Articles 20 (School Choice)

The following articles address the current state of public primary and secondary education in the U.S. I think the public education debate revolves around three themes: 1) freedom and empowerment of parents and students 2) religious freedom of families 3) accountability of teachers, administrators, parents, students, and entire schools. The following four articles share many of the same goals but are deeply divided on how to achieve those goals. Christians can always begin with the question, what approaches to public education will be most beneficial to poorest among us (Catholic Social Teaching’s “preferential option for the poor”)? There are other important considerations as well. Many on this blog have children, have chosen to live in neighborhoods specifically because of the quality of the public school there, have paid property taxes (funding local public schools) while also choosing to pay private school tuition, teach in a major urban public school system and have chosen to placed their children in that same system, and so on. I am curious to hear any responses to the current education debate, particularly implementation of school choice programs vs. further investment in traditional public schools. -NB

Reason.com “Knowing is Half the Battle. But It's the Easy Half.” (September 1, 2010)

By Katherine Mangu-Ward

Liberating teacher performance data is a great way to start out the school year. But it's not enough.

They say that knowing is half the battle. But it’s the easy half.

On Sunday, the Los Angeles Times caused quite a stir by releasing individual performance data about 6,000 of the system’s primary teachers after weeks of hyping the story. The paper took the simple but ingenious step of filing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the district’s raw math and reading standardized test scores over several years. For each teacher, the paper calculated a score based on the gains shown by his or her individual students from the time they arrived in the classroom in the fall to the time they left—a value-added score—and then rated the teachers’ effectiveness.

Information is power, and the school system and teachers union had access to this data long before theTimes. But instead of releasing scores—and thus seizing the opportunity to frame the information and the debate—they sat on the data for years, stalling, hoping no one would notice that it existed at all. Their mindset dates from a time when processing a large amount of data and offering a granular analysis was a difficult and expensive business. But number crunching on this scale is no longer the province of big bureaucracies with major computing power. Anyone can do it, and it was only a matter of time before someone did.

Naturally, the teachers union flipped out. In addition to announcing a boycott of the paper, union reps have condemned the release of the scores to parents as “dangerous.” (To his credit, Obama education chief Arne Duncan backed the release of the scores, saying “What’s there to hide?”)

But all the data in the world won’t do kids or their parents any good if they can’t make choices informed by that data.

In a world where we can get rankings and information about every book, every household appliance, every restaurant, and every manicurist, we are in the habit of casually seeking information and making well-informed choices about the things we buy and the people we contract with for services. But in education (and, for that matter, in medicine) users are mostly working in an information vacuum. One reason doctors and hospitals are frightened of the popularization of information about patient satisfaction and pricing is that people can, with some constraints, take their broken legs, strep throats, or brain tumors elsewhere. But parents don’t have that luxury when it comes to public schooling.

Even if parents know who the good teachers are—and they often do already—it often doesn’t matter, since kids are randomly assigned. They’re allocated to a district, a school, a schedule, and a classroom, all without any input from students or parents. The biggest decision public school parents get to make about their child’s primary education is where they choose to live. Short of staging a mini-sit in at the guidance counselor’s office (something my parents were known to do from time to time) there’s not much you can do once the die has been cast. And if you’re a parent who doesn’t have the luxury of taking a day off from work to spend fighting the school bureaucracy, your kid is stuck wherever he was randomly assigned, no matter what. Teacher data doesn’t do a lick of good if you don’t have input about which teacher you wind up with.

Instituting a small degree of teacher choice wouldn’t be overwhelmingly difficult. Schools at all levels could opt for the kind of first-come, first-served lottery that large colleges use. It's not an ideal system, but it’s an improvement. Again, computers these days, they can do amazing stuff. Once a system is in place, this kind of limited choice would be neither time consuming nor expensive. But it would create one outcome that teachers unions will do almost anything to stop: It would quickly become obvious which teachers aren’t desirable. The teachers with the half-empty classrooms would be ripe for firing. And that’s the scenario that makes teachers unions (and to a lesser degree school boards and other education bureaucracies) fear a flood of data, especially if it’s accompanied by even a little choice.

In today’s Los Angeles Times, this troublingly common sentiment showed up: "As a parent, I think I have a right to know," said [school] board member Nury Martinez, who added that she did not believe that the general public should be able to see a teacher's entire review.” Giving parents all the information that’s available is a bad idea, the argument goes, in part because they might start trying to make the kind of choices for their kids that they make every day about their lunches, their jobs, or their dry cleaners.

Asked about the release of the Los Angeles teacher data at a recent community meeting, reformist D.C. school Chancellor Michelle Rhee replied with a personal story and a similar gut reaction: “I was looking at the data in my own children’s school,” she says. “I could see the teacher data. One good, one not so much. I pride myself on not giving my kids preferences. But as a mother i was like whoa! From an administrative point of view, it’s pretty terrifying.”

There were a lot of mothers in Los Angeles on Sunday who were like whoa. But none of those whoamoments will amount to much in a system starved of choice.

“I’m kind of waiting for the FOIA request in my mailbox,” says Rhee. It’s coming, alright. But it won’t be enough.

Katherine Mangu-Ward is a senior editor at Reason magazine.

Source: http://reason.com/archives/2010/09/01/knowing-is-half-the-battle-but

Guidelines for Government and Citizenship, "Education"

A Publication of The Center for Public Justice (www.cpjustice.org)

1. Parents bear primary responsibility for the nurture and education of their children. This fact is recognized in both American and international law.

2. In justly exercising its responsibility to provide for the general welfare, government may – and indeed should – help parents meet their responsibilities. For most of American history, such assistance has included the funding of elementary and secondary education.

3. With its support of schooling and its mandate that all children receive an education, government should concentrate on upholding public equity provisions, assuring that each child has fair access to quality education.

4. To honor the educational responsibilities of families and to fulfill its own responsibility to treat citizens equitably, government should be impartial in its treatment of the diverse types of schooling parents choose for their children.

5. Those who educate and establish schools should be free to decide on the philosophical and pedagogical approaches they offer, the curricula they adopt, and the means of governing and administering the schools they open to the public.

6. When government certifies a variety of schooling options that fulfill the public purpose of educating children and when parents choose schools for their children, justice demands that each child should receive the same kind and degree of public financial support. Equitable public funding should be offered without regard to the religious, philosophical, or pedagogical differences among the variety of certified schools parents choose.

7. At present, government fails to do justice when it does not fund equally all of the schooling options it legally certifies. Instead it discriminates against many American families and schools by not funding the education of children who attend non-government schools, including religious schools. This stands in contrast to public funding of school choice in most other democracies in the world.

8. The Center for Public Justice advocates equitable public funding for all children, allowing parents to choose the means of education that is best for their children. A school-choice system of this kind does justice to parental responsibility for children, to the diversity of publicly approved schools, and to the religious freedom of all citizens, ensuring a just and proper relationship between government and society’s diverse families and schools.

Implications

1. State education vouchers for each student may be the best means of covering tuition costs equitably for students at all schools, including religious schools.

2. Schools receiving public support, whether via vouchers or directly, should be free to hire staff and to design curricula that reflect their distinctive educational, philosophical, and religious missions.

3. State laws that authorize specialized charter schools may be the best legal means of expanding choice in American education. In order to be fair and equitable, however, charter-school laws should be revised to include religious schools as eligible schooling options.

For Further Reading

Glenn, Charles L. Ambiguous Embrace: Government and Faith-Based Schools and Social Agencies. Princeton University Press, 2000.

McCarthy, Rockne M., James W. Skillen, and William A. Harper. Disestablishment a Second Time: Genuine Pluralism for American Schools. Christian University Press, 1982.

Skillen, James W., ed. The School Choice Controversy: What Is Constitutional?Baker Book House and Center for Public Justice, 1993.

[Read more about this Guideline in the Public Justice Report, Fourth Quarter 2006.]

Sourece: http://www.cpjustice.org/content/education

National Education Association (website), “Study Finds Vouchers Fail to Raise Student Achievement” (April 13, 2010)

By Kevin Hart

Milwaukee’s school vouchers program has lasted 20 years and has channeled hundreds of millions of dollars in public funds to private schools. Now, an ongoing study on the academic performance of voucher students is casting serious doubt on whether the program is effective.

The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, established in 1990, currently serves more than 20,000 students who receive public funds to pay for private school tuition. The University of Arkansas’ School Choice Demonstration Project has been commissioned to perform a five-year study comparing voucher students to demographically similar public school students. Two years into the study, the results are not looking promising for vouchers.

Through the 2007-2008 school year, two years into the study, researchers found that there was no difference in academic achievement among the elementary, middle, and high school students who were tested. Students receiving vouchers failed to outperform their public school counterparts.

Ironically, the research was funded by several groups with a history of supporting school choice, such as the Kern Family Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation. The study also found that, to date:

▪ Religious schools have been the primary beneficiaries of the vouchers program: Of the 124 participating private schools, 82 percent are affiliated with one of 10 distinct religions.

