A Clash of Proselytizations

1 THE NORMAN LEAR CENTER “The P olitics of Media, Technology & Culture" A Clash of Proselytizations An Essay by Jack Miles Fellow in Religious Affairs, Pacific Council of International Policy Based on a Presentation to Celebrity, Politics & Public Life April 8, 2005 2 THE NORMAN LEAR CENTER Jack Miles A Clash of Proselytizations The Norman Lear Center Celebrity, Politics & Public Life Founded in January 2000, the Norman Since Fall 2000, the Norman Lear Center Lear Center is a multidisciplinary research has sponsored a popular faculty seminar and public policy center exploring series on Celebrity, Politics & Public Life. implications of the convergence of Faculty and deans from over 20 entertainment, commerce and society. On departments convene three times each campus, from its base in the USC semester to develop an interdisciplinary Annenberg School for Communication, analysis of political life in this country as it the Lear Center builds bridges between is shaped by popular culture. The project is schools and disciplines whose faculty study co-directed by USC History Department aspects of entertainment, media and Chair Steven J. Ross and Leo Braudy, Leo S. culture. Beyond campus, it bridges the gap Bing Professor of English. Our topics have between the entertainment industry and ranged from Elian Gonzales and Timothy academia, and between them and the McVeigh to Angela Davis, Robert public. Through scholarship and research; Mapplethorpe, and Edward G. Robinson. through its fellows, conferences, public The group includes professors and deans events and publications; and in its from anthropology, art history, cinema- attempts to illuminate and repair the television, theatre, ethnic studies, American world, the Lear Center works to be at the studies, German, sociology, business, forefront of discussion and practice in the political science, economics, education, policy and planning, philosophy, gender field. studies, art history, psychology, communication, journalism, English, and history. 3 THE NORMAN LEAR CENTER Jack Miles A Clash of Proselytizations Jack Miles Fellow in Religion and International Affairs at the Pacific Council of International Policy, Mac Arthur Fellow (2003-2007), and Getty Scholar (2006-2007), Jack Miles' writings have appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, and many other publications. His book GOD: A Biography won a Pulitzer Prize in 1996 and has been translated into sixteen languages, including Hebrew and (twice) Chinese. A sequel to that book entitled CHRIST: A Crisis in the Life of God was published simultaneously in 2001 in the United States, Britain, Germany, and France. Dutch, Italian, Japanese, and Brazilian translations are in progress or in print. Over a period of nearly twenty years, 1975-1995, Miles was successively an editor at Doubleday, executive editor at the University of California Press, literary editor at the Los Angeles Times, and finally a member of the Times Editorial Board, writing on politics and culture. He serves on the final selection committee of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and is general editor of the forthcoming Norton Anthology of World Religions. Miles has been at different times Visiting Scholar at Occidental College, Mellon Visiting Professor of Humanities at Caltech, Director of the Humanities Center at the Claremont Graduate University, Regents Lecturer at the University of California, Senior Advisor to the President of the J. Paul Getty Trust, and Visiting Fellow with the Committee on the Conceptual Foundations of Science, University of Chicago. Born in Chicago in 1942, he spent the years 1960-1970 as a Jesuit seminarian, studying at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome,1964-1966, and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, 1966-1967, before enrolling at Harvard University where he completed a Ph.D. in Near Eastern languages in 1971. He is fluent in several modern languages. Miles served as a member of the nonfiction jury for the1999 Pulitzer Prize. In 1996, he chaired the jury for the Irish Times International Fiction award. He was the founding director, and for seven years the jury chair of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Awards at the Claremont Graduate University. Miles is a past president of the National Book Critics Circle, and an advisory board member of PEN Center USA West. This article began as a presentation to the Celebrity, Politics and Public Life Seminar, a project at the USC Annenberg Norman Lear Center. Particular thanks to the founder of the seminar, Prof. Marty Kaplan. 