your holy documents, once you start applying reason to the whole process, you come to realize that there are big incompatibilities between the things we believe to be true today and the things our religions tell us. Once you start questioning the fundamental precepts of a religion, you come to realize that it’s only a matter of faith. And once you start wondering why it is you believe in this particular faith rather than some other completely incompatible faith, you start wondering if there’s any truth to any of them.
I’ve heard Bill Clinton say that whenever you can get people to focus on serious issues, the Democrats win. I’m not sure I agree with that statement, but I think it works when applied to religion. Whenever Ann Coulter shoots her mouth off, she forces people to confront the logical contradictions in their religious beliefs; and whenever you can get the people to focus on logic and reason, those of us who believe in secular morality without religion win.
That’s what I believe, anyway.