▪ Teachers at schools receiving voucher funds may be less qualified: More public school teachers had teaching certifications and master’s degrees than teachers at the private schools participating in the vouchers program.

▪ Boys and girls are not benefiting equally: Girls in the vouchers program were considerably less likely to experience growth in reading than boys.

The University of Arkansas research is not the first study that failed to show achievement gains among Milwaukee students receiving vouchers. As the study authors point out, a previous study by University of Wisconsin researcher John Witte compared voucher students to public school students from 1990-1995 and found “no clear evidence” that vouchers improved student achievement.

The results are unsurprising for those who follow research on voucher programs. Research on a controversial vouchers program in Washington, D.C. yielded similar results.

According to data from the U.S. Department of Education, students from schools labeled “in need of improvement” – the very students vouchers are supposed to help – have not experienced any gains in reading or math after using vouchers to attend Washington, D.C. private schools.

Source: http://neatoday.org/2010/04/13/study-finds-vouchers-fail-to-raise-student-achievement/

The following text consists of excerpts of this report taken from NAACP.org. -NB

NAACP.org “Framework for Providing All Students an Opportunity to Learn through Reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act”

Sponsored By:

Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights under Law

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)

NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc.

National Council for Educating Black Children

National Urban League

Rainbow PUSH Coalition

Schott Foundation for Public Education

Today there is nothing short of a state of emergency in the delivery of education to our nation’s communities of color. As our communities quickly grow on pace to become a numerical majority, it is clear that confronting the issues we face is not just our challenge alone but all of America’s challenge. As a nation, we are failing to provide the high-quality educational opportunities that are critical for all students to succeed, thereby jeopardizing our nation’s ability to continue to be a world leader.

As a community of civil rights organizations, we believe that access to a high-quality education is a fundamental civil right. The federal government’s role is to protect and promote that civil right by creating and supporting a fair and substantive opportunity to learn for all students, regardless of where and to whom they were born. This objective is advanced by many components of the proposed FY 2011 education budget and the Blueprint for Reform setting forth the Administration’s priorities for reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). For instance, we applaud the Administration’s goal for the United States to become a global leader in post-secondary education attainment by 2020 and its efforts to develop specific strategies for turning around low-performing schools.

While there are numerous positive aspects of the Administration’s education agenda, more comprehensive reforms are necessary to build a future where equitable educational opportunity is the rule, not the exception. As civil rights organizations, it is our responsibility to seek to close and ultimately eliminate the opportunity and achievement gaps experienced by communities of color. To this end, we outline six major principles that we will collectively advocate to strengthen the ESEA and ensure that the federal government provides the support necessary to protect every child’s civil right to a high-quality education:

Equitable opportunities for all;

Utilization of systematically proven and effective educational methods;

Public and community engagement in education reforms;

Safe and educationally sound learning environments;

Diverse learning environments; and

Comprehensive and substantive accountability systems to maintain equitable opportunities and high outcomes.

....we also offer specific recommendations to implement the principles outlined above. We advance proposals to leverage federal resources available to all states in order to create the preconditions to achieve equitable opportunities for all. As a part of extending an opportunity to learn as a civil right, we call for: “universal” early education for all students in all states; policies that will provide access to highly effective teachers for all students, including incentives to recruit and retain well-prepared, highly effective teachers in high–need, low-income, and rural areas; and community schools that offer wraparound services and strong, engaging instruction with adequate supports. We urge the federal government to institutionalize a federal resource accountability system so that students, parents, and teachers will have the school and community resources necessary for students to achieve high standards, regardless of where they live....

....We propose that the federal government adopt Common Resource Opportunity Standards, which would support the states’ common student outcome standards movement by ensuring sufficient resources to address extreme state budget cuts and interstate inequities. These standards would include national benchmarks for the following resources: (i) high-quality, early childhood education; (ii) highly effective teachers; (iii) a broad, college-bound curriculum that will prepare all students to participate effectively in our democracy; and (iv) equitable instructional resources.1 As a condition for receiving federal funds under the ESEA, each state would be required to submit a plan for closing opportunity gaps in these areas and ensuring that all students

1An outline of Common Resource Opportunity Standards was presented to Secretary Arne Duncan by several organizations on November 4, 2009.3

have access to these core resources. As envisioned in the now pending Student Bill of Rights Act, H.R. 2451, federal funding should be tied to each state’s demonstrated progress toward equitable access to these education resources.

The federal government should also require that states make progress in achieving resource equity for their schools. It should do so by enforcing existing requirements for comparability in the funding provided to high- and low-poverty schools and close the loopholes in those comparability requirements by incorporating into the ESEA the provisions of the now pending ESEA Fiscal Fairness Act, H.R. 5071....

....We applaud the Administration’s Blueprint for proposing that information on school climate and the health of students’ learning environments should be incorporated into school accountability measures. But it is critical that these measures are designed well and implemented effectively. At the school level, we urge replacing the ESEA’s ineffective “persistently dangerous schools” label with a “safe and supportive schools” metric, focusing on indicia of positive school conditions that support learning. Criteria should include infrequent use of 11

exclusionary discipline measures, high pupil and teacher attendance rates, low arrest rates, and survey results showing good rapport and personalization between students and staff. Research has shown that high marks on these indicators are predictive of learning environments that keep students in school until graduation rather than pushing them to drop out of school prematurely.

The shift to a “safe and supportive schools” approach must be coupled with changes to discipline practices at the school level. A school’s failure to perform well under this metric should trigger local and state support to implement evidence-based approaches to improve school climate....

....The ESEA’s “right-to-transfer” provisions should be retained and strengthened. States should be required to ensure that every low-income child assigned to a school that consistently underperforms on the ESEA’s accountability standards has the guaranteed right to enroll in a high-performing school. If no such school is available within the same school district, the student should have the right to enroll in a high-performing school outside the district that has available seats and, if the school receives federal funds, it must be required to accept the student. The ESEA should also provide transportation, resources, and services to support families who exercise their child’s right to transfer. Additional incentives, coupled with the resources proposed in the DOE’s Magnet School Assistance Program, could aid states in promoting these opportunities....

....CONCLUSION

More than fifty years ago, it took the persistent efforts of parents and students in cities and hamlets across the country to persuade the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education to rule that all students should have access to an inclusive, high-quality education. Today, our nation is still struggling to fulfill Brown’s promise.

As a community of civil rights organizations, our objective is not to support prescriptions that only have the capacity to change a few schools for a few students. We want a blueprint for a federal commitment to education reform that embraces the entire nation and all of its people.

We therefore call on the Administration and Congress to take four important direct actions:

1. Adopt the recommendations in this letter for current discretionary education spending, budget proposals for FY2011 and subsequent years, and ESEA reauthorization;

2. Convene a Summit on the Opportunity to Learn in fall 2010 where administration and legislative officials can meet with key stakeholders to outline a federal role and blueprint for fulfilling the fundamental civil right of all students, in all states, to a fair and substantive opportunity to learn; 15

3. Establish a White House Commission on the Opportunity to Learn as a standing interagency and intergovernmental commission tasked with identifying and monitoring the coordination and investments necessary to place the United States on a trajectory to meet the 2020 goal of becoming a global leader in post-secondary education attainment and to provide all students a fair and substantive opportunity to learn; and

4. Convene a panel comprised of leadership of the Department of Justice, the DOE, the National Governors Association, civil rights organizations, and other key stakeholders to recommend steps towards confirming that education is a federal civil right.

Some have articulated a belief that our nation is unable to garner the resources to provide a high-quality education for all students and therefore we should just save those we can. But as civil rights advocates, our objective is not to support prescriptions that only have the capacity to change a few schools for a few students. We invoke the leadership and drive of the candidate and Senator from Illinois who told a nation, “Yes we can.” Securing equal access to high-quality education is the civil rights battle of this generation.

Source: http://naacp.3cdn.net/bbe013962d37e1c6a9_com6btgji.pdf

Articles 19 (Race, Justice, & Equality)

The theme of race has received heightened attention recently as a result of the premature firing of an Obama Administration official who was believed to have made racist remarks against white people. In addition, allegations have been made for awhile now regarding undertones (and overtones) of racism present in the "Tea Party" movement. Furthermore, data has shown that African Americans have been hit harder by the recession than any other group (unemployment is substantially higher among blacks than other racially identified groups), implying for many that this is more evidence of continued race-driven inequality in the United States. The four articles below offer widely divergent perspectives within the contemporary debate on race in America (although the fourth deserves the closest reading). I think that there are few debates in America today which comprise more confusion and dishonesty than this one. -NB

The New York Times “You’ll Never Believe What This White House Is Missing” (July 24, 2010)

By Maureen Dowd

The Obama White House is too white.

It has Barack Obama, raised in the Hawaiian hood and Indonesia, and Valerie Jarrett, who spent her early years in Iran.

But unlike Bill Clinton, who never needed help fathoming Southern black culture, Obama lacks advisers who are descended from the central African-American experience, ones who understand “the slave thing,” as a top black Democrat dryly puts it.

