God-free States always go after sincere Christianity

Every government that has freed itself from Judaeo-Christian principles will try to use its power to intimidate Christians from following their conscience and publicly (and sometimes even privately) living out their beliefs.  States that are free from such principles are more free to entertain their latent totalitarian tendencies.  Denmark does not want to be left behind China and most of the Middle East in their utter fright of people being exposed to (and preferring it to the state-sanctioned worldview) bold and sincere Christianity. 

In Denmark, it looks like similar tactics have been used against Torben Søndergaard to what were used against Larry Lea in the U.S. back in 1992, only this time the disinformation and slander seemed to be coordinated with the Danish government.

What Reza Aslan really thinks of Christianity

In various interviews Reza Aslan will represent himself as someone who deftly navigates between religious frameworks as easily as a polyglot switches between languages, and in others he seems to communicate what a bitter disappointment Christianity ended up being for him since he discovered through his studies at a Jesuit school that the entire New Testament was a bunch of made-up stories with little connection to the Jewish scriptures and religion. 

I think the most telling moment is when he is in like-minded anti-conservative company at Loonwatch and attempts to convey what is "brilliant and profoundly moving" about the Christian narrative: 

LW: How was that, what was that experience like when you were an Evangelical?
RA: It’s magical! The thing about Evangelical Christianity and why I think it is so appealing, particularly to young people is that I mean it is just such a brilliant and profoundly moving story. There is a reason why it is called the greatest story ever told, right?  That God had this physical son, like His little baby boy you know that came down to earth, and because you yourself are such an awful human being, because of all the terrible things you do, God decided to have His son tortured and murdered in order to save you from yourself, and that if you don’t accept that story, not only are you spitting in God’s face but, oh yeah, you are also going to burn in hell for all eternity.

It’s an amazing story, that’s why it is so appealing. Now the important thing to understand is that is what it precisely is: a story. I am not by any means discounting it or criticizing it.

Not by any means discounting it... Aslan seems unaware here of how his characterization of the "gospel" or New Testament story comes across.  This summation sounds as patronizing and goofy as what would typically be heard from "New Atheists" and secular humanists.  It is at the exact moment he is asked to explain why Christianity is appealing that his veneer of scholarly objectivism unravels and he can't help putting it in a particularly unappealing light-- and then he tries to recover by complimenting his own strawman version of Christianity as "amazing."  (I challenge the reader to find any comparable summary of Islam by Aslan.)   

Aslan having a moment at about t=19:40

In his 'Inside the Scholar's Studio' interview at Harvard, about 19 minutes into the Youtube video, Aslan appears to have a similar moment sharing a laugh with the audience about the absurdity of a human being somehow being God and also being capable of real human moments:

... when you try to think about him [Jesus] as struggling or suffering, as anxious or scared, when you try to think about the humanity of him, it's very difficult to do so, because, you knooow ... he's also God.  

and then switching back to his objective voice, having already evaded criticism by acknowledging first that the simultaneous humanity and divinity of Jesus is a Christian mystery.  This mystery that he seems to be trying to find a scholarly way to ridicule is something that he talks about as being "the heart of orthodox Christianity."  He separates what he calls the "God Jesus" from the human Jesus as though the divine element (along with nearly the entire New Testament narrative, if you read his book Zealot) must be somehow removed entirely before we understand who Jesus is and what he stands for.  What Reza means by "God Jesus" is "the detached, unearthly being I had been introduced to in church" or "a celestial detached spirit with no interest in the world" (similar language is used in his book Zealot).

Now Reza Aslan talks a lot about how his Muslim outlook does not shape his academic beliefs--his personal notion of the Islamic belief of "radical unity" is unorthodox--but his rejection of Christianity seems very much in line with a traditional Islamic interpretation of "radical unity" as he explains:

I always talk about how I had an emotional conversion to Christianity but a rational conversion to Islam. Reading about the way Islam talks about the divine and the relationship between human beings and God and conceptions of the universe and ideas of the transcendent, these made a hell of a lot more sense to me cosmologically speaking than some old man in the sky impregnated a virgin and His son came out [of her] and died for us.

As he goes on to explain in the Loonwatch interview, Islam has very little creed and instead has a lot of rules that are not driven by Islamic theology per se, and so there is not a lot of weird stuff in Islam that is hard to reconcile with rational thought as in Christianity where "some old man in the sky impregnated a virgin and His son came out and died for us."  There's no weird stuff like "God Jesus" and real human Jesus somehow being the same person.  Islam instead, in its inception and scripture, has an ordinary flesh-and-blood prophet slaughtering real people with real swords because they don't accept the prophet's revelations (what Aslan refers to obliquely as a "chilling new reality").  No weird theological mumbo-jumbo like an old man in the sky impregnating a virgin so that He can torture His divine baby boy, as Aslan summarizes Christianity.

When you hear Reza Aslan disclaiming that different religions are basically the same except for using different metaphors to describe the same spiritual reality, consider whether the differences Aslan sees really go deeper than employing this or that metaphor.  If Aslan does not think Christianity is stupid, he is clearly bad at communicating the respect he has for those beliefs (which seems odd for someone who considers communication part of his particular expertise).   I believe it makes more sense to think that Aslan sometimes has trouble hiding his contempt for his personal (and poorly informed) concept of Christianity. 

