Posted by Damozel | Donny Deutsch and other Jewish people shouldn't assume that Ann Coulter's views on
Christianity are held by most Christians or even Ann Coulter herself. I cherish the madness of Ann Coulter and all she has done to promote the cause of liberalism, and I don't want to be uncharitable, but I still boggle every time she claims to be espousing the religion of Jesus. I am pretty familiar with the Gospels, and I'm pretty sure that Christ wouldn't have endorsed certain statements attributed to Coulter (which I gleaned from this October 2001 column at the Washington Monthly.
- If those kids had been carrying guns they would have gunned down this one [child] gunman. ... Don't pray. Learn to use guns."---Politically Incorrect, 12/18/97
- "[Clinton] masturbates in the sinks."---Rivera Live 8/2/99
- "God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the trees. God said, 'Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It's yours.'"---Hannity & Colmes, 6/20/01
- To a disabled Vietnam vet: "People like you caused us to lose that war."---MSNBC
- "I think [women] should be armed but should not [be allowed to] vote."---Politically Incorrect, 2/26/01
- "If you don't hate Clinton and the people who labored to keep him in office, you don't love your country."---George, 7/99
- "It's enough [to be impeached] for the president to be a pervert."---The Case Against Bill Clinton, Coulter's 1998 book.
- Let's say I go out every night, I meet a guy and have sex with him. Good for me. I'm not married."---Rivera Live 6/7/00
- "I think we had enough laws about the turn-of-the-century. We don't need any more." Asked how far back would she go to repeal laws, she replied, "Well, before the New Deal...[The Emancipation Proclamation] would be a good start."---Politically Incorrect 5/7/97
- "The presumption of innocence only means you don't go right to jail."---Hannity & Colmes 8/24/01
- "I have to say I'm all for public flogging. One type of criminal that a public humiliation might work particularly well with are the juvenile delinquents, a lot of whom consider it a badge of honor to be sent to juvenile detention. And it might not be such a cool thing in the 'hood to be flogged publicly."---MSNBC 3/22/97
- "The thing I like about Bush is I think he hates liberals."---Washington Post 8/1/00
- On Rep. Christopher Shays ... in deciding whether to run against him as a Libertarian candidate: "I really want to hurt him. I want him to feel pain."---Hartford Courant 6/25/99 (quoted from "The Wisdom of Ann Coulter")
But of course Coulter isn't really my kind of Christian or even my (Republican) mother's kind; instead, she's apparently a member of that surprisingly wide-spread American offshoot of Christianity, "The Christian Church of Christ Without Christ." Bill McKibben calls Christians of the militant stripe "Christianists," which I suppose is a shorter way to say the same thing. McKibben explains the core principles of Christianity, the sort based on the teachings of Jesus, as follows:
When one of the Pharisees asked Jesus what the core of the law was, Jesus replied:
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.
Love your neighbor as yourself: although its rhetorical power has been dimmed by repetition, that is a radical notion, perhaps the most radical notion possible. Especially since Jesus, in all his teachings, made it very clear who the neighbor you were supposed to love was: the poor person, the sick person, the naked person, the hungry person. The last shall be made first; turn the other cheeck; a rich person aiming for heaven is like a camel trying to walk through the eye of a needle. On and on and on---a call for nothing less than a radical, voluntary, and effective reordering of power relationships, based on the principle of love. McKibben, THE CHRISTIAN THE CHRISTIAN PARADOX: HOW A FAITHFUL NATION GETS JESUS WRONG, Harper’s Monthly Essay at 33 (August 2005.)
That's certainly what I was taught. Somehow I can't quite make this principle fit together with those underlying the sentiments espoused by Coulter.
Neither could Greg Kendall-Ball, a graduate student at Abilene Christian University, who drew national attention back in 2005 by doing his part to persuade Harding University, a Christian institution, to call off a scheduled speech by Ann Coulter.
Greg Kendall-Ball, a graduate divinity student at Abilene Christian University...cited comments Coulter had made about countries that harbor terrorists — “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity” — and about campus radicals: “When contemplating college liberals, you really regret once again that John Walker is not getting the death penalty. We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed, too. Otherwise, they will turn out to be outright traitors.”
In inviting Coulter to the campus, wrote Kendall-Ball, whose father and sisters are also Harding alums, the university had “failed to uphold the Christ-like spirit that Harding seeks to embody.” It troubled him, he said, that “someone advocating violence, forced conversions, physical intimidation and who has routinely expressed anti- or non-Christian views is welcomed and given one of the more prestigious speaking engagements on the school’s calendar.”(Inside Higher Education)
As a result of protests by Kendall-Ball and others, alumni of Harding University "sent a slew of e-mails and letters urging Harding officials to reconsider." And in the end, that's exactly what they did. (Inside Higher Education) In an e-mail message to faculty members, David Crouch, the director of public relations, said that the administration had “re-evaluated” its original decision to include Coulter in the 2005-6 lecture series.... (Inside Higher Education). Though he said that Harding and Coulter "are probably on the same page on many issues," Crouch confirmed that he hadn't known about "some of Coulter's more outrageous comments," and that these had prompted "second thoughts" on the administration's part. (Inside Higher Education.