The first black president should expand beyond his campaign security blanket, the smug cordon of overprotective white guys surrounding him — a long political tradition underscored by Geraldine Ferraro in 1984 when she complained about the “smart-ass white boys” from Walter Mondale’s campaign who tried to boss her around.

Otherwise, this administration will keep tripping over race rather than inspiring on race.

The West Wing white guys who pushed to ditch Shirley Sherrod before Glenn Beck could pounce not only didn’t bother to Google, they weren’t familiar enough with civil rights history to recognize the name Sherrod. And they didn’t return the calls and e-mail of prominent blacks who tried to alert them that something was wrong.

Charles Sherrod, Shirley’s husband, was a Freedom Rider who, along with the civil rights hero John Lewis, was a key member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee of the ‘60s.

As Lewis, the longtime Georgia congressman, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, he knew immediately that something was amiss with the distorted video clip of Sherrod talking to the N.A.A.C.P.

“I’ve known these two individuals — the husband for more than 50 years and the wife for at least 35, 40 — and there’s not a racist hair on their heads or anyplace else on their bodies,” Lewis said.

We may not have a “nation of cowards” on race, as Attorney General Eric Holder contended, but we may have a West Wing of cowards on race.

The president appears completely comfortable in his own skin, but it seems he feels that he and Michelle are such a huge change for the nation to absorb that he can be overly cautious about pushing for other societal changes for blacks and gays. At some level, he acts like the election was enough; he shouldn’t have to deal with race further. But he does.

His closest advisers — some of the same ones who urged him not to make the race speech after the Rev. Jeremiah Wright issue exploded — are so terrified that Fox and the Tea Party will paint Obama as doing more for blacks that they tiptoe around and do less. “Who knew that the first black president would make it even harder on black people?” asked a top black Democratic official.

It’s the same impulse that caused Obama campaign workers to refuse to let Muslim women with head scarves sit in camera range during a rally. It’s the same impulse that has left the president light-years behind W. on development help for Africa. In their rush to counteract attempts to paint Obama as a radical/Muslim/socialist, Obama staffers can behave in insensitive ways themselves.

“I don’t think a single black person was consulted before Shirley Sherrod was fired — I mean c’mon, “ said Congressman James Clyburn of South Carolina, a black lawmaker so temperate that he agreed with an op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal on Friday by Senator James Webb of Virginia, which urged that “government-directed diversity programs should end.”

“The president’s getting hurt real bad,” Clyburn told me. “He needs some black people around him.” He said Obama’s inner circle keeps “screwing up” on race: “Some people over there are not sensitive at all about race. They really feel that the extent to which he allows himself to talk about race would tend to pigeonhole him or cost him support, when a lot of people saw his election as a way to get the issue behind us. I don’t think people elected him to disengage on race. Just the opposite.”

Eleanor Holmes Norton, D.C.’s House delegate, agreed: “The president needs some advisers or friends who have a greater sense of the pulse of the African-American community, or who at least have been around the mulberry bush.”

And why does the N.A.A.C.P. exist if not to help clear a smeared champion of civil rights who gave a stirring speech about racial reconciliation at an N.A.A.C.P. banquet? Its president, Ben Jealous, shamefully following the administration’s rush to judgment, tweeted Monday night that Shirley Sherrod was a racist without even calling his Georgia chapter president or reviewing the N.A.A.C.P.’s own video of the speech.

It was Donna Brazile, a Democratic strategist, who, after hearing the entire speech, pushed to get it out and helped clear Sherrod’s reputation on CNN.

The president shouldn’t give Sherrod her old job back. He should give her a new job: Director of Black Outreach. This White House needs one.

The New York Times “Obama’s ‘Race’ War” (July 30, 2010)

By Charles M. Blow

Americans are engaged in a war over a word: racism.

Mature commentary on the subject has descended into tribal tirades, hypersensitive defenses and rapid-fire finger-pointing. The very definition of the word seems under assault, being bent and twisted back on itself and stretched and pulled beyond recognition.

Many on the left have taken an absolutist stance, that the anti-Obama sentiment reeks of racism and denial only served to confirm guilt. Many on the right feel as though they have been convicted without proof — that tossing “racism” their way is itself racist.

The “racists crying racism” meme is being pushed hard, on multiple fronts, all centered around the president.

After the N.A.A.C.P. asked the Tea Party “to condemn extremist elements” within its ranks, the right went on a witch hunt for black racists in the N.A.A.C.P. Not finding any, it created one. Andrew Breitbart presents: “The Sherrod Charade.”

Journalism is being tarred with the sins of some on JournoList, a now defunct listserv through which a handful of people wrote heretical things like the possibility of calling conservatives racist to divert attention from Obama’s connection to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr.

This was hardly a vast left-wing conspiracy, but it fed the right’s defensive narrative that the word “racism” has become a weapon — not the shot of a rifle carefully aimed at a clear target, but a shotgun blast sprayed wide and loose at all things anti-Obama.

There’s also the charge that the president is protecting the New Black Panthers from voter intimidation charges. This nonstory has been knocked down more times than a blind boxer, but the right keeps pushing it.

And then there’s Glenn Beck. He’s on a crusade to convince the lemmings of Foxland that President Obama is governing under the principles of Black Liberation Theology, a “grave perversion” of Christianity in which “minorities are saved in the sense that white people constantly confess and repent of being racist and meet the economic demands of minorities via the redistribution of wealth as a consequence of, in some form or another, reparations.” What? Oh, Glenn.

I have to say, I don’t know how these Fox viewers do it. Listening to a Beck argument is like living in an M.C. Escher drawing — fantastical illusions that defy logic and strain the brain.

Blacks, stunned by this new topsy-turvy world of racial politics, continue to rally around Obama. In opinion polls, they consistently rate Obama’s performance and policies highly, I suspect as much out of solidarity as conviction.

Whether the president likes it or not, he’s the nexus of this debate. I, for one, think that he should stand up and redirect it from the negative to the noble. There will be some grumbling to be sure, but there already is.

It’s your choice, Mr. President. I say stand up — for America, for common humanity, for civil discourse. To paraphrase the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., they can’t ride your back unless it’s bent.

The Washington Examiner “Pick Pookie from Baltimore's Park Heights” (August 2, 2010)

By: Gregory Kane

In what may go down as the anti-white-bashing piece of the year, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd opened her July 24 op-ed column with this sentence: "The Obama White House is too white."

Dowd is a talented writer, but who knew she was an absolute hoot as well?

It's one thing to take a president to task because he or she may not have enough black advisers, but can you believe a white woman chiding President Obama for not having black advisers "who are descended from the central African-American experience"?

And exactly what, Ms. Dowd, is the "central African-American experience"? Ask 20 different black Americans and you might get 20 different answers.

But Dowd didn't write her column without consulting with black elected officials first. She's too good a columnist for that. She quoted someone she described as a "top black Democrat" who knew exactly what the "central African-American experience" is. Obama, according to Top Black Democrat, needs black advisers who "understand the slave thing."

Let me dispose of this nonsense here and now: Top Black Democrat has no better understanding of "the slave thing" than you or I do because he -- or she -- has never been a slave. TBD and I do know that our ancestors were slaves, and that the experience was brutally dehumanizing. We know the history after slavery supposedly ended in 1865 was pretty gruesome as well. Other than that, we have no understanding of "the slave thing."

In fact, I may have one up on TBD in understanding the slave thing. I have black ancestors who were slaves, and at least one white one. She was my great-great-grandmother, who, in 1852, married what was called a "free man of color" in Southern Maryland. She was an indentured servant from France, one of many European female immigrants of that era who were indentured servants as well. I suspect TBD would dismiss their experience with a snort and a sneer.

But back to Dowd: She quoted South Carolina Rep. James Clyburn and District of Columbia House of Representatives Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton to bolster her case. Obama, Clyburn and Norton contended, needed to consult at least one black adviser to avoid the embarrassing fallout from the Shirley Sherrod affair. Dowd ended her column by suggesting that the Obama administration not give Sherrod that "unique position" in the Department of Agriculture, but a job as "Director of Black Outreach" instead.

I give Sherrod a thumbs down when it comes to that position. Her statement about conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart, black Americans and slavery clearly shows she needs to spend more time with her brain in drive and her mouth in park. But I have a perfect candidate for a proposed "Director of Black Outreach" in the Obama administration.

That would be Pookie from lower Park Heights in Baltimore. Or it could be Bey Bey from Southeast Washington, D.C. What are the advantages of having a Pookie or a Bey Bey as a director of black outreach? Oh, several.

1. Pookie or Bey Bey might -- or might not -- have an understanding of "the slave thing," but they probably wouldn't give a tinker's dam about it either.

2. Pookie and Bey Bey would be more concerned about adequate schools in their communities.

3. They'd be more concerned about the drug dealers and criminals ravaging their communities.

4. And they might understand that poor black folks need firearms for their protection.

Sherrod as Obama's "Director of Black Outreach"? Better go with Pookie from lower Park Heights.