Larry Lea: An Agenda for Painting with a Broad Brush

ABC should have been sued for slander, for damaging an innocent man's reputation.  I believe Larry Lea got on somebody's radar, not primarily for any particular malfeasance on his part, but for energizing American Christians in praying for their nation.  November 1991 was kicking off the year countdown to the '92 election, and the voting block responsible for 12 years of Republican presidential office needed to be shattered.  Naturally, ABC could be counted on for a "smite the shepherd" strategy.

Larry Lea's former wife Melva recounts why we should be worried about media agenda:

Before Larry did the interview, ABC told him that many people considered him to be the next Billy Graham and that the interview was going to be about "the new generation of preachers." When he got to the studio, they completely changed the angle. From Diane Sawyer's first word, the air just went out of the room. It was horrific.
We later were contacted by a senator who told us that the program was an ambush for a political agenda--to take down a huge voting block of right-wing conservative voters.
. . . What was devastating to me was that so many people in the body of Christ believed what they heard from a secular news reporter rather than believing someone who taught them how to pray and commune with God. For the most part everyone looked at us like we had leprosy.
After the interview we formed a committee of pastors to examine our practices. We invited EFICOM [Ethics and Financial Integrity Commission, a branch of the National Religious Broadcasters that certifies financial accountability] to come in and look at everything. One EFICOM member, who was a federal judge and clearly didn't like Larry, told him, "If I find anything wrong, you're in trouble."
Larry opened up everything to him. A few days later this man returned and said: "You have grounds to sue. There is absolutely nothing true about any of [ABC's] allegations."
Perception is everything, though. The damage had already been done. It destroyed our credibility.

Through a guilt-by-association maneuver in which they associated Larry Lea's ministry to Robert Tilton's goofy prosperity infomercials and the Peter Poppoff-esque shenanigans of W.V. Grant, the Dallas Morning News was poised to label the three men "a greedy, unholy trinity schooled in using the cross crassly." In spite of being guilty of writing a best-selling book about prayer, Lea's emphasis was always on prayer rather than prosperity. 

From The Dallas Morning News:

1.)  Judgment Day on `Prime Time Live' Author: Ed Bark  THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS (DAL) Publish Date: NOVEMBER 21, 1991 Word Count: 749 Document ID: 0ED56291649D24AC

Tell a friend to watch three Dallas area televangelists exposed as serpents on Thursday's exclusive Prime Time Live report.It's good for the soul. And it may be very bad for the nationally televised ministries of W.V. Grant, Larry Lea and Robert Tilton. Prime Time co-anchor Diane Sawyer, aided by hidden cameras, exposes a greedy, unholy trinity schooled in using the cross crassly. Yes, we've waded through this muck before. But televangelists continue to fold their hands and ...

Reza Aslan's Money-Making Marxism

As of the beginning of the year, Reza Aslan is worth $3 million.  Peddling secularism, quasi-Marxist philosophy, anti-Israel rhetoric, pseudo-mysticism, and popular pseudohistorical narratives has been very lucrative for this high-profile limousine liberal.  And he has high hopes for the movie rights to Zealot making him even more of that filthy lucre, cashing in on the latest popularity of Jesus films.

Regularly denouncing Christian conservatives for following an unhistorical Jesus and calling Joel Osteen a "charlatan" for having money and not condemning wealth, Reza Aslan claims that a fundamental aspect of Jesus' true identity was "his absolute hatred of wealth" and also claims to be a genuinely committed follower of the historical Jesus rather than the "detached celestial spirit" of Christianity who (in his keen reckoning) cares nothing for people's earthly plight unlike his entirely non-divine version of Jesus.

Reza has repeatedly spoken highly of what he thinks is the real Jesus' calling for a bloody hyper-Marxist revolution--that progressive vision which Charles Manson called "helter skelter" and which Reza says would be "a chilling new reality" as the rich are made destitute and the destitute are made wealthy.  So...when the revolution happens, how much of Reza's money will I be getting? 

Juergensmeyer's "Christian terrorism" and Breivik's paganism

Reza Aslan's thesis advisor Mark Juergensmeyer got some notice in Norway for calling Anders Breivik a "Christian terrorist":

The American terrorism researcher Mark Juergensmeyer believed however that Breivik was a Christian terrorist in line with the Oklahoma bomber, according to NRK. [Den amerikanske terrorforskeren Mark Juergensmeyer mente derimot at Breivik var en kristen terrorist på linje med Oklahoma-bomberen, ifølge NRK] *

Apparently, being raised in "flyover country" by a Catholic family makes one a Christian, just as growing up in Europe does for Breivik.  Writing for Patheos on the McVeigh-was-a-Christian meme, Jeremy Lott (editor of RealClearReligion.org) summarizes:

[McVeigh] told Time magazine in 1996 that he believed in a deity but had “lost touch with the religion” of his birth. . . . We might call him spiritual but not religious. He claimed to be agnostic but not an atheist. McVeigh believed in “science” and not “religion,” he said. (In fact, he said his religion was science.) His murky metaphysical notions included some sort of Deistic creator who set things in motion, not the personal God of Christianity.  . . . [He] didn’t believe in an afterlife and he certainly didn’t believe in hell.

