“Lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ, In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”
Barack Obama
In what has seemingly become a perennial occurrence, President Obama again managed to find a way to deprecate Christianity in the unlikely forum of the National Prayer Breakfast. Citing examples from hundreds of years ago, he made a ludicrous attempt at moral equivalency between Islamic terrorism and Christianity, because clearly, Christians aren’t perfect either. Possibly if the President could have found some examples from this century, his comments would not have seemed so ridiculous. It’s a little like telling a woman she ought not be so indignant at her abusive husband because after all, she herself had a great grand uncle who once beat his wife.
It’s part of our culture now where the only “high horse” we are allowed to ride is that of non-judgmentalism; and it was from that lofty perch that President Obama intended to cast the rest of us from ours. Ironically, non-judgmentalism is rather judgmental when it comes to judging the judgmental. We’ve all seen the memes about not judging someone who “sins differently than you”, which echoes the admonition of Jesus about judging the speck in your brother’s eye when you have a log in your own. Somehow we’ve reinterpreted Jesus’s words against hypocrisy to the supposition that no one can comment on the detrimental effects of having a speck in your eye… or a log. Of course the teaching ends with, having taken the log out of your own eye, you can see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s; the intent obviously not to boast of your own wonderfully clear eyes, but to use your vision to help others. Ultimately, even the “non-judgmental” have their limits. In seeking to shun condemnation for stylish sinfulness, they nevertheless would hardly use the same principles to withhold judgement regarding child molesters, animal abusers, wife beaters, rapists or murderers… unless the perpetrators were Islamic.
Any useful admonition taken to extremes becomes destructive. People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, but sometimes stones need to be thrown, and having a window in your house (as everyone does) ought not preclude you from throwing one. It’s not that we shouldn’t occasionally contemplate the atrocities of our distant ancestors, I guess, but no one has defended the Inquisition for quite some time; and making mention of it in relation to what is happening now serves only to diffuse the justifiable outrage. Likewise, today’s Christians are no more responsible for Jim Crow laws than today’s Democrats are for their forerunners who legislated them. That is a history we shall not return to; let’s stick to the here and now.
IMHO: Self-loathing is an extreme dislike or hatred of one self. The term can also be used to designate ones hatred for their own group, such as their family, ethnicity, social class, or nationality. President Obama’s tenure has been riddled with evidence that he holds America itself in disdain. Sometimes such a critical nature is merely an egotistical attempt to aggrandize oneself beyond the “naive” nationalism of one’s fellows, but when one can’t respond to Islamic extremists beheading, raping, and burning alive innocent victims without making a lame attempt at moral equivalency by grasping at centuries old examples… well, you may have a personality disorder. Where self loathing becomes a psychological disorder is where the hatred becomes so intense that you feel the need to self harm. For the self loathing individual, this can involve self injury or even suicide. For the self loathing world leader it can lead to damaging policy, national destruction or even holocausts.
The United States is not a perfect nation, far from it; but we are a good and decent people, and on balance we have been a force for good in the world. When we see evil in our midst, we remove it. We reach for perfection though we may never grasp it. If we become convinced that we are not that city on a hill, then we will retreat into darkness. We will content ourselves with corruption, cronyism, and perversion. Unlike reasoned humility, we will be caught in the mire of hopeless self loathing, whereby we will no longer seek to strive after goodness for ourselves and for our world, but only to escape judgement for our depravity.
A great piece–nicely thought through and presented in a judicious and non-inflammatory way. One wishes the President, who seems to major in our national shortcomings, could manage to comment in an equally measured manner rather than always speaking through the lens of “blame America.” I would think he would never consent to consistently faulting his own children in the misguided belief that constant blame would make them better people. Yet like so many on the left, he seems to believe that persistent criticism of his larger family, the nation, will lead to some good other than making him feel superior. I would agree with him that we do indeed have some national shortcomings, one of which was the choice of electing an individual to lead us whose partisanship and contempt for so much of what we stand for as a nation was so evident from the outset.