Examiner Columnist Gregory Kane is a Pulitzer-nominated news and opinion journalist who has covered people and politics from Baltimore to the Sudan.

First Things “Why We Didn’t Overcome” (Aug/Sept 2010)

By Glenn C. Loury

Freedom Is Not Enough: The Moynihan Report and America’s Struggle over Black Family Life from LBJ to Obama

By James T. Patterson
Basic Books, 228 pages, $26.95

The memo declares, “The United States is approaching a new crisis in race relations.” “A national effort is required,” it explains, “directed to a new kind of national goal: the establishment of a stable Negro family structure.” One sees the problem immediately: A government official in 1965 baldly states that expectations for equality are bound to be disappointed, not merely because of racism but also because the fabric of social life in the black ghettos is in tatters.

For many at the time, this kind of talk was simply unacceptable. How dare a white man say these things? What will happen to reform if studies like this are allowed to issue from the government? The author—an assistant secretary at the Labor Department named Daniel Patrick Moynihan—had to be made an example of.

And so he was. A firestorm of protest from journalists and civil-rights activists greeted the public release of his policy document. By calling attention to the instability of family life in poor black communities, Moynihan was said to downplay the importance of racial discrimination. By ascribing this trend in part to cultural factors, he was said to “blame the victim.” (Indeed, that now familiar phrase was coined in response to the Moynihan Report by the sociologist William Ryan.) By rehearsing the arguments of such distinguished black sociologists as W.E.B. Du Bois and E. Franklin Frazier—arguments that chattel slavery had ruined gender relations among the slaves, with profound consequences that reach into the twentieth century—Moynihan was said to be a flat-out racist.

In what might be understood today as political correctness run amok, productive discussion of “the Negro family” became impossible to sustain. This was the 1960s, after all. Civil-rights victories over implacable Southern opposition were fresh in everyone’s mind. Cities were burning during a series of long, hot summers. And, in tonier precincts, radical chic had become the fashion of the day, with the moral authority of racism’s victims unquestioned.

Nothing, it was said, is inherently good about two-parent families and nothing inherently bad about single motherhood. The weakness of black family life, it was alleged, is a distraction that shifts focus from what’s wrong with America to what’s wrong with black people. Moynihan—a dyed-in-the-wool liberal Democrat whose principal policy recommendation in his report was to expand public employment for black men—became for many the personification of anti-black sentiments dressed up with a Harvard pedigree.

Those willing to defend him, even while disagreeing with his analysis, were hard to find in the media, the civil-rights establishment, or the Democratic party. So intense was the negative reaction that the White House quickly scuttled a conference on the topic.

There was only one problem with all this. Daniel Patrick Moynihan was mostly right in 1965: right about the Negro family, both in his diagnosis of its condition and in his forecast of the likely implications. Looking across the social landscape today, nearly a half-century after his dire warning, we can see the plain fact that conventional family relationships in the black ghettos have collapsed. What is more, nothing approaching equality of results for the bulk of the black American population has been, or soon will be, achieved. More speculative, but still entirely plausible, is the conclusion that these two undeniable facts are closely connected, with the former a primary reason for the later.

But in 1965, critics were much more interested in what they supposed to be Pat Moynihan’s motives than in the acuity of his analysis. Fast and furiously came the accusations of ill will. A period ensued, lasting nearly two decades, during which little critical assessment of black family life was undertaken, and no policy response was fashioned. The story is by now a familiar one, even to the casual student of American social policy: Discussion of the internal cultural dynamics that might underlie black poverty in America must be left to those with racial standing to talk about such matters. Failing that, such discussion must be avoided altogether.

James T. Patterson tells this story masterfully in Freedom Is Not Enough. Ford Foundation Professor of History emeritus at (my own) Brown University, he has written numerous distinguished works on American social and political history and has won nearly all the prizes the field of history has to offer. I can still recall how much I learned as a young scholar in the early 1980s from my encounter with his wide-ranging America’s Struggle Against Poverty in the Twentieth Century.

Now, in Freedom Is Not Enough, Patterson returns to this terrain of American social policy to study the legacy of Moynihan’s controversial 1965 policy memorandum. Along the way he also provides an engaging if cursory political and intellectual biography of that memorandum’s ambitious and resourceful author—for Moynihan, of course, did not disappear after the firestorm of his memo. He went on to be a Harvard University professor, United Nations ambassador, and four-term United States senator.

After a brief recounting of Moynihan’s early life and professional ascendancy, Freedom Is Not Enough provides a useful account of the genesis of the Moynihan Report, its unhappy reception, and the ensuing political fallout. Along the way Patterson pays close attention to the scholarly and the popular literatures on the subject, and he repeatedly emphasizes Moynihan’s prescience by documenting the ever rising rates of unwed childbearing and single parenthood among black Americans—and in the broader national population as well.

Although Patterson avoids saying so directly, the fiercely negative reactions to Moynihan’s report were a brand of intellectual thuggery that became all too familiar afterward. Smug in their certitude, the thought police in the universities, the government, the editorial pages, and the foundation boardrooms managed, in effect, to censor public discourse on crime, affirmative action, school desegregation, voting rights, antidiscrimination enforcement, urban renewal, welfare policy, and much more.

It even became dangerous to celebrate the success of the civil-rights revolution by noticing the emergence of a new black middle class. The signature tactic was to accuse the politically incorrect of being racists. A willingness to entertain certain hypotheses—that forced busing could cause white flight, that proliferating criminal violence among blacks might retard urban development, that affirmative-action programs could stigmatize their beneficiaries—came to be seen as evidence of a lack of fidelity to progressive values.

Reliance on ad hominem argument grew more commonplace: What kind of person would say such a thing? And the list of unsavory characters lengthened. To Moynihan’s name were added those of Edward Banfield (for his reflections on urban decline), James Q. Wilson (for worrying about rising crime rates), Nathan Glazer (for noticing affirmative action’s racial discrimination), James Coleman (for exposing the limits of school desegregation), Abigail Thernstrom (for questioning racial gerrymandering), and Charles Murray (for suggesting that welfare payments could create dependency among long-term recipients).

I am not saying that these writers were correct in every detail, or that the policies they championed are ones I endorse. Indeed, I have publicly disagreed with many of them over the years. What I am saying is that, like Moynihan, all these social critics made cogent and important arguments that were rooted in often quite astute social observations, and they deserved to be taken seriously. What is more, all these critics have, in one way or another and to varying degrees, been vindicated by the subsequent evolution of events.

The furiously negative reaction to Moynihan’s report—and the subsequent suppression of the issue of family structure and interpersonal behaviors among the poor—was a disaster, both politically and sociologically, for the newly liberated black masses. It reflects what must be seen in retrospect as one of the great failures of that period of American social history.

In Freedom Is Not Enough, Patterson recalls Lyndon Johnson’s bitterness and Richard Nixon’s cynicism over the intellectual inflexibility of the liberal critics. There can be no doubt that the black poor were hurt, not helped, by such bitter resignation and cynical manipulation in the White House. Worse yet, it now seems clear that these were the surface manifestations of a deeper, more debilitating political injury.

Just look at the history of social policy over the past quarter-century. The liberals won most of the battles in the decade or so after 1965, but they have surely lost the war. And it is, in my view, the black poor who have paid the terrible price for this folly. Not that Moynihan was right in every detail, or that he was above criticism and without foibles and vanities. But he was right about the big questions, and it needs to be acknowledged that his political values were progressive to the core.

It must be said that Banfield, Coleman, Wilson, Thernstrom, Murray, Glazer, and others (this list could be considerably lengthened) were equally often right about the larger themes of the late-twentieth-century American social-policy debate: negative unintended consequences from progressive social interventions, limits of liberal reforms to create genuine equality, the importance of social order and the irreplaceable role in maintaining it of the traditional institutions of civil society. Events have consistently borne them out. Gifted and instinctive politicians, from Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton, have moved social policy consistently, and with considerable popular support, in the directions advocated by these critics of the liberal orthodoxy.

Unfortunately—from my perspective, anyway—these conservative critics who have trod the path of Pat Moynihan have not always shared the late senator’s progressive political commitments. Much to Moynihan’s chagrin, it was Charles Murray’s ideas more than his own that emerged victorious in the welfare-reform debate of the 1990s. Likewise, Jim Wilson has exerted more influence on anti-crime policy than any of his detractors, with staggering results in incarceration among the lower ranks of American society. Nat Glazer’s criticisms seem friendly to affirmative action when compared with recent federal court opinions, and Abigail Thernstrom’s critique of racial gerrymandering in the interest of guaranteeing the voting rights of black Americans may yet come to rule the day.

Generally speaking, the ostracized and demonized neoconservatives who gathered around Public Interest magazine in the late 1960s and through the 1970s have swept the table in the public debates. Meanwhile, Lyndon Johnson’s Second Reconstruction has proved an utter failure if understood in the terms Johnson himself invoked in his fabled speech at Howard University in 1965—a speech that Moynihan had a large hand in writing, and that found Johnson declaring as his administration’s goal that “We seek not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.”

