Rhetoric Race and Religion
by Robert Wright
The Atlantic
It took the final, climactic weekend of Tebow-mania to draw my attention to the weeks-old Saturday Night Live skit below. The skit ridicules Tim Tebow and/or Jesus, depending on how you interpret it. Parts of it made me laugh, but I still think this kind of stuff probably hurts the cause of the secular liberals who typically create it. My two reasons for believing this can be found below
1) Prominent among the political adversaries of secular liberals are religious conservatives, the more extreme of whom consider themselves to be at war with the prevailing culture. They may homeschool their kids (though not all homeschoolers share this attitude) or in other ways try to wall themselves off from this culture. When secular liberals who shape the culture fulfill the religious conservatives’ stereotype of them as threatening–by, say, seeming to ridicule Jesus, or seeming to ridicule Tebow’s faith–conservatives will be more inclined to stay within their walls, avoiding engagement with the secular world. So they’ll find it easier to reject the entire liberal agenda, ranging from gay rights to uncensored science education in the public schools. (Don’t get me started on the damage that I fear Richard Dawkins is doing to science education in the heartland by embodying a false equation between Darwinism and a militant, contemptuous atheism.) In short, when liberals are seen as ridiculing Christianity, they’re energizing their adversaries and making it harder to turn adversaries into allies, or at least neutral parties, on particular issues.
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