Islam and Judge Roy Moore

I apologize.  I should keep better notes; I’ve forgotten who it was that kindly brought this item to my attention about a week ago:

“Thousands of Muslims march against ISIS as brother of one of Jihadi John’s victims remembers his death”

***

Thanks to Matthew Wheeler for calling this heartwarming story to my attention, a harbinger of the utopian bliss that will inevitably dawn when atheism bears universal sway:

“Chinese police order Muslims to hand in all copies of the Koran and prayer mats or face ‘harsh punishment'”

In fact, stories like this one almost make one want to break into song:

Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us, only sky
Imagine all the people living for today
Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too
Imagine all the people living life in peace
You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope some day you’ll join us
And the world will be as one
Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people sharing all the world
You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope some day you’ll join us
And the world will live as one

***

The Republican nominee for the United States Senate from Alabama, and very likely the next senator from that state, is its former two-time (and twice removed) chief justice, Roy Moore.

I am not happy about his nomination, nor about his likely entry into the Senate — though, truth be told, I’ll probably often agree with his votes.  He isn’t even remotely my kind of conservative.  I don’t care much, one way or the other, about fundamentalist Protestantism, but I really object when it’s fused with bigotry and with populist demagoguery.  This article, by Yonat Shimron — about as Israeli/Jewish a name as can be imagined, by the way — lists some of the things about Mr. Moore that most concern me:

“5 faith facts about Roy Moore: Evangelical in excess”

I’ll take some of Ms. Shimron’s points in order:

“Moore is a Christian nationalist.”

I am emphatically not.  There is a religious basis to the United States of America — those who wish to envision America as a secular state may yet succeed, but, as a matter of history, they’re wrong — but that religious basis is not an expressly Christian one.  The “civic religion” of America was open from the start to Jews and, even more obviously, to Deists.  It is, if you will, not anti-Christian but sub-Christian.  The opening paragraph of the Declaration of Independence reads as follows:

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

There is, in the Declaration, no citing of biblical passages, and certainly not of the New Testament.  Rather, Thomas Jefferson’s appeal to “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” evokes a kind of natural theology or natural law, in a way accessible to Christians, Jews, Deists, and, yes, eventually to Muslims — though, perhaps significantly, not to atheists.  Thomas Jefferson was very likely a Deist himself, and almost certainly a kind of Unitarian.

“Moore said Islam is a false religion”

Well, you might respond, he’s a Christian, so of course he disagrees with Islam.  But he goes far beyond that.

Shimron describes Mr. Moore as having a “long-standing” “antipathy” toward Islam.  In 2006, he criticized Congressman Keith Ellison, a Muslim, for taking his oath of office with his hand on a Qur’an rather than on a Bible.  I find that criticism disgusting and inappropriate.  Non-Christians are not, and should not be, second-class citizens in the United States.

“The Islamic faith,” Moore has written, “rejects our God and believes that the state must mandate the worship of its own god, Allah.”

But this is ignorant nonsense:

“‘Allah’ is not pagan term — it means ‘God'”

Moreover, referring to God as he is worshiped by Muslims as god, with a lower case g, is offensive.  And it’s simply (and slanderously) false that Islamic law forces non-Muslims to worship a foreign “god” or to convert to Islam — and that, accordingly (and according to Mr. Moore), “false religions like Islam” are incompatible with the First Amendment to the Constitution.

And earlier, for what it’s worth, in the summer of 2017, PolitiFact awarded Mr. Moore its prestigious “Pants on Fire” award for his claim that there are communities in the United States that are “under Sharia law right now.”

Latter-day Saints who might be inclined to applaud Mr. Moore on his statements about Islam should probably write to him to inquire what he thinks about Mormonism.

“Moore denies the theory of evolution”

This will probably have little impact, if any, on his voting in Washington DC.  And I don’t care that much what he thinks about evolution; I myself have some reservations about certain readings of it.  But his summary rejection of evolution seems to suggest that he’s quite ignorant of science and very possibly hostile to it, and I regret that.  Bottom line:  I don’t expect Roy Moore to rank among the intellectual leaders of the United States Senate.

Posted from Park City, Utah