Supposedly, Breivik identified himself at one time as a "cultural Christian."  But does that mean anything more than having grown up in the secular Europe with its historical roots in Christianity?  Is Breivik's use of the symbols of ancient Scandinavian paganism merely a superficial cultural flourish?  According to the same Norwegian article:

Now Breivik said that he "is not and never has been - a Christian," in a letter he sent to "interested or affected parties in comp. With 22/7" along with two other letters to, among other day.  He describes himself as "one of the more fanatical National Socialists in Northern Europe."
During a point called "Odinisme" dismisses his Christianity and Jesus as follows:
"There are few things in the world that is more pathetic than the Jesus figure and his message, and I have always despised the weakness and the internationalism that the church represents."
He stressed that he prays and sacrifices to God and receive strength from God, but that he calls him "Odin, not Jesus or Jehovah."

Sounds Christian to me.  Could be that radical sect of Christianity that eschews the Biblical names for God and thinks little of "the Jesus figure and his message."  Interesting sense of being "culturally Christian."  Breivik seems culturally pagan, in addition to being religiously pagan.

According to the article, Henrik Syse, "philosopher and senior researcher at the International Peace Research Institute (PRIO)," thinks people should be careful how they apply the phrase "Christian terrorist" to Anders Breivik, considering how he is not a Christian "in any meaningful sense." Not being a Christian in any meaningful sense seems like an excellent reason not to be called a "Christian terrorist" at all.  It doesn't seem that he could be Christian in any meaningful sense even if he claimed to be a Christian.

It is not entirely unnatural that people have characterized Breivik as a Christian, just as there are many Muslim terrorists as far removed from what most people would think that Islam stands for, says Sysendammen.
While it is clear a point that if he takes [sic] explicit distance from Christianity, one can not call him a Christian.

The researcher stresses that the Christian culture background is not completely irrelevant, because Breivik refers to it and calls himself a crusader.
His ideology and philosophy must be taken seriously because it is so dangerous and
can inspire others.  But philosophically it is a smear, as it is hardly worth taking seriously intellectually, and that is a far cry from Christian thought, says Sysendammen.

True, the background is "not irrelevant" because, as Adolf Hitler did, Breivik was trying to sell his ideas to European cultures whose historical traditions are rooted in Christianity, not Islam.  However, fascism, even paganistic fascism, has more in common with cultural Marxism than , the nationalistic tendencies of fascism notwithstanding. (Of course, fascist dictators have always respected national borders, right?)  Fascism may be the illegitimate child of Marxism, but its paternity is clear, with its aims of the government shaping and controlling its people by undermining the roles of family and traditional institutions.  Unlike communism, fascism paid lip service to the importance of the very institutions and it actively sought to subdue and control.  The religious cultural background becomes very important to any ideology that claims to uphold the very cultural elements it seeks to radically refashion (or "fundamentally transform"). 

Syse's analogy to "Muslim terrorist" only holds with respect to terrorists who (1) are "far removed" from what most Muslims (rather than "most people") would think Islam stands for, and who (2) embrace an ideology that is "a far cry from" Islamic thought.  Which begs the question, how do we determine how far something is removed from essential Christianity or essential Islam? 

Let's say Mahmoud is an Egyptian terrorist killing Arab Christians, and he said that he preferred to call his Allah by the name of the Egyptian god Horus, and he said that nothing was more pathetic than Mohammed and his message.  Wouldn't anyone calling Mahmoud a Muslim terrorist be quickly corrected?  Assuming, of course, that it could be argued in this case that Mahmoud was not a Muslim in any meaningful sense.  In what sense would he be "culturally Muslim" other than having been exposed to Islam while growing up?  President Obama could be considered culturally Muslim in that sense, having attended a Muslim school as a boy. 

In Reza Aslan's view of religion, we might have to call Ahmoud a Muslim terrorist as long as Ahmoud associates himself with Islamic culture, even if his appeal to Islam is shallow and opportunistic, since religious affiliation is entirely about identification and not about what you actually believe.

Why would anyone need to associate an obvious pagan like Breivik with the "Jesus and his message" which he finds so miserably "pathetic"?  Maybe for the same reason people identify the pagan Adolf Hitler with Christianity.  But underneath the question of how a blatant non-Christian gets labeled a Christian is a deeper question:  If "making explicit distance" from Christianity can disqualify one from the charge of being a Christian, how far can one drift from being a Christian "in any meaningful sense" so that the distance from Christianity no longer needs to be "explicit"?

PS: The Norwegian article sports these factoids about Odinism:

[Odinism:]  Worship of Odin in Norse mythology.
There is disagreement whether [Odin] is the same as Asatru. [Det er uenighet om det er det samme som åsatru.] 
In the US Odinism [is] often coupled with white supremacy and violence. [I USA er odinisme ofte koblet med hvit overlegenhet og vold.] 
Vigrid is e.g. a late modern form of Odinism mixed with Norse mythology and racial doctrine.  [Vigrid er f.eks en senmoderne form for odinisme med blanding av norrøn mytologi og raselære.]

