As a relatively secular Jew growing up in New York, surrounded by other secular Jews, most of whom were and continue to be, liberal Democrats, I had very little contact with religious Christians. In my area of Long Island, the Catholic kids went to Parochial Schools, the Italians and Irish were more identified by their ethnicity rather than their religion, and born-again Christians were an exotic species that apparently inhabited parts of the country where my kind were not welcome. The ascendancy of liberalism in the public square through the latter half of the last century afforded someone safely ensconced in the cocoon of New York the opportunity to learn nothing about those fellow citizens who took their Christianity seriously. While I had patients who in the privacy of my consultation room were able to discuss their religious beliefs, any public discussion of Christian ideas or ideals were typically filtered through the secular lens of the New York Times, the "paper of record". Unfortunately, through the 1990's, it was more common to read about the sexual abuse of children by Priests than of anything positive religion, Christianity specifically, had to offer. Nonetheless, for anyone willing to read between the lines it was clear that there was something happening in our culture under the radar. It is arguable that the cold war would not have been won without the late Pope John Paul II lending his moral authority to the cause of freedom.
Approximately three years ago I began to spend significant time on the internet reading blogs. The experience of following links, reading and considering the various ideas expressed by bloggers who I didn't know except through their words, was intellectually stimulating and enlightening. When I "meet" a new blogger, I typically know nothing about them. They could be male, female, black, white, straight, gay; none of that mattered. What mattered was whether or not they made sense and could illuminate part of our shared experience. If I found something valuable in a post, I would usually peruse other posts; if there was a spark, I would save the url; if I found myself returning repeatedly I would put them on my short list and eventually onto my blog roll.
Most often, it was only after a person made their way onto my "short list" that I would take the time to read the "about me" section on their blog (if they had one.) That is when I noticed something remarkable. For a person from New York, immersed in liberal New York thought, a surprising number of the bloggers on my short list were religious Christians. Considering that the usual characterization of religious Christians in the pages of the Times and from the lips of the typical liberal is that they are intolerant religious bigots, indistinguishable from the religious fanatics who live in the Middle East and form the Taliban or al Qaeda, the thought occurred to me to wonder what the meaning of this could be. How was it that I had come to see The Anchoress, Gates of Vienna, Kobayashi Maru, and La Shawn Barber, among others, as making more sense than that paragon of rationality, the New York Times?
Allow me to venture a diagnosis: I would suggest that religion can work in two distinctly different ways and that the meaning it has for the person determines how it is publicly expressed and what it supplies for the person psychologically and emotionally.
I have written, and continue to believe, that human beings have a very deep seated need for religious belief. In Political Deification, I wrote:
We are better equipped than our distant cave dwelling ancestors to understand the world, but on an individual level, we remain surrounded by monsters and magic. Fate can separate us from our loved ones in an instant and we have no mommy or daddy who will hug us and tell us everything will be all right (which our children might believe; even if someone tries to reassure us, we can not even comfort ourselves with the reassurance because we know better.) The only way we can keep our irrational (and sometimes rational) fears from destabilizing our minds is to find something more powerful than ourselves to believe in; we need God, and in the absence of God, we will invent the equivalent to protect us.
Many people who profess to not believe in God show the contradiction by their devotion to secular ideas that appears to have all the characteristics of religious belief. [See W(h)ither Religion, Political Religion, for more on this topic.]
If one accepts that we need an organizing set of faith-based ideas to believe in, the next question is what differentiates different approaches to religion? Since all religious belief is, to a devout secularist, irrational, what is the difference between the Anchoress and bin Laden? Anyone who has spent any time reading my blog will not be surprised to learn that I believe that the meaning of one's religious belief is intimately related to one's level of narcissism along with the development of their superego, that part of the mind that integrates one's conscience [prohibitions and commandments] and one's ego ideal [the idealization of who one wants to be].
Developmentally, the ego ideal is one of the last parts of the personality to form. I describe this in more detail in Narcissism, Malignant Narcissism, and Paranoia: Part I:
To better understand narcissism, you need to better understand the development of self esteem and a related concept of the "ego ideal." Early in life we take the various images we have developed of ourselves (our self representations, in Psychoanalytic terms) and merge them to form a relatively stable, and usually only moderately distorted, sense of who we are and how we fit into the world around us.
.... From the various self representations the child develops his ego ideal. The ego ideal is the collection of abilities, traits, strengths and weaknesses, that make up the person who the child wishes he could be. This will include identifications with various important people in the child's world (including fantasies of people, but that takes us farther afield) and can include famous people as well. Many adolescents and pre-adolescents long to be like their favorite athlete or movie star (though what they want to be like is their fantasy of the person based on the celebrity's carefully crafted persona. Despite the celebrity culture in this country, most people give up their longing to be someone else well before they reach adulthood.)
In a person who has developed a relatively realistic ego ideal, religious feelings can be incorporated int their ego ideal. Thus, they may believe that ideally the person they want to be is a successful writer, loving mother and wife and include that they want to be a loving Christian who lives their life as close to their lord as possible. People who are able to live close to their ego ideal tend to be resilient and their religious beliefs can add tot heir resiliency.
On the other hand, those who are either far from their ego ideal (a high school drop-out who is a slacker, smokes Marijuana every day, and imagines he will become a Doctor) or who have a primitive ego ideal (to become a suicide bomber, for example) will use their religion in place of their conscience. Since the conscience stems from internal sources, an internalized knowledge of right and wrong, when one's conscience is less well developed, it is often helpful to have religious ideals facilitate control of one's impulses. However when a rigid, intolerant religiosity functions as one's conscience the outcome is a person who is rigid and intolerant; such people are extremely sensitive to perceived slights and reacts with rage to anything they find critical of their beliefs.
I would suggest that deeply religious people whose religion is primarily accepted as part of their ego ideal tend to rely on reason and rationality in their discussions, even when they are discussing their religious faith. These people already have an internalized sense of right and wrong (the conscience derives from the relationship with the parents) and their religion supports their conscience. This is why white supremacists who claim to be Christians are more akin to Islamists than to those who predominate in American Christianity today.
So-called liberals who fail to distinguish between religious tolerance and intolerance are exhibiting a special form of small minded intolerance.
The essential experiment has already been done:
Imagine drawing a cartoon which depicts Mohammed or a film which is unflattering to Islam.
Imagine painting a scene which is sacrilegious to Christians.
Which situations have lead to death threats? Which situations have been met with demands that the government stop supporting such "art"? The difference in response to the two provocations should be all the evidence the liberals need to distinguish between fanaticism and those whose religious beliefs encourage tolerance.
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