Further to this VC post by Josh Blackman, which discusses a bizarre and opportunistic outburst by Religious Liberty Commission member Carrie Prejean Boller focusing on her views about Catholics’ views about anti-Zionism, I would add this: Unsurprisingly, given their opposition to anything like liberal pluralism and religious freedom, when unhinged Christian nationalists start going after one faith, it’s rare that they will stop there. A good deal of the time, they won’t have started there either.
This is of course true for the “ecosystem on the right” that Blackman is concerned with. Whatever purported radical changes it has through lately–unless “lately” means “for at least the past half-decade,” that seems like the wrong word to me; but I do agree with the use of the label “the right” rather than, say, “conservative”–anti-Muslim sentiment has been at or near the top of that particular ecosystem’s hit parade for a long time. And the “strange new respect” for antisemitic grifters, or Vancian reluctance to condemn them, has not so captivated them that they have failed to continue their pursuit of this longstanding interest.
Just yesterday, as he noted, Ilya Somin testified against an abomination of a bill in the House, the dishonestly named Preserving a Sharia-Free America Act. The bill states that “[a]ny alien in the United States found to be an adherent of Sharia law by the Secretary of State, Secretary of Homeland Security, or Attorney General shall have any immigration benefit, immigration relief, or visa revoked, be considered inadmissible or deportable, and shall be removed from the United States.” One notes that: 1) the bill does not get rid of Sharia, because any Muslim citizen can continue to both be an “adherent” of Sharia and, in many instances, take advantage of it in the same way that people of many faiths, Jews included, make use of religious arbitration; 2) the bill could not constitutionally make America “Sharia-free” without affecting all those other faiths’ use of religious law and religious arbitration; 3) the bill does seek to make religion and religious-viewpoint discrimination official national policy; 4) it’s part of a longstanding invocation of “Sharia law” as a phony alleged existential threat to the United States, partly out of genuine bigotry and partly because it’s an excellent GOTV measure and terrific for fundraising; and 5) as Ilya wrote, it’s “manifestly unconstitutional” and, one might add, manifestly malicious and immoral.
I note, perhaps relevantly to the question of “ecosystem,” that the three ridiculous witnesses called by the majority to support the bill are a classic part of that ecosystem and one, Krista Schild, is affiliated with the home-base organization of a self-styled “journalist” and nonstop Twitter prevaricator, and is thus especially representative of the ascendant social media/attention economy wing of the ecosystem. I wrote recently of the chair of the committee whose hearings these were, Chip Roy, that despite past examples of “his capacity to pay tribute to the better angels of our nature,” in his current campaign for Texas Attorney General he is promising to “stand athwart the advance of Sharia Law.” Indeed, many of the Republican candidates for Texas statewide races this year are running on an anti-Islam platform. Also relevant to the same ecosystem question, and further relevant to Josh’s concerns with the Heritage Foundation: Heritage Foundation fellow Mike Howell’s push to ban “head coverings” in the House. Howell made clear that he meant “Muslim head coverings,” or at least “religious minority head coverings but Jews should stay out of it because they get an exception,” and then questioned whether Islam is “a legitimate religion,” which has the same air as Boller’s willingness to lecture about what Catholics believe and others’ willingness to make assertions about what Jews believe.
Blackman’s post was updated as I was writing this to announce that Boller was removed from the Commission. I’m glad! And I’m sincerely glad that when Howell was making his anti-Islamic push on social media, he was opposed, inter alia, by Rabbi Yaakov Menken, who’s on the Commission’s advisory board of religious leaders. Likewise, I’m sincerely glad that Blackman eventually rejected the Heritage Foundation, whose decline into “rabid populism” I would call far from recent. But I do think it necessary to add that from a standpoint that is generally concerned with religious liberty for all, Jews are the latest but not the first religious minority to be subjected to the hostility of the “ecosystem” of which he writes. We might spare a thought for the continuing hostility to Islam—a hostility that has not paused, but redoubled—and the rejection of equal religious liberty it represents. I add that notwithstanding his willingness to condemn Boller and speak in favor of “respect for all faiths,” the commission’s chairman, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who perhaps was not the best choice to lead that body, continues to advocate for “preventing Sharia law in Texas” and hounding Muslims in that state. I hope he will eventually learn something from the wiser and more respectable members and advisors to the commission.
It seems to me the broader ecosystem-related lesson here is not so much that antisemitism is a growing cancer in America, or a long-present cancer that is being given oxygen by a whole new set of people and ignored by a whole new set of vice presidents. True enough and worrisome enough, God knows. But the broader lesson is that Christian nationalism and antiliberalism are anti-conservative, corrosive, and dangerous altogether; that the people who sincerely adhere to these views are hardly going to be satisfied with one enemy or one minority to threaten and deny basic constitutional rights, any more than the Nazis’ profound and murderous hatred of Jews caused them to neglect the persecution of political opponents, the Roma, the physically handicapped, and gays and lesbians; that this, as well as common decency and respect for religious and other civil liberties, should lead good people to reject Christian nationalism and antiliberalism altogether; and that any party or movement that gives itself over to a bunch of attention-economy grifters and con artists (the president of the United States far from least among them), some sincere about the issues they exploit and some simply opportunistically vicious, and that positively leans into that kind of economy, will face these issues over and over and over again. Maybe a key step in addressing antisemitism, in this ecosystem and elsewhere, is to thoroughly reject antiliberalism and its rough or smooth salesmen and to champion genuine, and not merely “tolerated,” religious liberty for all faiths.