Jesus' Color Brings Reza Doubletalk Into Relief

Whatever the value of Megyn Kelly's claims about Jesus' appearance, they are not based on her being unable to imagine a darker Jesus, but are based on some very old, if questionable, documents.  These documents are contested in terms of the authenticity or the pedigree is in question.  I think it is ultimately hard to base anything definitively on them, any more than on even earlier documents claiming that Jesus was "small and ugly."  Kelly believes that her image is a historical image.  Ultimately it is probably no more historical than Reza Aslan's depictions in Zealot.  But Aslan, in response to Kelly, greatly muddies the waters.

People might be surprised at the role of religion growing up in the South.  Southern churches are where I learned the song "Jesus Loves the Little Children."  The purpose of the song didn't seem to be to categorize people into colors but to drive home this singular point:  Nobody's color matters to Jesus.  A theme repeated in the epistles of Paul.  A theme repeated in the educational materials of the church-run school I attended.  Reza Aslan's Zealot conveys a very different Jesus whose prescriptions of love are only meant between fellow Jews, and who is completely for a violent ousting of European occupiers from Palestine (is it Jesus or Reza that wants this?).  In the following exchange, Reza seems to say each socioeconomic group has its own Christ:

So, it's a much more interesting issue that arises from her statement: Megyn Kelly is right. Her Christ is white.
What is it about Christ, historically or religiously, that leads people to want to convey him in their own images?
That is the entire point of the Christ.

from Killing Jesus

No, Reza. That is not the entire point of the Messiah/Christ.  The Christ of the apostles is something surprising.  The point of the New Testament is not to have an unhistorical Messiah who can be made into whatever we want--it is a Messiah that is as uncomfortable to "white suburbanites" as he was to the Pharisees and Jewish zealots, and as he obviously is to Reza Aslan.  The New Testament presents an unexpected sort of Messiah, who in a certain sense is "neither Jew nor Gentile nor barbarian" because these ethnic and socioeconomic distinctions disappear in him.  Reza's Jesus is a small and uninteresting class warrior, not remotely as interesting as Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr., who both stand out as much more evocative of the transcendence of Jesus of Nazareth than a Che Guevara character.

Reza's responses to Megyn Kelly do two things.  They draw a red herring across the substance of her statements (the question of which historical assertions are credible), and they change the topic to Reza's tortured notion of Christ vs. Jesus.  The oneness of the people joined in spirit to Jesus the Messiah is a central theme in the letters of Paul the Apostle.  In Paul's integrated synagogues of the early church where Jews and Gentiles alike rejoiced in the Messiah together, the point of the Christ/Messiah (that Reza claims Paul invented) is not so the Greek can have a European Jesus while his Jewish brother has a Middle Eastern Jesus.  The point is that this historical Galilean Jew was "the express image" of one Father God who made all mankind in His image.  The point of Jesus removing the "division" and the "enmity" as stated in Paul's letter to Ephesus is lost completely in Reza's pseudo-historical Jesus.  The "Jewish context" of Jesus and the Hebrew scriptures pervade the New Testament. 

Jesus, as Reza claims, might well have been the same color as Reza.  Maybe darker, maybe lighter.  That is more likely to me than that he was fair-skinned.  But neither scenario makes Jesus any less an empathetic Savior for all peoples.  Unless you are someone who defines people by their socioeconomic environment, or identifies "color" with such; unless you see everything through a lens of identity politics which ignores the extraordinary way in which the Resurrection started transcending ethnic and social boundaries, "first in Judaea, then in Samaria, and then in the uttermost parts of the earth."  Ultimately, it is the "content of his character" (a pertinent MLK phrase) that defines Jesus, not the color of his skin, be it fairer than Kelly's or darker than Aslan's.

Reza's comments about the "real" color of Jesus' skin put me in mind of an article by Harvard alumnus and native Israeli Natalie Portman:

Faisal Chaudhry writes . . .  creatively framing the same article with a conversion into a “white” vs. “brown” struggle (Op-Ed, “An Ideology of Oppression,” April 11). At one point, Chaudhry even compares the situation to apartheid. This is a distortion of the fact that most Israelis and Palestinians are indistinguishable physically.

Having visited Jerusalem on occasion I've noticed that there is considerably more ethnic or "racial" diversity among the Jewish than among the Arab.  All the Arabs look Caucasian, if swarthy.  The Jews look like Ethiopians and like European Caucasians and like Bedouins, and like everything in between.  Some Palestinian Christians in Bethlehem bring identity politics into the gospel:  In this revisionist take, Jesus is a Palestinian who is ethnically different from the Judaeans who deliver him to Pilate.  It is an anachronistic reading into the tension between the Galileans of the Israelite North and the Judaeans, and something about it is disturbingly reminiscent of Hitler's state church of revisionist "Positive Christianity" for whom Jesus was not Jewish but Aryan.  (Incidentally, the non-Jewishness of Jesus is an idea categorically rejected by the American Fundamentalist movement--a movement much more interested in recognizing the distinct Jewishness of Jesus and the early church than the liberal movements it rebelled against.) 

