Bubble thinking from Kathleen Parker

Kathleen Parker of the Washington Post Writers Group has a new column called, Oh, Allah, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz? San Francisco Chronicle 08/20/07. It's one more piece of evidence increasing my suspicious that a significant portion of the Republican Party is operating in a bubble of willful self-deception.

If there is still a meaningful distinction to be made between low-brow, middle-brow and high-brow rightwing writing, Parker falls into the "middle-brow" category. Her shtick is to present the sneering prejudices presented in a rawer form by Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage and so on in the voice a respectable white lady. It's kind of like listening to a narrow-minded country girl who learned in a college sorority had to make the same nasty stuff sound respectable, at least to other sorority girls of a similar background. I don't want to denigrate sorority members as a group, though, by equating them all to Kathleen Parker. That would be unfair.

Let's assume for the sake of taking her column on its own terms that her basic reported fact is more-or-less accurate and not absurdly taken out of context. It's seems that a retiring Catholic bishop in the Netherlands named Tiny Muskens has suggested that Christians worldwide should start calling God "Allah" as a way of making a gesture of peaceful intent and solidarity with Muslims. Or, as she reports it:

"Allah is a very beautiful word for God," Muskens said on Dutch television a few days ago. "Shouldn't we all say that from now on we will name God Allah?"

Muskens pointed out that in Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim country where he spent eight years, priests use the word "Allah" in Catholic Mass.

Not surprisingly, Parker devotes her column to ridiculing the idea.

Somehow, though, she never gets around to mentioning that "Allah" is the Arabic word for God. Christians in Arabic-speaking countries use "Allah" for God because, well, they speak Arabic. Kind of like people in Spanish-speaking countries call God "Dios" because that's, you know, the Spanish word for God.

I have no idea how it came about that in Indonesia, Catholics apparently use "Allah" for God. Has "Allah" been taken over from Arabic into Bahasa Indonesia, the country's national language? Actually Indonesia has quite a few languages. The island of Java has three languages; Sumatra has 15.

Parker's column is devoted to attempts at humor over the idea that are mostly a polite-white-lady version of the crude sneers at which her more low-brow fellow Republican commentators specialize. But then she ventures beyond trying to come up with ditsy-sorority-girl political humor, which is groan-inducing enough, and tries to say something about theology, reacting to a Muslim who made the statement of FOX News that "Muslims, Christians and Jews all worship the same God". Parker writes:

Contrary to Hooper's one-God claim, Christians and Muslims don't really worship the same God. Although both religions are monotheistic - and if there's just one God, there's just one God - Christians believe Jesus was the Son of God and Muslims think otherwise.

That's not a small doctrinal difference. In fact, at the risk of exhausting the obvious, Christianity doesn't exist without, um, Christ. Of course we could rewrite the Apostle's Creed to include Muhammad: "I believe in Allah the Father Almighty... and in Muhammad, his favorite prophet ..." The possibilities are infinite, really. Alternatively, we could pretend to be sane and suggest that everybody go to his or her own house of worship, pray to his or her own version of the Creator, and otherwise get a grip.

Can divine intervention provide Kathleen Parker with "a grip"?

Now, Christian fundamentalists don't believe Muslims worship the same God. For that matter, fundamentalists tend to believe that even most other Christians don't worship the same God they do. Or, at least that they worship God so inadequately that they're all going to Hail with the Jews and Muslims, and Hindus and Buddhists, etc., etc.

Still, though it's unlikely to shine a light into the mind of the grip-less Ms. Parker, Muslims, Jews and Christians all believe that they are worshipping the God of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament), the God of Abraham.

But, gee, when you're trying to achieve the snotty-suburbanite tone Parker goes for, trying to dig a snarky remark out of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity is something you would think even she wouldn't attempt. But you would be wrong. I won't belabor her near-incomprehensible comment on it except to say that there's a reason that theologians call the doctrine of the Trinity "a mystery". And that all she managed to display is that she has no concept at all of what Christian monotheism means. It's probably best if she just tries to avoid those big four-syllable words like "monotheism".

The whole real point of her column, though, is that Muslims are scary heathens. And they probably want to turn our good ole American hymnbooks into Muslim chants. Or something.

The amazing and sad thing is that ditsy nonsense like this is what rates as Big Punditry these days. Can democracy actually survive with a press corps this clueless?

On the substance of the Dutch bishop's suggestion, it doesn't really make much sense to me. But I don't want to knock this bishop, who I don't believe I've ever heard of before, just on Kathleen Parker's description of him.

Tags: kathleen parker