Radically confused

By JAY AMBROSE
Rosie O'Donnell, an activist on behalf of lesbians and gays, said on the TV show "The View" that "radical Christians" were as bad as "radical Muslims," apparently forgetting, if she ever knew, that even some non-radical Muslims stone gays _ that is, throw rocks against their flesh until they are bloody, dizzy, in awful pain and finally dead.

In some Muslim lands, they do that to women who have sex outside marriage, too, or maybe just encourage them to cut their throats, and if you convert from Islam to Christianity _ remember Abdul Rahman in Afghanistan and his close call? _ they will execute you unless maybe the United States is doing all it can as a major power to prevent the law-sanctioned atrocity.

Keep in mind that we aren't talking about the radical, fascistic Muslims yet. When we get to that topic, we find true-believing martyrs running around with bombs tucked under their shirts, all the better to blow thousands of innocent little boys and girls, their mothers and others to smithereens as they go about their daily lives. Even though I have explored the headlines, I find no reports of "Christian radicals" doing that.

It's true, we all know, that some pathological, morally demented anti-abortion fanatics have engaged in violence in this country, killing a physician and a police officer as recently as 1998. But they are a relative handful of people, and in no way representative of a significant, death-dealing current within a religious faith, as are the Muslim jihadists now aiming to destroy a civilization that gave us political liberty, the art of Michelangelo, the drama of Shakespeare, the physics of Newton and Einstein, universities, far-reaching medical advances, technological brilliance and the historically unprecedented prosperity of modern times.

O'Donnell's examples of recent Christian malfeasance included the war in Iraq, as if that war somehow grew out of extreme theological mulling instead of secular policy calculations undertaken by a host of officials trying to deal with hard, cold realities. You can reasonably argue they were mistaken in their conclusions, but not that those conclusions derived from some shared religious conviction, radical or otherwise.

What we have in O'Donnell is a thoughtless, uninformed and deeply prejudiced point of view, hardly atypical of mouthy show-biz types whose voices have a much further reach than their intellects. More disturbing, however, is that some highly educated Americans are only fractionally less confused, if that.

A few months back, I sat across a dinner table from a college professor who first told us how scary he found polls showing that large numbers of Americans believe in the Rapture and later, in a discussion of religious violence, contended that nothing in the story of humankind matched the slaughter perpetrated by Christian purpose in the 20th century.

I myself find it more than peculiar for anyone to suppose that divinely chosen folks among us will be snatched to heaven some rapturous day while everyone else wanders around trying to figure out what happened to them. Yet even if the polls are right that a sizable minority of Christians hold to that view, I see no threat in the fact nearly as great as another revelation of polling, namely that most students at the nation's top schools _ dominated by liberal, faith-skeptical faculties _ are woefully ignorant about American history. Tomorrow's leaders may well know more about Beavis and Butthead than James Madison's part in framing the Constitution.

Meanwhile, the sources of most 20th-century mayhem _ World War I and World War II, Hitler's extra-war evil in Germany, Stalin's in the Soviet Union and Mao's in China _ were anything but campaigns initiated in the name of Christ. Unlike the Christian crusades, the Moorish invasion of Spain and Portugal or the military conquests of the Ottoman Turks, those wars and instances of genocide did not come about out of religious motivation.

The Christian-bashing opinions emanating from O'Donnell, the professor and countless others on the left seem to me the work of politically correct cultural relativism, a paranoia manifested in wholly unjustified worries about an evolving American "theocracy" and even downright bigotry about evangelicals, actually a sweet-tempered, mild group of people in my experience. Their greatest crime as far as I can tell is wanting to participate peacefully as citizens in this democracy of ours, not destroy it and spit on it and kill as many of us as possible, as the radical Muslims would like.

(Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, is a columnist living in Colorado. He can be reached at SpeaktoJay(at)aol.com.)