Contrary to what Reza Aslan claims, Christianity is not about divorcing Jesus from his time and place and people; it simply doesn't see the need to define Jesus solely by his environment or color.  We can't do that with Gandhi, nor with MLK Jr., nor with Bonhoeffer--and from a historical point of view, we have every reason not to do it with Jesus of Nazareth.  Whether or not Reza Aslan is being deliberately obtuse about the motivation of New Testament theology, it is important to see how the very essence ("the fabric and nature") of the NT is detrimental to his "Zealot" thesis. 

Resurrection: Is Reza an Expert in Judaeo-Christian History?

Elijah & the Widow's Son

Reza Aslan, famous for being questioned on Fox News, answered why a Muslim such as himself would choose Jesus as a topic for a book: “I am a scholar of religions with four degrees including one in the New Testament . . . I am an expert with a Ph.D. in the history of religions . . . I am a professor of religions, including the New Testament – that’s what I do for a living, actually . . . To be clear, I want to emphasize one more time, I am a historian, I am a Ph.D. in the history of religions.” [emphases mine]

Matthew Facciani posting to Patheos.com thinks that critics are being too rash in dismissing Aslan's expertise.  He writes, "What really matters is what area your research is in (i.e. your [PhD]dissertation)." 

What is the actual case about Reza Aslan's expertise?  In First Things, Matthew J. Franck writes after taking a very close look at Aslan's qualifications: 

. . . He is an associate professor in the Creative Writing program at the University of California, Riverside, where his terminal MFA in fiction from Iowa is his relevant academic credential. It appears he has taught some courses on Islam in the past, and he may do so now, moonlighting from his creative writing duties at Riverside. Aslan has been a busy popular writer, and he is certainly a tireless self-promoter, but he is nowhere known in the academic world as a scholar of the history of religion. And a scholarly historian of early Christianity? Nope.  

What about that Ph.D.? As already noted, it was in sociology. I have his dissertation in front of me. It is a 140-page work titled “Global Jihadism as a Transnational Social Movement: A Theoretical Framework.” If Aslan’s Ph.D. is the basis of a claim to scholarly credentials, he could plausibly claim to be an expert on social movements in twentieth-century Islam. He cannot plausibly claim, as he did to Lauren Green, that he is a “historian,” or is a “professor of religions” “for a living.”

Reza Aslan doesn't seem to have taught any classes on the New Testament.  His PhD dissertation was specific to Islam.  Yet his tweet to @matanlurey pictured here seems to suggest that his sociology degree in jihadism that is somehow based on the History-of-Religions school of thought entitles him to claim (along with his two lesser religion-related degrees) expertise as a historian of all three Western Religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. 

That is indeed very impressive.  A case in point:  Aslan said some interesting things about in response to an interviewer's question:

You argue that it’s the story of resurrection that really set Jesus apart. What made resurrection such a novel idea?
Well, it simply doesn’t exist in Judaism. The idea of an individual dying and rising from the dead absolutely has no basis in five thousand years of Jewish history, scripture or thought.
So, that’s the thing: No matter what you think about the resurrection, the thing that’s kind of fascinating from an historical perspective is that there is simply no Jewish context for it. 

Christians know that there is a scene documented in the Book of Acts that speaks of some Pharisees siding with Paul the Apostle against the sect of Sadducees because they couldn't dismiss out of hand the idea of an individual being resurrected.  Similar statements appear in the gospels concerning the Pharisees.   Let's dig a little deeper.

From Aish.com:

Fundamental belief of Judaism?  Let's look at Chabad.org:

A basic tenet of the Jewish faith is the belief that those who have died will again be brought to life. In fact, Techiat HaMeitim, "Vivification of the Dead" is one of the thirteen cardinal principles, or "foundations," of Judaism.  . . . In this dark and imperfect world, we cannot yet behold and enjoy the fruits of our labor. But in the Era of Moshiach, the accumulated attainments of all generations of history will reach their ultimate perfection. And since "G‑d does not deprive any creature of its due," all elements that have been involved in realizing His purpose in creation will be reunited to perceive and experience the perfect world that their combined effort has achieved.   . . . 

The article goes on to describe the "centrality of the Resurrection to the whole of Judaism".  The Online Jewish Encyclopedia says this about the Pharisees:

Secularizing or Secularism?

One of the many topics in which it is hard to understand what Reza Aslan really means is that of secularization and its meaning. 

When politicians speak of bringing democracy to the Middle East, they mean specifically an American secular democracy, not an indigenous Islamic one.

There exists a philosophical dispute in the Western world with regard to the concept of Islamic democracy: that is, that there can be no a priori moral framework in a modern democracy; that the foundation of a genuinely democratic society must be secularism.  . . .  As the Protestant theologian Harvey Cox notes, secularization is the process by which "certain responsibilities pass from ecclesiastical to political authorities," whereas secularism is an ideology based on the eradication of religion from public life.  . . . neither human rights nor pluralism is the result of secularization; they are its root cause. Consequently, any democratic society -- Islamic or otherwise -- dedicated to the principles of pluralism and human rights must dedicate itself to following the unavoidable path toward political secularization.