I recount this incident because it shows that even Christians who would not necessarily endorse my own version of Christianity ("Jesus IS 'the Christian left') don't ascribe to her very special brand. Not that I have much faith in her Christianity or even in her 'Christianity' or 'Christianicity.'
I suspect that the muddle she's in at present is the result of her having attempted for the sake of her 'target audience' to parrot what she believes are fundamentalist Christian views. In other words, I think these were self-serving statements manufactured for effect and that they backfired because she basically doesn't know what she's talking about once she gets on the subject of religion or Christianity. Naturally, I don't know this for certain, but her statements of naive religious faith strike me as about as sincere as her hair color.
Anyway, here's her latest:
After Mr. Deutsch asked her what the country would look like if her “dreams, which are genuine, came true” on the show on Tuesday, Ms. Coulter initially responded, “It would look like New York City during the Republican National Convention” in 2004.
Pressed to elaborate, she said, “People were happy. They’re Christian. They’re tolerant. They defend America.”
Then Mr. Deutsch cut her off, asking if she thinks “we should all be Christian, to which she replied, “yes.”(NYT Caucus)
She seemed to lose confidence when he challenged her on this point. (NYT Caucus) You can watch her say her piece on You Tube:
Deutsch has since remarked that once she realized that Deutsch was offended, Coulter seemed to become "frightened" and to feel she had gone too far.
I believe it. She was equally uncomfortable when challenged by Elizabeth Edwards for her remarks concerning the Edwards' dead child.
I get the impression that she isn't any braver than any other mean girl when she senses that the crowd isn't with her or that her bombastic remarks might boomerang.
I'm sorry; I can't take her seriously. She makes me laugh out loud and the fact that she is simply expressing what certain Americans want and need to hear I regard as a good thing. It's important not to suppress the voices of those who have got their ideas of religion, patriotism, liberty, and the constitution badly wrong; if you shut them up, they'll go on thinking just the same, but you won't know it till it's too late.
For an argument that her ludicrous remarks are "too dangerous to ignore," see this article in The L.A. Times (and Memeorandum's Round-Up). The writer, Tim Ruttan, correctly identifies the roots of the views she expressed, and proceeds to get very worked up about what these views mean about Coulter---which in her case I imagine is exactly nothing. On the other hand, there are people currently in power who doubtless hold views similar to those expressed by Coulter about the relationship between Christianity and Judaism. Indeed I've heard it expressed by perfectly well-meaning people who were as clueless as Coulter seemed to be about how offensive it is to people of the Jewish faith. Coulter probably performed a public service by baldly---and may I say naively---expressing it.
"[S]upersessionism," the theological notion that Christianity "completes" or "perfects" Judaism is, along with the deicide libel, anti-Semitism's major theological underpinning. Indeed, in Central and Western Europe between the world wars, there was a substantial body of purportedly "respectable" intellectual opinion that held "supersessionism" made possible a "reasonable" theological anti-Semitism that was entirely licit, as opposed to the Nazis' and fascists' illicit, "racially based" anti-Semitism. It is fair to say that the rails leading to Auschwitz were greased by precisely the opinion Coulter expressed on American television this week.....
Here, for example, is what transpired on the airwaves Friday. Deutsch went onto NBC's "Today" show and called it "scary" that, in this instance, Coulter was not being deliberately provocative. "We're playing with dangerous words in our society -- there's no accountability, there's a glibness that we in the media kind of elevate." (L.A. Times)
It's true that Coulter wasn't trying to provoke Deutsch; she was perfectly civil. Which shows that civility doesn't always matter if the view itself is intrinsically offensive....But offensive or not, I have to disagree with Ruttan. I don't think it's as dangerous to allow people to express their bad ideas as it is to suppress them; what's dangerous is to suppress such expression or to permit it but allow the bad ideas to go unchallenged (which Deutsch did not). In his exchange with Coulter, he emerged the clear winner, just as Elizabeth Edwards did. Which is exactly what is supposed to happen to bad ideas in a democracy. And which can't happen if people who hold them aren't given the chance to air them.
LINKS
MEMEORANDUM (see blogger reactions)
Jon Swift on Ann Coulter (satire)
Elizabeth Edwards Viciously Attacks Ann Coulter
CPAC is Shocked--Shocked!--by Ann Coulter's Remarks
Ann Coulter Tackles the Menace of Widows and Grieving Mothers
RELATED BN-POLITICS POSTS
QUOTED OR CITED
Chris Shays is a Republican. Otherwise, I generally agree with what you say. I do think that there is no ambiguity on what Jesus would think of capital punishment, war, or adultery. I will freely say that Ann Coulter is not part of the Christian church, since if that church does not make it clear that her statements are not Christian, many will be misled.
Posted by: Charles | October 13, 2007 at 09:11 PM
Thanks for your comment. Sadly, there ARE churches which agree, or purport to agree, with Coulter, but I'd dispute the label "Christian."
I THOUGHT Shays was a Republican, but the reference to him as a Democrat is from quoted material from another site. I'd better stick a (sic) in there....
Posted by: Damozel | October 13, 2007 at 10:00 PM