In his NYT column today, Nicholas Kristof returns to a subject he’s covered before: the unwarranted deriding of evangelicals.
At a New York or Los Angeles cocktail party, few would dare make a pejorative comment about Barack Obama’s race or Hillary Clinton’s sex. Yet it would be easy to get away with deriding Mike Huckabee’s religious faith.
Liberals believe deeply in tolerance and over the last century have led the battles against prejudices of all kinds, but we have a blind spot about Christian evangelicals. They constitute one of the few minorities that, on the American coasts or university campuses, it remains fashionable to mock.
Scorning people for their faith is intrinsically repugnant, and in this case it also betrays a profound misunderstanding of how far evangelicals have moved over the last decade.
I can appreciate Kristof’s point, but this is unpersuasive. First, the Huckabee comparison is flawed. Judging Clinton on her gender is ridiculous. Judging Obama on race and ethnicity is offensive. But when Kristof hears people disparaging Huckabee at cocktail parties, I suspect he’s hearing people mocking Huckabee’s ideas — which deserve to be fair game in the midst of a presidential campaign.
After all, the former Arkansas governor has been pretty far out there on the fringe. He rejects modern biology. He thinks wives should submit graciously to their husbands. He’s equated homosexuality with bestiality. He’s publicly endorsed “quarantining” AIDS patients; he’s boasted that God is directly helping his presidential campaign; and he’s said that if a man and a woman live together outside of marriage, they’re engaging in a “demeaning … alternate lifestyle.”
And if the intelligentsia ridicule these beliefs, they’re guilty of “intolerance” and “scorn” for the faithful? It’s the moral equivalent of racism and misogyny? I don’t think so.
Ultimately, my biggest beef with Kristof’s perspective is that he’s buying into (and further perpetuating) a myth the left has been working to debunk: that somehow liberals and Democrats revel in their mockery of Christians.
This is utter nonsense, and it’s noticeable that Kristof doesn’t offer any specific examples, relying on anecdotes and supposition. When Kristof wrote a similar column four years ago, arguing that the left shows “bigotry toward people based on their faith,” his most specific example was a seven-year-old quote from Ted Turner — as if Turner were a prominent voice in contemporary progressive politics. Today, Kristof dispenses with examples altogether, basing his argument on what he imagines people in LA and NYC are saying at cocktail parties.
Just to set the record straight, the premise is mistaken. Howard Dean and the DNC are conducting considerable outreach to the evangelical community. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama make no secret of their Christian faith, and Obama, in particular, has made frequent appearances before evangelical audiences.
To be fair, Kristof’s broader point is that Christian evangelicals, in general, are not where they once were. The crazed and unhinged beliefs of radical televangelists like Pat Robertson are no longer quite as dominant as they once were, and some rank-and-file evangelicals now consider issues like poverty and global warming to be moral imperatives. Kristof argues that that the left should consider this shift an opportunity for outreach.
But therein lies the point: progressives have already noticed the shift and began the outreach years ago. The problem isn’t that liberals “scorn people for their faith”; it’s that Nick Kristof hasn’t noticed how wrong this argument is.