This sounds like a philosophical backflip: first acknowledging that a people can't secularize themselves into a more free society, and then suggesting in ambiguous language that to remain "dedicated to the principles of pluralism and human rights" one must not stray from the inexorable pull of secularization, a path that is "unavoidable" provided a society "dedicates itself to following" it.  In America's case, all we need is a Supreme Court to force our ignorant society of religious yokels to remain dedicated to it.  Aslan at turns seems to be saying that Middle Eastern countries must find their way to democracy in their own way and their own time (in other words, we need to stop sanctions and ignore human rights violations), and then begs the question why unavoidable paths require dedication.  If we interpret that last sentence as meaning that this dedication to secularization itself follows irrevocably, it still begs the question why any Islamic democracy would dedicate itself to "pluralism and human rights" in a way that would subordinate religious sensibilities to higher principles.  This sounds like doubletalk.  

The main problem here is that it is hard to trust how some "prominent thinkers" distinguish an acceptable encroachment of "political authorities" into "ecclesiastical" life from "the eradication of religion from public life."  Presumably, "ecclesiastical" voices (including any religious coalition) don't surrender these "responsibilities" easily; the real question is just what we mean by a voluntary surrender of these responsibilities.  The vision of Marx and of every collectivism derived from Marxism (fascism, communism, socialism) has demanded a centralized authority that puts every ecclesiastical agency (and every familial and didactic agency) at its mercy fiscally, legally, politically.  This is necessary for a centralized state to impose the right morality and vision of society (e.g. a specific interpretation of pluralism and human rights with which a free people might disagree 1,2) that the religious sensibilities of the common folk are too backward to embrace willingly.  It requires a power unaccountable to the people, like a dictator or (in America's case) a Supreme Court.  Turkey is not a good example for Aslan because theirs was not a voluntary surrender. Which is why they don't wear hijabs. 

The work that Reza Aslan does with Mike Weinstein in undermining the prominent place that Christianity holds in America's military says a lot about what he really means by secularization.  This sort of forced pluralism or involuntary pluralism is apparently seen as the passing of certain responsibilities in which it becomes .  I wonder what Aslan would make of attempts to de-Islamicize the Iranian military, squelching Islam's prominent role in that society.  This sort of thing is not necessary for pluralism, and is not traditional American pluralism.  Traditional American pluralism is neither forcing a society to celebrate all views equally nor forcing a society to deny having a specific religious heritage.  The former comes from a quasi-religious progressive vision of diversity as a sacrament; the latter comes from a tacit agreement between secularism and quasi-religious progressivism.

Lauren Green's Real Mistake

Many pieces critical of Reza Aslan's Zealot, and of his performance in the interview with Fox correspondent Lauren Green, seem to make a perfunctory jab at Fox (lest their colleagues mistake them for conservative sympathizers) and/or make an obligatory nod toward Green's terrible blunder, whether it's Islamophobia, bulverism, anti-intellectualism, "racism" (against the "Muslim race"?) or some such combination of unsavory prejudices and bigotry.

The combination of Aslan's immediate display of offense and his line "a Muslim scholar's right to write about Jesus" set the stage for all sorts of pointless bloviation about Green's questioning his right to write a book about Jesus.  Not only do I think this misses the mark, I think it would be going way past the facts to claim that Green questioned the propriety (which is another thing entirely) of his writing this book.  Despite his many repetitions of his credentials, he was not questioned on his qualifications for writing the book (but many have naturally questioned it since the interview).

But Aslan displayed from the beginning of the interview his awareness of what he was actually being asked.  He was being asked about his motivation in writing the book, and immediately hid behind his credentials and his "job," as though his qualifications entailed objectivity, and avoided the very explanation that frames his entire book. 

He has elsewhere admitted that he wrote the book with a very strong personal, ideological bias.  It had nothing to do with his "job" as either a professor of creative writing or as visiting professor of contemporary religious issues. (The "job" he had in mind was apparently not his paid job as professor, but his calling, as he sees it, as a public intellectual.)  As he states in his book, it had everything to do with his conversion into being a follower of a 2000-year-old political radical.  He had an ideological bias, and it inspires, informs, and permeates his book. 

Reza Aslan: Religious Text Has No Intrinsic Meaning

According to Reza Aslan, your religious text does not in any way inform your value system or your world view.  Rather, your value system and world view are dependent entirely on other things and instead dictate your interpretation of your religious text. 

How Did Fox News Surprise Reza Aslan?

In many interviews Reza Aslan has repeated the refrain that Fox News has "spun" Islamophobia "into ratings gold." In the interview below, Aslan explained in more detail what he experienced during the famous interview that catapulted him into media stardom.    

When you first went through that now-viral Fox News interview, did you think the internet would notice?


Reza looking shocked.

Not at all. I understood what was happening about halfway through the interview, I’ll be honest. I went through the interview thinking that of course they’re going to come out swinging. That’s what Fox News does; that’s why they’re so successful. I expected one, maybe two, questions about my perceived Muslim bias in writing this book. I knew it was going to be an attempt to discredit the book and the academic work behind the book by trying to smear the author. I expected that. What I didn’t expect was ten solid minutes of it. *

This is very interesting. 