With a third of black children now living in poverty, with more than one million black men in jail, with an average deficit of three years in acquired reading skills for black youngsters relative to whites by the end of adolescence, with more than two out of every three black babies born to unwed mothers, with hard-core ghettos in Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, Oakland, St. Louis, Houston, New Orleans, Baltimore, and dozens of other American cities continuing to fester in their marginality and hopelessness—with all of this wreckage so readily at hand, it is clear that we Americans have not yet overcome.

Freedom is definitely not enough. Good sense, even temper, openness to criticism, intellectual honesty, and faith in the good intentions of those with whom one disagrees—these things are also necessary if the legacy of America’s shameful racial past is ever to be superseded. Now, thanks in part to a bygone generation of self-righteous and feckless liberals, we face the prospect that it never will be.

Glenn C. Loury, a member of First Things’ editorial and advisory board, is Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences at Brown University.

Article 18 (Religion & Violence)

I apologize for the length, but it is worth it if you have the chance. The modern western understanding of "religion" as a distinct category from other areas of life is a relatively recent development, yet it is a category that cannot encompass such "religions" as Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. So how does one make sense of the claim that "religion" causes violence as opposed to other political, economic, or social causes? The author offers an interesting perspective on this question. Enjoy.
-NB

Harvard Divinity Bulletin “Does Religion Cause Violence: Behind the common question lies a morass of unclear thinking” Vol. 35, No. 2 & 3 (Spring/Summer 2007)

By William T. Cavanaugh

Everyone knows that religion has a dangerous tendency to promote violence. This story is part of the conventional wisdom of Western societies, and it underlies many of our institutions and policies, from limits on the public role of religion to efforts to promote democracy in the Middle East.

In this essay, I am going to challenge that conventional wisdom, but not in the ways it is usually challenged by people who identify themselves as religious. Such people will sometimes argue that the real motivation behind so-called religious violence is in fact economic and political, not religious. Others will argue that people who do violence are, by definition, not religious. The Crusader is not really a Christian, for example, because he doesn't really understand the meaning of Christianity. I don't think that either of these arguments works. In the first place, it is impossible to separate out religious from economic and political motives in such a way that religious motives are innocent of violence. How could one, for example, separate religion from politics in Islam, when Muslims themselves make no such separation? In the second place, it may be the case that the Crusader has misappropriated the true message of Christ, but one cannot therefore excuse Christianity of all responsibility. Christianity is not primarily a set of doctrines, but a lived historical experience embodied and shaped by the empirically observable actions of Christians. So I have no intention of excusing Christianity or Islam or any other faith system from careful analysis. Given certain conditions, Christianity, Islam, and other faiths can and do contribute to violence.

But what is implied in the conventional wisdom that religion is prone to violence is that Christianity, Islam, and other faiths are more inclined toward violence than ideologies and institutions that are identified as "secular." It is this story that I will challenge here. I will do so in two steps. First, I will show that the division of ideologies and institutions into the categories "religious" and "secular" is an arbitrary and incoherent division. When we examine academic arguments that religion causes violence, we find that what does or does not count as religion is based on subjective and indefensible assumptions. As a result certain kinds of violence are condemned, and others are ignored. Second, I ask, "If the idea that there is something called 'religion' that is more violent than so-called 'secular' phenomena is so incoherent, why is the idea so pervasive?" The answer, I think, is that we in the West find it comforting and ideologically useful. The myth of religious violence helps create a blind spot about the violence of the putatively secular nation-state. We like to believe that the liberal state arose to make peace between warring religious factions. Today, the Western liberal state is charged with the burden of creating peace in the face of the cruel religious fanaticism of the Muslim world. The myth of religious violence promotes a dichotomy between us in the secular West who are rational and peacemaking, and them, the hordes of violent religious fanatics in the Muslim world. Their violence is religious, and therefore irrational and divisive. Our violence, on the other hand, is rational, peacemaking, and necessary. Regrettably, we find ourselves forced to bomb them into the higher rationality.

The Incoherence of the Argument

The English-speaking academic world has been inundated—especially since September 11, 2001—by books and articles attempting to explain why religion has a peculiar tendency toward violence. They come from authors in many different fields: sociology, political science, religious studies, history, theology. I don't have time here to analyze each argument in depth, but I will examine a variety of examples—taken from some of the most prominent books on the subject—of what they all have in common: an inability to find a convincing way to separate religious violence from secular violence.

Charles Kimball's book When Religion Becomes Evil begins with the following claim: "It is somewhat trite, but nevertheless sadly true, to say that more wars have been waged, more people killed, and these days more evil perpetrated in the name of religion than by any other institutional force in human history."1 Kimball apparently considers this claim too trite to need proving, for he makes no attempt to reinforce it with evidence. If one were to try to prove it, one would need a concept of religion that would be at least theoretically separable from other institutional forces over the course of history. Kimball does not identify those rival institutional forces, but an obvious contender might be political institutions: tribes, empires, kingdoms, fiefs, states, and so on. The problem is that religion was not considered something separable from such political institutions until the modern era, and then primarily in the West. What sense could be made of separating out Egyptian or Roman "religion" from the Egyptian or Roman "state"? Is Aztec "politics" to blame for their bloody human sacrifices, or is Aztec "religion" to blame? As Wilfred Cantwell Smith showed in his landmark 1962 book, The Meaning and End of Religion, "religion" as a discrete category of human activity separable from "culture," "politics," and other areas of life is an invention of the modern West. In the course of a detailed historical study of the concept "religion," Smith was compelled to conclude that in premodern Europe there was no significant concept equivalent to what we think of as "religion," and furthermore there is no "closely equivalent concept in any culture that has not been influenced by the modern West."2 Since Smith's book, Russell McCutcheon, Richard King, Derek Peterson, and a host of other scholars have demonstrated how European colonial bureaucrats invented the concept of religion in the course of categorizing non-Western colonized cultures as irrational and antimodern.3

Now that we do have a separate concept of "religion," though, is the concept a coherent one? Jonathan Z. Smith writes: "Religion is solely the creation of the scholar's study . . . . Religion has no independent existence apart from the academy."4 Brian C. Wilson says that the inability to define religion is "almost an article of methodological dogma" in the field of religious studies.5 Timothy Fitzgerald argues that there is no coherent concept of religion; the term should be regarded as a form of mystification and scrapped.6 We have one group of scholars convinced that religion causes violence, and another group of scholars which does not think that there is such a thing as "religion," except as an intellectual construct of highly dubious value.

The former group carries on as if the latter did not exist. Kimball is one of the few who acknowledges the problem, but he dismisses it as merely semantic. Describing how flustered his students become when he asks them to write a definition of "religion," Kimball asserts, "Clearly these bright students know what religion is"; they just have trouble defining it. After all, Kimball assures us, "Religion is a central feature of human life. We all see many indications of it every day, and we all know it when we see it."7 When an academic says such a thing, you should react as you would when a used car salesman says, "Everybody knows this is a good car." The fact is that we don't all know it when we see it. A survey of religious studies literature finds totems, witchcraft, the rights of man, Marxism, liberalism, Japanese tea ceremonies, nationalism, sports, free market ideology, and a host of other institutions and practices treated under the rubric "religion."8 If one tries to limit the definition of religion to belief in God or gods, then certain belief systems that are usually called "religions" are eliminated, such as Theravada Buddhism and Confucianism. If the definition is expanded to include such belief systems, then all sorts of practices, including many that are usually labeled "secular," fall under the definition of religion. Many institutions and ideologies that do not explicitly refer to God or gods function in the same way as those that do. The case for nationalism as a religion, for example, has been made repeatedly from Carlton Hayes's 1960 classic Nationalism: A Religion to more recent works by Peter van der Veer, Talal Asad, Carolyn Marvin, and others.9 Carolyn Marvin argues that "nationalism is the most powerful religion in the United States."10

At this point I can imagine an objection being raised that goes like this: "So the concept of religion has some fuzzy edges. So does every concept. We might not be able to nail down, once and for all and in all cases, what a 'culture' is, or what qualifies as 'politics,' for example, but nevertheless the concepts remain useful. All may not agree on the periphery of these concepts, but sufficient agreement on the center of such concepts makes them practical and functional. Most people know that 'religion' includes Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and the major 'world religions.' Whether or not Buddhism or Confucianism fits is a boundary dispute best left up to scholars who make their living splitting hairs."

This appears to be a commonsense response, but it misses the point rather completely. In the first place, when some scholars question whether the category of religion is useful at all, it is more than a boundary dispute. There are some who do not believe there is a center. In the second place, and much more significantly, the problem with the "religion and violence" arguments is not that their working definitions of religion are too fuzzy. The problem is precisely the opposite. Their implicit definitions of religion are unjustifiably clear about what does and does not qualify as a religion. Certain belief systems, like Islam, are condemned, while certain others, like nationalism, are arbitrarily ignored.

