Beinart on religion, secularism, and the cartoons

Peter Beinart, of The New Republic, contributed to a recent issue of the magazine what I thought was a very thoughtful essay on the whole "free speech / offensive cartoons/ riots in the streets / religion and liberalism" debate.  One the one hand:

The riots currently engulfing the Islamic world, prompted by a Danish newspaper's decision to caricature the Prophet Mohammed, require two responses. The first is easy: horror. In the physical assault on Denmark's embassies and citizens, and in the diplomatic assault on Denmark's government--all because a free government won't muzzle a free press--multiculturalism has become totalitarianism. Religious sensitivity, say the zealots marching from Beirut to Jakarta, matters more than liberty. Indeed, it matters more than life itself. To which the only answer, from democrats of all religions and of none, must be: In this matter, we are all Danes.

As I have suggested in earlier posts (though not so eloquently), I agree. On the other hand:

Responding to the thuggishness is easy. Responding to the cartoons themselves is harder. It is hard to condemn them when the barbaric response in parts of the Islamic world so vastly dwarfs the initial offense. And yet, the cartoons should be condemned nonetheless. Of course, the Danish newspaper had the right to publish them. But, in doing so, it revealed a particularly European prejudice, one that the United States must take care not to repeat.

The prejudice is not simply against Islam. Rather, it stems from Europe's--or at least Western Europe's--inability to take religion seriously at all.

Later, after expressing concern that many conservatives in the United States seem not to share President Bush's "conservative ecumenism," Beinart writes:

Now, in the wake of the cartoon saga, the election of Hamas and the ongoing trauma in Iraq, that universalism is being challenged, and the older, more pessimistic conservatism is resurfacing. And that's a very bad thing. No matter what you think of the religious right's domestic agenda, the United States is much better off with a religious right than with a Christian right or a Judeo-Christian right. When conservative American Christians lose their ability to identify with conservative Muslims--to imagine their faith as in some basic way the same and deserving of the same basic respect--the United States will find itself less able to speak to the Muslim world, and less able to listen to it. It will find itself, in other words, in the place Europe is now. And that's a place no American should want to be.

While I imagine my own views of the so-called "religious right" differ from Beinart's, it seems worth working to hold on to the very Dignitatis humanae-type theme that Muslims' faith is "in some basic way the same and deserving of the same basic respect" as Christians' (which is not to say that one must suspend or bracket one's view that Christianity is true or shield one's eyes from the fact that there are serious problems in the Muslim world).