I found this a thoughtful piece. From the op-ed pages of the Post.
Taking Satan Seriously
By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Tuesday, October 28, 2003; Page A23
When Lt. Gen. William "Jerry" Boykin pulled up slides of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein and told a religious audience that America's real enemy was "a guy called Satan," the general was no doubt expressing the views of tens of millions of Americans.
When he declared that "they're after us because we are a Christian nation," millions who later heard his words probably nodded their heads.
The obvious response to the Boykin case is to say that because he is now deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence, he should be relieved of his post. His religious spin on the struggle against terror would seem to contradict the administration's official line that this battle is not a religious war. If a general said, "My friend Wesley Clark is right about the war in Iraq and Bush is wrong," he'd be out on his ear for insubordination.
But without intending to, Boykin has revealed the difficulties with our usual arguments on behalf of religious liberty.
For the administration, it's not just that Boykin presents a political problem, because the most loyal part of Bush's base is made up of evangelical Christians, many of whom share Boykin's views. Even more important, it is highly likely that Bush himself, a genuinely devout Christian by all accounts, agrees with at least some, perhaps much, of what Boykin said. In particular, it's pretty certain that Bush believes that Satan is in some way implicated in the troubles the United States now faces. That is not an eccentric view among Christians. It is rather orthodox.
Cashiering Boykin would thus raise two problems for the administration: the political problem of offending religious conservatives and a theological problem. If Boykin is fired or transferred because of what he said, the administration would have to explain rather precisely where Boykin's views contradicted the president's -- and where they did not. Bush does not want to be drawn into an extended theological controversy.
The larger problem is that the very idea of religious liberty is theologically difficult for many believers.
It's easy for nonbelievers to condemn fundamentalists, because many agnostics and atheists see religion as a bunch of hooey.
For Christians, Muslims and Jews who are believers but have relatively liberal theological views, toleration is also an easy reach. At the risk of vastly oversimplifying decades of thoughtful work by liberal theologians, I'd argue that liberal believers tend to hold some version of the idea that God is not fully revealed. All of us, in St. Paul's words, "see through a glass darkly," and all faiths are thus embarked on a shared journey toward the truth. Religious liberty makes a lot of sense in this context.
But if you believe that you are in possession of something like the absolute truth -- and have an obligation to proclaim it and a duty to convert others -- religious toleration ultimately involves tolerating "error" and allowing error to propagate itself.
Recall, for example, that Boykin described to a gathering of evangelicals his reaction to seeing a Muslim warlord in Somalia brag that he would be protected by Allah. "I knew my God was bigger than his," Boykin said. "I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol."
Nonbelievers and theological liberals have trouble getting their minds around the idea that Boykin and his Muslim counterpart in the story are both convinced, intellectually as well as emotionally, that theirs is the true conception of God. For fundamentalist Christians and Muslims alike, it makes sense to proclaim their countries, respectively, "Christian" or "Islamic" nations, because doing so is an affirmation of what they see as right and good.
Usually we gloss over all this. We defend religious liberty on practical grounds: that it's better to live and let live than to kill or be killed over religious questions.
That's a good enough argument most of the time, and it's good enough for me. But when someone like Boykin comes along, he is an embarrassment to our pragmatic arrangements. He is explaining to us that it is very hard for many religious people to buy into the liberal consensus -- to put their religious convictions on the shelf when asked -- to embrace a system in which "truth" and "error" get equal time and equal rights.
Boykin has moved the issue of religious toleration front and center. Simply transferring him would not answer the challenge he has presented. It falls to Bush, who understands better than most where Boykin is coming from, to make the case for religious liberty to his political base in order to make it to Muslims too.
postchat@)aol.com
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