This becomes most apparent when the authors in question attempt to explain why religion is so prone to violence. Although theories vary, we can sort them into three categories: religion is absolutist, religion is divisive, and religion is irrational. Many authors appeal to more than one of these arguments. In the face of evidence that so-called secular ideologies and institutions can be just as absolutist, divisive, or irrational, these authors tend to erect an arbitrary barrier between "secular" and "religious" ideologies and institutions, and ignore the former.

Consider the case of the preeminent historian Martin Marty. In a book on public religion, Politics, Religion, and the Common Good, Marty argues that religion has a particular tendency to be divisive and therefore violent. When it comes to defining what "religion" means, however, Marty lists 17 different definitions of religion, then begs off giving his own definition, since, he says, "[s]cholars will never agree on the definition of religion." Instead, Marty gives a list of five "features" that mark a religion. He then proceeds to show how "politics" displays all five of the same features. Religion focuses our ultimate concern, and so does politics. Religion builds community, and so does politics. Religion appeals to myth and symbol, and politics "mimics" this appeal in devotion to the flag, war memorials, and so on. Religion uses rites and ceremonies, such as circumcision and baptism, and "[p]olitics also depends on rites and ceremonies," even in avowedly secular nations. Religion requires followers to behave in certain ways, and "[p]olitics and governments also demand certain behaviors." In offering five defining features of "religion," and showing how "politics" fits all five, he is trying to show how closely intertwined religion and politics are, but he ends up demolishing any theoretical basis for separating the two. Nevertheless, he continues on to warn of the dangers of religion, while ignoring the violent tendencies of supposedly "secular" politics. For example, Marty cites the many cases of Jehovah's Witnesses who were attacked, beaten, tarred, castrated, and imprisoned in the United States in the 1940s because they believed that followers of Jesus Christ should not salute a flag. One would think that he would draw the obvious conclusion that zealous nationalism can cause violence. Instead, Marty concludes: "it became obvious that religion, which can pose 'us' versus 'them' . . . carries risks and can be perceived by others as dangerous. Religion can cause all kinds of trouble in the public arena."11 For Marty, "religion" refers not to the ritual vowing of allegiance to a flag, but only to the Jehovah's Witnesses refusal to do so.

As you can see, we need not rely only on McCutcheon, Smith, King, Fitzgerald, and the rest to show us that the religious/secular dichotomy is incoherent. Religion-and-violence theorists inevitably undermine their own distinctions. Take, for example, sociologist Mark Juergensmeyer's book Terror in the Mind of God, perhaps the most widely influential academic book on religion and violence. According to Juergensmeyer, religion exacerbates the tendency to divide people into friends and enemies, good and evil, us and them, by ratcheting divisions up to a cosmic level. "What makes religious violence particularly savage and relentless" is that it puts worldly conflicts in a "larger than life" context of "cosmic war." Secular political conflicts—that is, "more rational" conflicts, such as those over land—are of a fundamentally different character than those in which the stakes have been raised by religious absolutism to cosmic proportions. Religious violence differs from secular violence in that it is symbolic, absolutist, and unrestrained by historical time.12

However, keeping the notion of cosmic war separate from secular political war is impossible on Juergensmeyer's own terms. Juergensmeyer undermines this distinction in the course of his own analysis. For example, what he says about cosmic war is virtually indistinguishable from what he says about war in general:

Looking closely at the notion of war, one is confronted with the idea of dichotomous opposition on an absolute scale. . . . War suggests an all-or-nothing struggle against an enemy whom one assumes to be determined to destroy. No compromise is deemed possible. The very existence of the opponent is a threat, and until the enemy is either crushed or contained, one's own existence cannot be secure. What is striking about a martial attitude is the certainty of one's position and the willingness to defend it, or impose it on others, to the end.

Such certitude on the part of one side may be regarded as noble by those whose sympathies lie with it and dangerous by those who do not. But either way it is not rational.13

War provides an excuse not to compromise. In other words, "War provides a reason to be violent. This is true even if the worldly issues at heart in the dispute do not seem to warrant such a ferocious position." The division between mundane secular war and cosmic war vanishes as fast as it was constructed. According to Juergensmeyer, war itself is a "worldview"; indeed, "The concept of war provides cosmology, history, and eschatology and offers the reins of political control." "Like the rituals provided by religious traditions, warfare is a participatory drama that exemplifies—and thus explains—the most profound aspects of life." Here, war itself is a kind of religious practice.

At times Juergensmeyer admits the difficulty of separating religious violence from mere political violence. "Much of what I have said about religious terrorism in this book may be applied to other forms of political violence—especially those that are ideological and ethnic in nature."14 In Juergensmeyer's earlier book, The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State, he writes: "Secular nationalism, like religion, embraces what one scholar calls 'a doctrine of destiny.' One can take this way of looking at secular nationalism a step further and state flatly . . . that secular nationalism is 'a religion.' "15 These are important concessions. If true, however, they subvert the entire basis of his argument, which is the sharp divide between religious and secular violence.

Other theorists of religion and violence make similar admissions. Kimball, for example, says in passing that "blind religious zealotry is similar to unfettered nationalism," and, indeed, nationalism would seem to fit—at times—all five of Kimball's "warning signs" for when religion turns evil: absolute truth claims, blind obedience, establishment of ideal times, ends justifying means, and the declaration of holy war. The last one would seem to preclude secular ideologies, but as Kimball himself points out, the United States regularly invokes a "cosmic dualism" in its war on terror.16 Political theorist Bhikhu Parekh similarly undermines his own point in his article on religious violence. According to Parekh,

Although religion can make a valuable contribution to political life, it can also be a pernicious influence, as liberals rightly highlight. It is often absolutist, self-righteous, arrogant, dogmatic, and impatient of compromise. It arouses powerful and sometimes irrational impulses and can easily destabilize society, cause political havoc, and create a veritable hell on earth. . . . It often breeds intolerance of other religions as well as of internal dissent, and has a propensity towards violence.17

Parekh does not define religion, but assumes the validity of the religious/secular distinction. Nevertheless, he admits that "several secular ideologies, such as some varieties of Marxism, conservatism, and even liberalism have a quasi-religious orientation and form, and conversely formally religious languages sometimes have a secular content, so that the dividing line between a secular and a religious language is sometimes difficult to draw."18 If this is true, where does it leave his searing indictment of the dangers peculiarly inherent to religion? Powerful irrational impulses are popping up all over, including in liberalism itself, forcing the creation of the category "quasi-religious" to try somehow to corral them all back under the heading of "religion." But if liberalism—which is based on the distinction between religion and the secular—is itself a kind of religion, then the religious/secular distinction crumbles into a heap of contradictions.

For some religion-and-violence theorists, the contradictions are resolved by openly expanding the definition of "religion" to include ideologies and practices that are usually called "secular." In his book Why People Do Bad Things in the Name of Religion, religious studies scholar Richard Wentz blames violence on absolutism. People create absolutes out of fear of their own limitations. Absolutes are projections of a fictional limited self, and people react with violence when others do not accept them. Religion has a peculiar tendency toward absolutism, says Wentz, but he casts a very wide net when considering religion. Wentz believes that religiousness is an inescapable universal human characteristic displayed even by those who reject what is called "organized religion." Faith in technology, secular humanism, consumerism, football fanaticism, and a host of other worldviews can be counted as religions, too. Wentz is compelled to conclude, rather lamely, "Perhaps all of us do bad things in the name of (or as a representative of) religion."19

Wentz should be commended for his consistency in not trying to erect an artificial division between "religious" and "secular" types of absolutism. The price of consistency, however, is that he evacuates his own argument of explanatory force or usefulness. The word "religion" in the title of his book—Why People Do Bad Things in the Name of Religion—ends up meaning anything people do that gives their lives order and meaning. A more economical title for his book would have been Why People Do Bad Things. The term "religion" is so broad that it serves no useful analytical purpose.

At this point, the religion-and-violence theorist might try to salvage the argument by saying something like this: "Surely secular ideologies such as nationalism can get out of hand, but religion has a much greater tendency toward fanaticism because the object of its truth claims is absolute in ways that secular claims are not. The capitalist knows that money is just a human creation, the liberal democrat is modest about what can be known beyond human experience, the nationalist knows that a country is made of land and mortal people, but the religious believer puts faith in a god or gods or at least a transcendent reality that lays claim to absolute validity. It is this absolutism that makes obedience blind and causes the believer to subjugate all means to a transcendent end."

The problem with this argument is that what counts as "absolute" is decided a priori and is immune to empirical testing. It is based on theological descriptions of beliefs and not on observation of the believers' behavior. Of course Christian orthodoxy would make the theological claim that God is absolute in a way that nothing else is. The problem is that humans are constantly tempted toward idolatry, to putting what is merely relative in the place of God. It is not enough, therefore, to claim that worship of God is absolutist. The real question is, what god is actually being worshiped?

