Christianity and History

Joe Sobran reports:

The great vice of liberal thinking is its failure of imagination with respect to Christians. For all their preaching of “sensitivity” and “multiculturalism,” they are belligerently ignorant of Christian culture and Christians’ feelings. In fact they seem to think that there is something specially “artistic” about offending Christians. Offending blacks, Jews, feminists, or homosexuals is “insensitive,” while offending Christians is “irreverent” — a word that has come to suggest a rather cute sassiness.

Yet the whole history of Western Civilization is rooted in religion. Unless you understand Judaism, Catholicism, and Protestantism, along with the rise of Islam, you don’t understand the events that shaped the modern world. The issues of the Reformation were still alive when the United States was founded, when slavery was debated, when the Civil War tore the country apart, when Prohibition was adopted, when Joe McCarthy assailed “godless Communism,” when John Kennedy became the first Catholic American president.

The Christian Right is closer to its own historic roots than most Americans, yet the media and the history textbooks treat it as a marginal, virtually un-American movement. This isn’t “multicultural”; it’s anti-cultural. It refuses to take America’s real origins seriously, adopting the Supreme Court’s shallow and ahistorical interpretation of the separation of church and state.

An article well worth your time.