![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
"Abrahamic America"
Dec. 18th, 2006 04:35 pm"What intrigues me about this new notion of a Judeo-Christian-Islamic (aka Abrahamic) America is how it manages to be both inclusive and exclusive at the same time. Obviously, it admits Muslims in what had once been a Protestant-Catholic-Jewish club. But by stressing such Western religious staples as monotheism, it obviously excludes religions that affirm no God (Buddhism) and those that affirm many (Hinduism).
"I see both the Judeo-Christian model and the newer Judeo-Christian-Islamic one as rear-guard efforts to keep the Christian America model alive—efforts that will likely fail. We live in a country where Buddhists and Hindus are now asking for a place at the table of American faiths—where the sort of 'faith-based' social services lauded by the Bush administration are delivered not only by Christians, Jews, and Muslims but also by Hare Krishnas and Zen Buddhists.
"Or, as Supreme Court Justice William Douglas put it in 1965, we are 'a nation of Buddhists, Confucianists, and Taoists, as well as Christians.'"
-Stephen Prothero, Chair, Boston University Department of Religion
"I see both the Judeo-Christian model and the newer Judeo-Christian-Islamic one as rear-guard efforts to keep the Christian America model alive—efforts that will likely fail. We live in a country where Buddhists and Hindus are now asking for a place at the table of American faiths—where the sort of 'faith-based' social services lauded by the Bush administration are delivered not only by Christians, Jews, and Muslims but also by Hare Krishnas and Zen Buddhists.
"Or, as Supreme Court Justice William Douglas put it in 1965, we are 'a nation of Buddhists, Confucianists, and Taoists, as well as Christians.'"
-Stephen Prothero, Chair, Boston University Department of Religion