But surely, the objection might go, nobody really thinks the flag or the nation or money or sports idols are their "gods"—that is just a metaphor. However, the question is not simply one of belief, but of behavior. If a person claims to believe in the Christian God but never gets off the couch on Sunday morning and spends the rest of the week in obsessive pursuit of profit in the bond market, then what is "absolute" in that person's life in a functional sense is probably not the Christian God. Matthew 6:24 personifies Mammon as a rival god, not in the conviction that such a divine being really exists, but from the empirical observation that people have a tendency to treat all sorts of things as absolutes.

Suppose we apply an empirical test to the question of absolutism. "Absolute" is itself a vague term, but in the "religion and violence" arguments it appears to indicate the tendency to take something so seriously that violence results. The most relevant empirically testable definition of "absolute," then, would be "that for which one is willing to kill." This test has the advantage of covering behavior, and not simply what one claims to believe. Now let us ask the following two questions: What percentage of Americans who identify themselves as Christians would be willing to kill for their Christian faith? What percentage would be willing to kill for their country? Whether we attempt to answer these questions by survey or by observing American Christians' behavior in wartime, it seems clear that, at least among American Christians, the nation-state is subject to far more absolutist fervor than Christianity. For most American Christians, even public evangelization is considered to be in poor taste, and yet most endorse organized slaughter on behalf of the nation as sometimes necessary and often laudable. In other countries or other traditions the results of this test might be very different. The point is that such empirical testing is of far more usefulness than general theories about the violence of "religion."

We must conclude that there is no coherent way to isolate "religious" ideologies with a peculiar tendency toward violence from their tamer "secular" counterparts. So-called secular ideologies and institutions like nationalism and liberalism can be just as absolutist, divisive, and irrational as so-called religion. People kill for all sorts of things. An adequate approach to the problem would be resolutely empirical: under what conditions do certain beliefs and practices—jihad, the "invisible hand" of the market, the sacrificial atonement of Christ, the role of the United States as worldwide liberator—turn violent? The point is not simply that "secular" violence should be given equal attention to "religious" violence. The point is that the distinction between "secular" and "religious" violence is unhelpful, misleading, and mystifying, and should be avoided altogether.

What Is the Argument For?

If the conventional wisdom that religion causes violence is so incoherent, why is it so prevalent? I believe it is because we in the West find it useful. In domestic politics, it serves to silence representatives of certain kinds of faiths in the public sphere. The story is told repeatedly that the liberal state has learned to tame the dangerous divisiveness of contending religious beliefs by reducing them to essentially private affairs. In foreign policy, the conventional wisdom helps reinforce and justify Western attitudes and policies toward the non-Western world, especially Muslims, whose primary point of difference with the West is their stubborn refusal to tame religious passions in the public sphere. "We in the West long ago learned the sobering lessons of religious warfare and have moved toward secularization. The liberal nation-state is essentially a peacemaker. Now we only seek to share the blessings of peace with the Muslim world. Regrettably, because of their stubborn fanaticism, it is sometimes necessary to bomb them into liberal democracy." In other words, the myth of religious violence establishes a reassuring dichotomy between their violence—which is absolutist, divisive, and irrational—and our violence—which is modest, unitive, and rational.

The myth of religious violence marks the "clash of civilizations" worldview that attributes Muslims' animosity toward the West to their inability to learn the lessons of history and remove the baneful influence of religion from politics. Mark Juergensmeyer, for example, sets up a "new Cold War" pitting the "resurgence of parochial identities" over against "the secular West." "Like the old Cold War, the confrontation between these new forms of culture-based politics and the secular state is global in its scope, binary in its opposition, occasionally violent, and essentially a difference of ideologies." Although he tries to avoid demonizing "religious nationalists," Juergensmeyer sees them as essentially "anti-modern." The particular ferocity of religious nationalism comes from the "special relationship between religion and violence." The question then becomes "whether religious nationalism can be made compatible with secular nationalism's great virtues: tolerance, respect for human rights, and freedom of expression." Given the war between "reason and religion," however, Juergensmeyer is not optimistic; "there is ultimately no satisfactory compromise on an ideological level between religious and secular nationalism."20

Despite its incoherence, the idea that religion is prone to violence thus enforces a binary opposition between "the secular West" and a religious Other who is essentially irrational and violent. The conflict becomes explicable in terms of the essential qualities of the two opponents, not in terms of actual historical encounters. So, for example, Juergensmeyer attempts to explain the animosity of the religious Other toward America:

Why is America the enemy? This question is hard for observers of international politics to answer, and harder still for ordinary Americans to fathom. Many have watched with horror as their compatriots and symbols of their country have been destroyed by people whom they do not know, from cultures they can scarcely identify on a global atlas, and for reasons that do not seem readily apparent.21

Nevertheless, Juergensmeyer is able to come up with four reasons "from the frames of reference" of America's enemies. First, America often finds itself cast as a "secondary enemy." "In its role as trading partner and political ally, America has a vested interest in shoring up the stability of regimes around the world. This has often put the United States in the unhappy position of being a defender and promoter of secular governments regarded by their religious opponents as primary foes." Juergensmeyer cites as an example the case of Iran, where "America was tarred by its association with the shah." The second reason often given is that America is the main source of "modern culture," which includes cultural products that others regard as immoral. Third, corporations that trade internationally tend to be based in the United States. Fourth and finally, the fear of globalization has led to a "paranoid vision of American leaders' global designs."

Juergensmeyer acknowledges, "Like all stereotypes, each of these characterizations holds a certain amount of truth." The fall of the Soviet Union has left the United States as the only military superpower, and therefore "an easy target for blame when people have felt that their lives were going askew or were being controlled by forces they could not readily see. Yet, to dislike America is one thing; to regard it as a cosmic enemy is quite another." The main problem, according to Juergensmeyer, is "satanization," that is, taking a simple opponent and casting it as a superhuman enemy in a cosmic war. Osama bin Laden, for example, had inflated America into a "mythic monster."22

The problem with Juergensmeyer's analysis is not just its sanitized account of colonial history, where the United States just happens to find itself associated with bad people. The problem is that history is subordinated to an essentialist account of "religion" in which the religious Others cannot seem to deal rationally with world events. They employ guilt by association. They have paranoid visions of globalization. They stereotype, and blame easy targets, when their lives are disrupted by forces they do not understand. They blow simple oppositions up into cosmic proportions. Understanding Muslim hostility toward America therefore does not require careful scrutiny of America's historical dealings with the Muslim world. Rather, Juergensmeyer turns our attention to the tendency of such "religious" actors to misunderstand such historical events, to blow them out of proportion. Understanding Iranian Shi'ite militancy does not seem to require careful examination of U.S. support for overthrowing Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 and for the shah's 26-year reign of terror that was to follow. Instead, Juergensmeyer puzzles over why "religious" actors project such mundane things as torture and coups and oil trading into factors in a cosmic war. Juergensmeyer's analysis is comforting for us in the West because it creates a blind spot regarding our own history of violence. It calls attention to anticolonial violence, labeled "religious," and calls attention away from colonial violence, labeled "secular."

The argument that religion is prone to violence is a significant component in the construction of an opposition between "the West and the rest," as Samuel Huntington puts it.23 Huntington's famous thesis about the "clash of civilizations" was first put forward by Bernard Lewis in an article entitled "The Roots of Muslim Rage": "It should by now be clear that we are facing a mood and a movement far transcending the level of issues and policies and the governments that pursue them. This is no less than a clash of civilizations—the perhaps irrational but surely historic reactions of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both."24 As in Juergensmeyer, actual historical issues and policies and events are transcended by a consideration of the irrationality of the Muslim response to the West. The West is a monolithic reality representing modernity, which necessarily includes secularity and rationality, while the Muslim world is an equally monolithic reality which is ancient, that is, lagging behind modernity, because of its essentially religious and irrational character. This opposition of rational and irrational, secular and religious, Western and Muslim is not simply descriptive, but helps to create the opposition that it purports to describe. As Roxanne Euben writes in her study of Islamic fundamentalism, this opposition is part of a larger Enlightenment narrative in which defining reason requires its irrational other:

[E]mbedded in the Enlightenment's (re-)definition and elevation of reason is the creation and subjection of an irrational counterpart: along with the emergence of reason as both the instrument and essence of human achievement, the irrational came to be defined primarily in opposition to what such thinkers saw as the truths of their own distinctive historical epoch. If they were the voices of modernity, freedom, liberation, happiness, reason, nobility, and even natural passion, the irrational was all that came before: tyranny, servility to dogma, self-abnegation, superstition, and false religion. Thus the irrational came to mean the domination of religion in the historical period that preceded it.25

The problem with grafting Islamic fundamentalism into this narrative, according to Euben, is that it is incapable of understanding the appeal of fundamentalism on its own terms. It dismisses rather than explains.26 It also exacerbates the enmity that it purports to describe. As Emran Qureshi and Michael Sells put it, "Those who proclaim such a clash of civilizations, speaking for the West or for Islam, exhibit the characteristics of fundamentalism: the assumption of a static essence, knowable immediately, of each civilization, the ability to ignore history and tradition, and the desire to lead the ideological battle on behalf of one of the clashing civilizations."27