1. First of all, why would Aslan give a Fox News online program the time of day if he never thought "the internet" would notice? 
2. He says here that he expected Fox News to "come out swinging" with "questions about my perceived Muslim bias," and yet as several sympathetic articles have noted (in the NY Times,  the American Conservative, Big Think, etc.), Aslan lifts his eyebrows high in apparent bewilderment when Green does exactly what he was expecting.  It seems to be this gesture that many people took as barely contained umbrage, and indirectly as evidence of a mistreated scholar unfairly insulted (after all, he looked offended).  And this perceived sleight frames Aslan's explanation about how he is a "prominent Muslim thinker" and how his academic credentials both entitle and require him to write this book about Jesus. (It is his job to do so, he explained.) 
3. Presumably, the only surprise occurred halfway through the interview (about 5 minutes in).  And presumably, this surprise was that this interview would be "ten solid minutes" of  discrediting his book and its underlying scholarship.  Yet Green let him explain how his academic views  contradict orthodox Islam.  Green asked him to talk about the claims of his book, and then let him present an overview of the argument in his book.  Green then brought up another criticism of his book.  While the interview was a flawed (even botched) attempt to corner a particularly slippery interviewee (and most of the attempts to discredit Green have been extremely flawed as well), to describe it as "ten solid minutes" of ad hominem is not just flawed, it's patently false.   

French journalist Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry observed:

. . . The interviewer quotes Aslan a bit of criticism of his book. Instead of responding, Aslan talks about how his book has a hundred pages of endnotes and is therefore a serious book. First of all, that’s silly. I mean, really. But second of all, answer the damn question. Aslan speaks as if the fact that he has a PhD somehow means that he is beyond criticism, at least from non-PhDs, and certainly from journalists.

Then why go on the interview?
I mean, think about it for a second. There’s about as much chance of Fox News’ audience buying Aslan’s book as there is of it buying Yeezus. So why do the interview?

Well, for this, of course. The interview didn’t ever degenerate—it never “generated” to begin with. Oh sure, Fox News had its own agenda. But Aslan could have played it cool, or presumed good faith at least on the first question. That’s if he hadn’t been coming on the interview just for this. To assume bigotry on the part of Fox News, to talk about his academic bona fides, and therefore to generate a viral moment and juice his book sales.

Well said.  

Expert in the History of Religions

Elizabeth Castelli, a professor of religious studies, wrote an article for The Nation about Zealot.  After denouncing the Infamous Fox Interview, she took issue with Aslan's self characterization as a historian. She observes the probable, and potentially misleading, meaning of Aslan's self-description as an expert in the "history of religions":

Aslan’s claims concerning his academic degrees have led to some confusion: he uses the term “historian of religions” at times, “historian” at others. To people unfamiliar with the intellectual histories involved, the first term may not resonate. “History of religions” derives from the nineteenth-century German university context where the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule [history-of-religions school] sought to place the phenomenon of religion—especially in its archaic and ancient iterations—in social and cultural context. It has since become the name for a particular disciplinary approach to the study of religion, most often associated in the United States with the University of Chicago and the University of California at Santa Barbara, where Aslan earned his PhD in sociology. To the extent that he did coursework in the UCSB Religious Studies department, he can certainly lay claim to preparation in the history-of-religions approach. Although this approach was influential on the study of the New Testament and early Christianity in the first two decades of the twentieth century, it has had little impact in the decades since. [emphases mine]

Reza on who gets to speak for Jesus

The "right of a scholar" (Muslim or no) "to write about Jesus" is not and has never been at issue.   Conservatives certainly may not like tax dollars supporting all kinds of freedom of expression, and may disagree on what counts as freedom of expression, but writing popular books on all sorts of unusual theories has been commonplace. 

In response to Pope Francis' [apostolic exhortation suggesting that certain economic freedoms might need to be sacrificed for social justice], these two paragons of the far right [Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin] – both of whom regularly invoke the teachings of Jesus to bolster their own political views – have suddenly turned their backs on the man whose actual job description is to speak for Jesus.   

Neither of these "paragons" is Catholic, and as Reza is a expert in Western Religions, he should know that only Roman Catholics view the Pope as speaking for Jesus and only when he speaks ex cathedra.  For someone who writes about the forthcoming "Protestantization of Islam" and has lauded Osama bin Laden as being a Luther-type reformer in this process, this is a profoundly unsophisticated bit of nonsense.  His language conjures a picture of conservatives walking arm in arm with the Pope and "suddenly turning" on him.  In the famous FOX News interview, it seemed that Reza was saying that is his actual job description as well to speak for Jesus, which according to his preface to Zealot is what he's all about.  He seems to believe that all Protestants should stand at attention when the Pope gives Jesus' opinion on the free market, or when a supposedly objective scholar like Reza does so. 

He dismisses "the far right" (a politically loaded term) -- through the judicious picking of "paragons" -- as having "a profoundly unhistorical view of Jesus."  If you've read Zealot, then you know that what Reza really means by "a profoundly unhistorical view of Jesus" is that thing Christians call the New Testament, which presents Jesus as "a detached celestial spirit with no interest in the affairs of this world" instead of the truly compassionate revolutionary he actually was.  Yes, the entire New Testament is profoundly (deeply and fundamentally) unhistorical according to Reza Aslan, except for the few bits and pieces he uses to support his "historical" view.  (He does grant that the crucifixion happened, and that the original disciples actually did believe that Jesus healed people and believed he was resurrected; but he claims almost all the details of the gospels and theology of the epistles were completely made up.)

