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{"id":1933,"date":"2012-08-12T14:15:00","date_gmt":"2012-08-12T14:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2012\/08\/what-war-on-religion.html"},"modified":"2012-08-12T14:15:00","modified_gmt":"2012-08-12T14:15:00","slug":"what-war-on-religion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2012\/08\/what-war-on-religion.html","title":{"rendered":"What War on Religion?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

In July of 1844, word reached New York that Joseph Smith Jr., founder of the LDS Church<\/a>, had been murdered by a mob in Illinois. Reporting for the New York Herald, James Gordon Bennett wrote, \u201cThere can be no doubt that political feeling entered largely into the popular excitement in that region against the Mormons<\/a>.\u201d He noted that the Whig party worried LDS Church members would support their rival, Democratic candidate James K. Polk, in that year\u2019s presidential election. In turn the party\u2019s newspapers in Illinois had created much of the anti-Mormon sentiment that led to the assassination. \u201cThis affords another and most melancholy illustration of the pernicious, demoralizing, brutalizing influence of the party presses,\u201d Bennett wrote, \u201cwhich are daily influencing the passions of the people by the vilest and most incendiary tirades against their respective opponents.\u201d<\/p>\n

One hundred and sixty-eight years later, the \u201cincendiary tirades\u201d of political parties are alive and well. Americans instinctively know this, and as the election nears, their televisions are inundated with political commercials. On Thursday (August 9), Mitt Romney\u2019s campaign released a new advertisement, dubbed \u201cBe Not Afraid,\u201d a line that Pope John Paul II made famous during the Cold War. Splicing footage of Romney in Poland with a newspaper headline, the 30-second ad lambastes Obama for his \u201cwar on religion.\u201d Though the ad never mentions the statute by name, it references the HHS mandate, the Obama administration\u2019s order for insurance to provide contraception coverage, which can apply to religious groups who oppose it. The voiceover intones: \u201cPresident Obama used his healthcare plan to declare war on religion, forcing religious institutions to go against their faith.\u201d<\/p>\n

Watching the commercial, I was reminded of a column from John L. Allen Jr. in National Catholic Reporter last month, which Amy Sullivan also cited in a blog post. Allen critiqued the Catholic bishops for using the phrase \u201cwar on religion\u201d when referring to the president\u2019s healthcare mandate. \u201cThere are undeniably important church\/state issues in play in America,\u201d Allen wrote, \u201cbut if they constitute a \u2018war,\u2019 it\u2019s a metaphorical one, waged in legislatures and courthouses.\u201d He countered by listing examples where a \u201cliteral war of religion\u201d is taking place around the world. Examples of such wars continue to multiply. In Wisconsin, just four days before Romney released his ad, a white supremacist killed six Sikhs on the grounds of their own temple. On Monday, a mosque in Joplin, MO was destroyed by fire, which officials suspect was the work of arsonists. That same day, 19 Nigerians were shot and killed in a church, presumably by an Islamist group as part of the country\u2019s ongoing religious conflict. These lives were undoubtedly under siege for their faith.
Read the rest here<\/a><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"