Milo professes himself a Catholic and wears a pair of gold crosses around his neck. He speaks about the importance of Christianity for the values of Western civilization. As he put it in one interview: “[Western civilization] has created a religion in which love and self-sacrifice and giving are the highest possible virtues… That’s a good thing… But when you remove discipline and sacrifice from religion you get a cult.”
.. None of these issues, most especially the civilizational roots of culture and virtue in religious faith, are typically addressed in modern college education in America. Rather, they are, for the most part, purposefully avoided.
.. while discussion of Christian theology may no longer be at the center of university education, religion still is—we just don’t call it that anymore.
.. Their minds are already open—and being filled with what they are given in place of religion: multiculturalism; race, class, gender; the purportedly secular ideals of socialism and Marxism. Particularly for those students, and faculty, who have little to no religious education outside of school, these ideals have become their faith. This is why students and faculty find Milo so threatening. He not only challenges them to examine beliefs they have never been taught to question.
If the Southern Baptist church can’t be bigger, Russell Moore wants it to be better.
.. Moore was respectful, but he seemed puzzled by Land’s eagerness to defend Palin. “Dr. Land thinks that Governor Palin’s resignation was a shrewd move,” he said. “I don’t. I don’t understand it at all.” Later in the show, after Land had hung up, Moore offered a broader critique. “We, as evangelical Christians, are really, really prone, it seems to me, to become so enthused with political figures that we just automatically impute to them almost superheroic status,” he said. “Put not your trust in princes,” he added—Psalm 146:3. “Or in princesses, either.”
.. For a long time, Southern Baptists had not only a faith but a cause. They saw God’s greatness reflected in the inherent goodness of the American South—and, more recently, in America itself.
.. And in the Obama era Land’s status as an old-fashioned culture warrior came to seem, to some members of the church, like a liability. In 2012, after George Zimmerman, a neighborhood-watch volunteer, fatally shot Trayvon Martin, a seventeen-year-old African-American, Land said on his own radio show that activists were seizing on the case “to gin up the black vote for an African-American President.” When he was criticized, he suggested that Zimmerman had behaved rationally; a black man, he said, was “statistically more likely to do you harm than a white man.”
.. his radio show was cancelled, and, under pressure, he resigned from the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, which he had led since 1988.
.. admonishing Southern Baptists to think first—and often—about their own sins. The denomination was formed, in 1845, by white Southerners who split off from a national Baptist movement that was growing increasingly intolerant of slavery. Moore sees in his theological ancestors a cowardly and catastrophic willingness to ignore the uncomfortable. “If you call people to repentance for drunkenness, or for adultery, or for any number of personal sins, but you don’t say anything about slaveholding or about lynching,” he says, “you’re just baptizing the status quo.”
.. both view abortion as the defining atrocity of our age.
..Trump responded, inevitably, on Twitter, calling Moore a “nasty guy with no heart!” On CNN, hours later, Anderson Cooper asked Moore to continue the dialogue, and Moore flashed a crickety smile. “It’s one of the few things that I can agree with Donald Trump on,” he said. “I am a nasty guy with no heart—we sing worse things about ourselves in our hymns, on Sunday mornings.” He added, “That’s the reason why I need forgiveness from God, through Jesus Christ.” He had found a way to mock an insult with a prayer.
.. the so-called “Trump effect”: in October, seventy-two per cent of white evangelicals agreed that an elected official who “commits an immoral act” in private could nevertheless behave ethically in public; five years earlier, only thirty per cent agreed with the statement.
..Robert Jeffress, the pastor of First Baptist Church, in Dallas, a flagship S.B.C. congregation, was probably speaking for many if not most Southern Baptists when he suggested that Trump was justified in responding to Moore’s “vitriolic attacks.” In Jeffress’s view, Trump is precisely the kind of protector whom Christians should support; he has said that, when it comes to defending America from Islamic terrorism and other threats, “I want the meanest, toughest son-of-a-you-know-what I can find.”
