People Are Wretched, Religion To Blame

This column by Roger Cohen is noteworthy for the earnestness of its anger against religion -- its "disgust."  In truth, I have little quarrel with the claim that lots and lots of people in this world are miserable, including many of the people Cohen discusses.  In fact, I have great sympathy for that view, and can remember having it reinforced almost every day as a state prosecutor.  And that was just after dealing with defense counsel.  I can even forgive Cohen for painting in rough and uncareful strokes.  After all, I'm not sure it's really true that Representative King, as misguided as his hearings may be, is in precisely the same category as the guy who murdered the Swedish man, or the other one who killed the Catholic policeman.  There seem to be relevant differences there.  I also don't quite understand the charge that Newt Gingrich and King are choosing "opportunistically" to target "creeping Sharia" "at a time when the middle name of the president is Hussein."  Opportunistic as their motives may be, I am not sure I see the connection to the President's middle name.  But maybe I just haven't been keeping up with this nonsense.  And of course, I understand that wrathfulness becomes more rhetorically pleasing as one wraps together disparate incidents into a single ball of seething self-righteous disgust.

Interestingly enough, Cohen finds in "religion" the lightning rod for his lightning.  This is a move made with greater elegance by Professor Amos Guiora in this book as well, and one can find some nice discussion of it in Paul Horwitz's book too (see the section on the "New Commissars of the Enlightenment").  Non-religious people like Cohen (see the last line), eschewing the usual liberal tolerance of religion, are electing instead to take a more aggressive tack and blame religion itself for what ails us.  I won't rehearse the standard replies to this move, as they will be familiar to the readership here.  But I often do wonder the extent to which this new approach -- a bit more Voltaire and a bit less Madison -- might or might not influence the law of religious liberty.