Douthat is considered a “reasonable conservative” in liberal circles, but this column is downright nutty. It’s frightening enough that someone who attended school in a city as international as Boston could endorse the idea of viewing Muslims worldwide as a “foe” of Christianity.  But consider the fact that there are probably a number of people in charge of making foreign policy decisions in the last administration, who saw Christianity and Islam as “foes” and acted or advised accordingly. In fact, the march to war in Iraq despite the lack of evidence of weapons of mass destruction, the false linkage of Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, and even the argument that the use of torture is justified against Muslims are easily explained by the worldview of a person who sees Christianity and Islam as being “foes,” particularly if one sees America as a “Christian Nation.”*

I mean, what? Other than his willful misinterpretation of the word “foe,” I challenge Serwer to identify anything at all in Douthat’s column that endorses religious conflict between Muslims and Christians.

It’s true that Catholicism and Islam compete for spiritual converts. But this isn’t Lepanto or the Siege of Jerusalem. It’s a straightforward case of religious pluralism, with both faiths striving to attract adherents through persuasion and institutional expansion. Are secularists like Serwer threatened by a robust public competition between Islam and Christianity? And if so, why?

The assumption that seems to undergird this line of thinking is that religious leaders should always avoid public agreement. This strikes me as both hopelessly naive and antithetical to the very idea of religious faith. Islam and Catholicism are spiritual cousins, but both faiths also have serious doctrinal differences. Denying these distinctions empties religion of any meaning other than some vague, Unitarian-lite belief in a higher power, which does serious violence to two venerable theological traditions.

*I also think Bush deserves some credit for distancing his (admittedly disastrous) foreign policy from any religious conflict.

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“The notion that differences of opinion between the Catholic church and U.S. law will somehow render Catholic judicial nominees unconfirmable is demonstrably ludicrous. In addition to opposing gay marriage, the Catholic church also opposes divorce, birth control, abortion, and any number of other things that are permitted by U.S. law. Indeed, the Supreme Court has recognized a constitutional right to many of these activities. And yet, somehow, even after those decisions, we’ve gone from having one Catholic Supreme Court justice in the 1980s to having five Catholic justices on the current Court.” ~ the Anonymous Liberal

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Mr. Gingrich’s brain is a 24/7 phenomenon: Half the time, you sit there just dazzled, the other half you want to stuff a baguette-end in his mouth to make him shut up. In the old days, the church would have assigned their best man to the case—a Fulton Sheen. When Clare Boothe Luce, one of the notable Catholic converts of her day, was asked whom she wanted to hear her first confession, she replied, “Bring me someone who has seen the rise and fall of empires!” They don’t make converts like that anymore. Or maybe they do.

Gingrich’s intellectual pretensions have been amply documented elsewhere, but I’m not particularly interested in assessing the man’s policy-making acumen. Suffice it to say that Gingrich clearly considers himself a leading public thinker and seems to want the rest of us to share in that opinion (fat chance, Mr. Speaker – I suffered through one of your interminable commencement addresses!). So I wonder if Gingrich’s assimilation into a rich and venerable religious tradition is a bit of intellectual signaling – another attempt to bolster his ideological street cred by tying himself to the branch of Christianity most closely associated with intellectual conservatism.

If so, it’s an odd role reversal. A few decades ago, a devout Quaker (Dick Nixon) enjoyed a decisive religious advantage over JFK’s casual Catholicism. Now, however, Catholics are firmly entrenched at the top of America’s socio-economic hierarchy, and it’s evangelical Protestants like Mike Huckabee that scare off mainstream voters.

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“The church is not simply the prolife movement, and to the extent that every interaction between the church and our political system is held hostage to the demands of the most confrontational elements of that movement, the church’s social message, including its message about abortion, will be marginalized and ineffectual. The respect and honor owed the office of the president does not depend on any particular president’s merits (as Buckley often reminded his liberal critics). That respect is, among other things, a powerful affirmation of the willingness of Americans to live together peacefully, despite profound disagreement. Notre Dame’s invitation to President Obama is perhaps best understood in that light.”

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