No Comparison: Traditionalists In U.S. Don’t Mirror Radical Muslims

Investor's Business Daily | 10/08/01 | Michael Medved / For Investor's Business Daily

[TimSkalaBim]

The Islamic fanatics who chant “death to America” focus much of their hatred on our freewheeling popular culture. They condemn the corrupting influence of the entertainment industry in terms that oddly echo the denunciations of Hollywood by U.S. cultural conservatives.

Noting those echoes, an old friend suggested, only half in jest, that I ought to feel some sympathy for the Taliban. “After all,” he told me, “they worry about the influence of Hollywood, and you worry about the influence of Hollywood. They don’t like the messages in pop music, and you don’t like the messages in pop music. They banned TV in their country, and you banned TV in your house. I know you don’t want to kill people or hide your wife in a burlap bag, but you’ve got to admit that in some ways, you’re really on their side.”

Key Differences

I admit nothing of the kind. The determination to resist the more wretched excesses of the entertainment-industrial complex does not qualify any U.S. traditionalist as a closet colleague of Islamic radicals. Those who make the case for Judeo-Christian values don’t call for death to their opponents or state “purification” sweeps.

Instead, they emphasize personal choice and alternative communities. Today’s materialistic, secular America hosts scores of vibrant religious subcultures that reject the relativistic values of academic and media elites.

Mormons in Utah, Chassidim in New York, Amish in Pennsylvania and millions upon millions of Evangelicals and conservative Catholics live in communities that defy all trendy secular norms. The estimated number of home-schooled children in the U.S. now approaches 2 million. Promise Keepers, Focus on the Family and many other organizations draw millions of members and supporters to their message of moral renewal.

The American marketplace of ideas has also provided a nourishing environment for Muslims. Islam represents one of the nation’s fastest-growing faiths. Ironically enough, Muslims in America experience less state interference with their religious life than do their co-religionists in any of the Islamic countries of the Middle East. Why, then, do so many Muslim traditionalists around the world feel such intense hatred for the U.S.?

Going back to Mohammed himself in the seventh century, the Islamic ideal of a just society involves an authoritarian structure of religious rules. Muslim history never sanctioned a clear division between spiritual and governmental authority. From this point of view, the most objectionable aspect of America isn’t the imposition of decadent standards on everyone, but the failure to impose any consistent standards on anyone.

A Divergent Path

America has developed in the opposite direction from the highly centralized, theocratic Islamic model. The Puritans who settled Massachusetts attempted to impose strict religious rules on a local basis, but they came to the New World to escape the concentrated state power of the Church of England. Quakers, Catholics, Presbyterians, Jews, Lutherans and others who followed them in colonial America nourished the same desire to cultivate their own independent religious communities.

The ancient Islamic model involves a godly state enforcing righteousness; American reality provides a secular state in which religious believers remain free to choose righteousness in their own way. The vigorous religious pluralism of our country has always, and effortlessly, defeated any fitful attempts to impose a single set of faith-based standards.

Even the most outspoken Christian fundamentalists can applaud that pluralism while working for a culture more respectful of religious values in general. If nothing else, the current crisis should clarify the dramatically divergent approaches to pursuing a godly agenda by Islamic and Judeo-Christian traditionalists. Islamic societies emphasize state power as the source of all justice and righteousness, while we celebrate our continuing freedom to make – and live – right choices according to individual conscience.

My hostility to television and its messages has never led me to call for police action to smash every TV set in the country. It’s easier – and better – to revel in the glorious liberty that allows our family to control the flow of media messages into our own home, and the stubborn American spirit of individualism that enables me to persevere in spite of the ridicule that may provoke.

Michael Medved hosts a nationally syndicated radio talk show.