In other words, the opposition of "religious" violence to "secular" peaceableness can lend itself to the justification of violence. In the book Terror and Liberalism, The New Republic contributing editor Paul Berman's call for a "liberal war of liberation" to be "fought around the world" is based on the contrast between liberalism and what he calls the "mad" ideology of Islamism.28 Similarly, Andrew Sullivan, in a New York Times Magazine article entitled "This Is a Religious War," justifies war against radical Islam on epistemological grounds. He labels it a "religious war," but not in the sense of Islam versus Christianity and Judaism. It is, rather, radical Islam versus Western-style "individual faith and pluralism." The problem with the Islamic world seems to be too much public faith, a loyalty to an absolute that excludes accommodation to other realities: "If faith is that strong, and it dictates a choice between action or eternal damnation, then violence can easily be justified."29

At root, the problem is epistemological. According to Sullivan, it took Western Christians centuries of bloody "religious wars" to realize "the futility of fighting to the death over something beyond human understanding and so immune to any definitive resolution." The problem with religion is that authoritative truth is simply not available to us mortals in any form that will produce consensus rather than division. Locke, therefore, emerges as Sullivan's hero, for it was Locke who recognized the limits of human understanding of revelation and enshrined those limits in a political theory. Locke and the founding fathers saved us from the curse of killing in the name of religion. "What the founders and Locke were saying was that the ultimate claims of religion should simply not be allowed to interfere with political and religious freedom."30

In theory, we have the opposition of a cruel fanaticism with a modest and peaceloving tolerance. However, Sullivan's epistemological modesty applies only to the command of God and not to the absolute superiority of our political and cultural system over theirs. According to Sullivan, "We are fighting for the universal principles of our Constitution." Universal knowledge is available to us after all, and it underwrites the "epic battle" we are currently waging against fundamentalisms of all kinds. Sullivan is willing to gird himself with the language of a warrior and underwrite U.S. military adventures in the Middle East in the name of his secular faith. Sullivan entitles his piece "This Is a Religious War," though the irony seems to elude him. On the surface, the myth of religious violence establishes a dichotomy between our peaceloving secular reasonableness and their irrational religious fanaticism. Under the surface often lies an absolute "religious" devotion to the American vision of a hegemonic liberalism that underwrites the necessity of using violence to impose this vision on the Muslim other.

Sam Harris's book about the violence of religion, The End of Faith, dramatically illustrates this double standard. Harris condemns the irrational religious torture of witches, but provides his own argument for torturing terrorists. Harris's book is charged with the conviction that the secular West cannot reason with Muslims, but must deal with them by force. In a chapter entitled "The Problem with Islam," Harris writes: "In our dialogue with the Muslim world, we are confronted by people who hold beliefs for which there is no rational justification and which therefore cannot even be discussed, and yet these are the very beliefs that underlie many of the demands they are likely to make upon us." This is especially a problem if such people gain access to nuclear weapons. "There is little possibility of our having a cold war with an Islamist regime armed with long-range nuclear weapons. . . . In such a situation, the only thing likely to ensure our survival may be a nuclear first strike of our own. Needless to say, this would be an unthinkable crime—as it would kill tens of millions of innocent civilians in a single day—but it may be the only course of action available to us, given what Islamists believe." Muslims then would likely misinterpret this act of "self-defense" as a genocidal crusade, thus plunging the world into nuclear holocaust. "All of this is perfectly insane, of course: I have just described a plausible scenario in which much of the world's population could be annihilated on account of religious ideas that belong on the same shelf with Batman, the philosopher's stone, and unicorns."

In other words, if we have to slaughter millions through a nuclear first strike, it will be the fault of the Muslims and their crazy religious beliefs. Before we get to that point, Harris continues, we must encourage civil society in Islamic countries, but we cannot trust them to vote it in. "It seems all but certain that some form of benign dictatorship will generally be necessary to bridge the gap. But benignity is the key—and if it cannot emerge from within a state, it must be imposed from without. The means of such imposition are necessarily crude: they amount to economic isolation, military intervention (whether open or covert), or some combination of both. While this may seem an exceedingly arrogant doctrine to espouse, it appears we have no alternatives."31

Harris's book is a particularly blunt version of this type of justification for neocolonial intervention, but he is by no means isolated. His book is enthusiastically endorsed by such academic superstars as Alan Dershowitz, Richard Dawkins, and Peter Singer. Indeed, Harris's logic is little different in practice from the Bush Doctrine, which says that America has access to liberal values that are "right and true for every person, in every society," that we must use our power to promote such values "on every continent," and that America will take preemptive military action if necessary to promote such values.32 Today, the U.S. military is attempting, through the massive use of violence, to liberate Iraq from religious violence. It is an inherently contradictory effort, and its every failure will be attributed in part to the pernicious influence of religion and its tendency toward violence. If we really wish to understand its failure, however, we will need to question the very myth of religious violence on which such military adventures depend.

Notes
Charles Kimball, When Religion Becomes Evil (HarperSanFrancisco, 2002), 1.
Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion (Macmillan, 1962), 19.
See, for example, Russell McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia (Oxford University Press, 1997); Richard King, Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India, and 'The Mystic East' (Routledge, 1999); The Invention of Religion: Rethinking Belief in Politics and History, ed. Derek Peterson and Darren Walhof (Rutgers University Press, 2003).
Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (University of Chicago Press, 1982), xi.
Brian C. Wilson, "From the Lexical to the Polythetic: A Brief History of the Definition of Religion," in What Is Religion? Origins, Definitions, and Explanations (Brill, 1998).
Timothy Fitzgerald, The Ideology of Religious Studies (Oxford University Press, 2000).
Kimball, When Religion Becomes Evil, 15.
See Fitzgerald, Ideology of Religious Studies, 17.
Carlton Hayes, Nationalism: A Religion (Macmillan, 1960); Peter van der Veer, "The Moral State: Religion, Nation, and Empire in Victorian Britain and British India," in Nation and Religion: Perspectives on Europe and Asia, ed. Peter van der Veer and Hartmut Lehmann (Princeton University Press, 1999), 3-9; Talal Asad, "Religion, Nation-state, Secularism," in Nation and Religion, 178-91; Carolyn Marvin and David W. Ingle, Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Flag (Cambridge University Press, 1999).
Carolyn Marvin and David W. Ingle, "Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Revisiting Civil Religion," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 64, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 768.
Martin Marty, with Jonathan Moore, Politics, Religion, and the Common Good: Advancing a Distinctly American Conversation About Religion's Role in Our Shared Life (Jossey-Bass Publishers, 2000), 25-26, 10-14, 24.
Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (University of California Press, 2000), 146, 153, 154, 217.
Ibid., 148-49.
Ibid., 149, 155, 217.
Mark Juergensmeyer, The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State (University of California Press, 1993), 15.
Kimball, When Religion Becomes Evil, 38, 36.
Bhikhu Parekh, "The Voice of Religion in Political Discourse," in Religion, Politics, and Peace, ed. Leroy Rouner (University of Notre Dame Press, 1999), 72.
Ibid., 74.
Richard E. Wentz, Why People Do Bad Things in the Name of Religion (Mercer University Press, 1993), 37.
Juergensmeyer, The New Cold War? 1-2, 5, 8, 201.
Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God, 179.
Ibid., 180, 181, 182.
Samuel Huntington, "If Not Civilizations, What?" Foreign Affairs 72 (November/December 1993): 192.
Bernard Lewis, "The Roots of Muslim Rage," Atlantic Monthly, September 1990, 60.
Roxanne L. Euben, Enemy in the Mirror: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Limits of Modern Rationalism (Princeton University Press, 1999), 34.
Ibid., 14–15.
"Introduction: Constructing the Muslim Enemy," in The New Crusades: Constructing the Muslim Enemy, ed. Emran Qureshi and Michael A. Sells (Columbia University Press, 2003), 28-29.
Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism (W. W. Norton, 2003), 191, 182. Berman takes issue with Huntington's "clash" thesis, saying that only Islamists see the conflict in such epic terms. "They also looked upon every new event around the world as a stage in Judaism's cosmic struggle against Islam. Their ideology was mad. In wars between liberalism and totalitarianism, the totalitarian picture of the war is always mad."
Andrew Sullivan, "This Is a Religious War," New York Times Magazine, October 7, 2001, 44, 47.
Ibid., 46-47, 53.
Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (W. W. Norton, 2004), 87-92, 192-99, 128-29, 151.
The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, September 2002, prologue and p. 15.
William t. cavanaugh is Associate Professor of Theology at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. He is the author, most recently, of Theopolitical Imagination: Discovering the Liturgy as a Political Act in an Age of Global Consumerism. This essay was presented earlier this year as part of a Lenten series sponsored by Harvard's Memorial Church and Episcopal chaplaincy.