.. Moore thinks that the idea of a moral majority is wrong, and was probably wrong when it was created: he suspects that earnest, orthodox Christians have always been outnumbered. Like any believer, he wants his church to grow, but he doesn’t seem particularly threatened by the thought that it might not.
.. He says that Christians in America must learn to think of themselves as a marginal community, struggling to survive in an increasingly hostile secular culture. In such a context, Muslims might seem less like enemies and more like allies in the fight for religious freedom.
.. Southern Baptists. After centuries of regional dominance, the denomination has been shrinking: last year, the church reported fewer than three hundred thousand baptisms, the lowest number in more than half a century, and a decline of about a third since the peak, in 1972
.. At the annual meeting, he said, “Brothers and sisters, when you have a government that says we can decide whether or not a house of worship can be constructed based upon the theological beliefs of that house of worship, then there are going to be Southern Baptist churches in San Francisco and New York and throughout this country who are not going to be able to build.”
Four police officers fined a woman on a Nice beach for wearing the swimsuit favored by some Muslims.
The images taken Tuesday show four policemen approaching a woman lounging on the shores of the Promenade des Anglais, where the burqini ban has been in place since last week.
.. The ticket, according to Agence France-Presse, said she was not wearing “an outfit respecting good morals and secularism.” The fine for defying the ban is 38 euros. One witness to the incident told AFP some onlookers were applauding the police and shouting “go home” to the woman and her daughter.
.. “I can tell you that online on Sunday, we received 60 orders—all of them non-Muslim,” Zanetti, who says she usually receives 10 to 12 orders, told AFP Tuesday. She said many of her customers purchase the swimwear for its sun protection.
Turkey has weathered five successful military coups since the founding of the Republic, in 1923, and what happened on Friday, with soldiers surging against President Recep Tayyip Erdoğanand his ruling Justice and Development Party, or A.K.P., marks an attempt at the sixth. Turkey is a constitutionally secular state, though one that is over ninety-five-per-cent Muslim and which was once the seat of an Islamic empire.
.. The tension between secularism and religious fundamentalism is as essential to understanding today’s Turkish political life as is the tension between federalism and states’ rights in America.
.. Çevik Bir, one of the generals who planned the coup, stated his case with a metaphor any parent could understand: “In Turkey we have a marriage of Islam and democracy. . . . The child of this marriage is secularism. Now this child gets sick from time to time. The Turkish Armed Forces is the doctor who saves the child. Depending on how sick the kid is we administer the necessary medicine to make sure the child recuperates.”
.. After 1997, Turkey swiftly swung secular. The late nineteen-nineties famously saw the persecution of women wearing headscarves in public places, a ban that had been originally implemented but loosely enforced by Atatürk in an effort to firmly establish a secular nation.
One of the leaders was the mayor of Istanbul, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who was later imprisoned, in 1999, for a speech he gave in Siirt, a town in the religiously conservative and restive southeastern part of the country. He was convicted of “inciting hatred based on religious differences” for reciting the following verses by the poet and nationalist ideologist Ziya Gokalp:
Our minarets are our bayonets
Our domes are our helmets
Our mosques are our barracks.
We will put a final end to ethnic segregation.
No one can ever intimidate us. . . .
My reference is Islam. If I am not able to speak of this,
What is the use of living?
..He views himself as the father of a new Turkish identity, one aligned more closely with its Ottoman past, its Islamic heritage.
.. Opposition parties have also chosen to stand in solidarity with the government. The Peoples’ Democratic Party, or H.D.P., which mainly represents the country’s Kurdish minority, sent out a mailer against the coup: “The only solution is democratic politics!”
.. Atatürk’s legacy and longevity seem to extend without question. He was the one who advised, “He is a weak ruler who needs religion to uphold his government; it is as if he would catch his people in a trap. My people are going to learn the principles of democracy, the dictates of truth, and the teachings of science.”