4 THE NORMAN LEAR CENTER Jack Miles A Clash of Proselytizations We are all missionaries (propagandists of our views). Each of us disapproves of the other missionaries. -- Mark Twain, Notebook, 1905 A Clash of Proselytizations During the first years of the twenty-first century, two questions touching the place of religion in American political life have been particularly prominent: first, that of the real or supposed influence of conservative Christians upon a president whom they helped elect; second, that of the legitimate or illegitimate invocation of Islam by the al-Qa’eda terrorists who attacked the United States on September 11, 2001 and by kindred groups around the world, often enough after similar attacks. These two questions, usually considered separately, can be mutually illuminating when joined at the relatively neglected topic of propaganda. At issue, ultimately, is whether the end of the George W. Bush Administration may be an opportune moment for the United States formally to reassert its political identity as a religiously neutral state. A key objective, surely, within the propaganda mission of the United States is to convert all nations into full members of that growing international community within which, after the fall of Soviet Communism, the United States has had – and greatly benefited from – the leading role. Some invited to assume such membership fear a pernicious loss of identity. Others are sympathetic, but hesitant. Much of the challenge of turning samplers and sympathizers into full 5 THE NORMAN LEAR CENTER Jack Miles A Clash of Proselytizations and active members has fallen quite properly upon the United States as the pre-eminent beneficiary of the emergent world system. Counter to this vision of progressive conversion to a global community stand overlapping, partially religious visions of globalization corrected, resisted, or halted. Latin American opposition draws on Christian activism for some of the energy on display during meetings of the World Trade Organization. But the Christian critique of globalism, as it might be read in a work like Rebecca Todd Peters’ In Search of the Good Life: The Ethics of Globalization (Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004) serves a mostly peaceful, negotiable resistance Islamist opposition is often v iolent, and though it may command the allegiance of only a thin stratum of Islamist opposition, by contrast, is often violent; and though it may the world's Muslims, that stratum command the allegiance of only a thin stratum of the world’s Muslims, is remarkably broad, highly networked, and demonstrably that stratum is remarkably broad, highly networked, and demonstrably lethal. lethal. The goal of al-Qaeda and cognate groups is to halt the expansion of the international community at the borders of the Ummah or world Muslim community, if not to sabotage it where it began. For these groups, conversion to or membership in the international community as generally understood, is tantamount to apostasy from Islam, and vice versa. Against this small but committed and embattled network stands the far larger and altogether less inflamed Muslim mainstream that sees no insuperable incompatibility between these two kinds of membership, even if it is skeptical about the benefits of globalization, and on guard against religious proselytization occurring under the cover of technical progress. Between the passion of the militants and the skepticism of the mainstream, the United States is enmeshed in a clash of proselytizations for which the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims are the contested population. 6 THE NORMAN LEAR CENTER Jack Miles A Clash of Proselytizations This campaign, as one waged on behalf of the international community rather than of a latter-day American empire, does not coincide exactly with any struggle to advance democracy, did not begin on September 11, 2001, will not end for decades, and has entered a new and volatile phase as the American adventure in Iraq accelerates toward its bloody conclusion and the sun sets on the Bush Administration’s Global War on Terror. Iraq, Conversions, and the National Interest The American-instigated war in Iraq, whatever else may be said of it, has created a conversion theater with a world audience. And contrary to the myth of an America that always shoots first and asks questions after, there are great resources in American culture for the analysis and understanding of other cultures. Such were the resources that won the Cold War by, in the crucial first instance, fighting back the inclination of some to turn it into a Hot War with an early, preemptive, nuclear attack on the Soviet Union and, in the second instance, by prevailing in a great duel of definitions. Victory in a propaganda war often goes to the side that more successfully defines the terms of the debate. Over time, Soviet Communism failed in its attempt to define the United States as the capitalist, militarist oppressor of the world’s workers and itself as their heroic liberator. Conversely, the United States succeeded in its attempt to define the Soviet Union as a totalitarian, militantly atheist menace to all nations and itself as their trustworthy defender. Actions counted for much indeed; yet in the judgment of as relatively hawkish a historian of the Cold War as John Lewis Gaddis,1 the determined and astute propagation of ideas counted for no less. America is the country that virtually invented market research. Given resources, time, and the will to cultivate domestic assets, Americans are fully capable of learning about other cultures.

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