Why would a main who praises reformation and 'Protestantization' for Islam, praise a centralized authority that purports to speak for all Christians?

Does Reza Aslan really think that Protestants must accept the Pope's opinion of the free market as Jesus' own opinion?  Or is he really just that full of himself that he depends now on people swallowing whole all his unchecked sophistry?  

The Papal Throne

Reverence in the presence of the Pope

Hitler and Christianity: An Oft-Repeated Lie

Probably no historical person prompts more universal disgust in Westerners than Adolf Hitler.  Yet, in a conversation with Cenk Uyger (Young Turks), Reza Aslan states that Hitler must have been a Christian because he identified himself as such.  To bolster Reza Aslan's point about how a religious view can't disown anyone who claims to be part of it, Cenk Uyger digs up a quote from Mein Kampf that secularists have long been championing as proof that Hitler was a Christian:

The anti-Semitism of the new movement was based on religious ideas instead of racial knowledge.

Now, the charge of quote-mining is so overused, it almost "only does emotive work." And yet, one presumably had to read Mein Kampf to find this quote, and the context is not at all obscure in chapter 2.  The Christian Socialist Party was a political party that tried to wed liberal Christian "higher criticism" ideas with both ethnic paranoia and socialism, and thus leveled its bigotry against the faith of Judaism (an almost Marcionite brand of supercessionism). Ultimately, a truly nationalistic movement, Hitler thought, could not possibly be based on fluffy spiritualities but on cold objective material (i.e. biological) realities.  A Jewish person, in Hitler's mind, was a corrupt creature regardless of what he believed; an idea deeply antithetical to Christian canon and dogma in general.  By not being based on "racial knowledge" (what is now called "scientific racism" was commonly justified by evolutionary thought), the CSP was necessarily "a sham anti-Semitism which was almost worse than none at all" in Hitler's account.

In other words, the "new movement" "based on religious ideas" was not National Socialism, but so-called "Christian Socialism".  The "old movement" in this context was Pan-Germanism, a movement Hitler believed was more on target in principle but off target in method.  In fact, the CSP was so effective at convincing Hitler of the dangers posed by Jewish people that Hitler praised its methods rather than its principles, as it "recognized the value of large-scale propaganda and was a virtuoso in influencing the psychological instincts of the broad masses of its adherents." To absorb any of CSP theological ideas (which were neither conservative nor orthodox) would at least have required Hitler to entertain the notion that anyone can be saved through the truth.  And Hitler acknowledges in Mein Kampf that he would have none of this.  There is, in fact, not even a half-hearted attempt to base his political ideas on any kind of Christian doctrine. 

He does make a vague reference to "true Christianity" once in chapter 11, but like a good politician does not elaborate on what that means other than insinuating that it is antithetical to greed (still popular in anticapitalist rants), and makes a perfunctory jab about how Jesus was rejected and betrayed by Jewish people in the 1st century--an image that had been used for years to drum up and justify anti-Semitic sentiment at the expense of New Testament teaching.  Hitler brings this medieval passion play cliche into his book 9 chapters after explaining that the main thing he got from the Christian Socialists was how to use effective propaganda.  This would be the perfect place to explain how his political Weltanschauung meshes with Christianity, and Hitler is emphatically silent.  But there is no chance, according to secularists, that Hitler's appeal to religious imagery was cynically opportunistic rather than deep and heartfelt.  I mean, it's not like he was a politician.

Exactly how dedicated to the New Testament was Hitler's "National Reich Church"?

The National Church has no scribes, pastors, chaplains or priests, but National Reich orators are to speak in them. The National Church demands immediate cessation of the publishing and dissemination of the Bible in Germany... The National Church declares that to it, and therefore to the German nation, it has been decided that the Fuehrer's Mein Kampf is the greatest of all documents. It ... not only contains the greatest but it embodies the purest and truest ethics for the present and future life of our nation. The National Church will clear away from its altars all crucifixes, Bibles and pictures of saints. On the altars there must be nothing but Mein Kampf (to the German national and therefore to God the most sacred book) and to the left of the altar a sword. On the day of its foundation, the Christian Cross must be removed from all churches, cathedrals and chapels... and it must be superseded by the only unconquerable symbol, the swastika.* 

PhD in Reagan: Reza Aslan's Tortured Analogy of Objectivity

It's hard to find a perfect analogy for anything, but in the famous FOX News interview Lauren Green and Reza Aslan both took a few stabs at analogizing this "Muslim scholar's" situation in terms of writing a modern political biography.

Green:  Taylor Kane just says, "So, your book is written with clear bias and you're trying to say that's academic. That's like having a Democrat write a book about why Reagan wasn't a good Republican. It just doesn't work." What do you say to that?
Aslan:  Well, it would be like a Democrat with a PhD in Reagan who has been studying his life and history for two decades writing a book about Reagan.

Ok, Aslan does not have a PhD in Jesus.  He does not have a PhD in the New Testament. He does not have a PhD in in History.  And even though his PhD does draw on religious studies with a History-of-Religion slant, his PhD is not in Religion or Religious Studies.  His PhD is in the sociology of a violent religious phenomenon in modern Islam. He has claimed at times that his focus for his Harvard degree in religious studies was Islam from the start, and his formal training in New Testament studies seems to have mostly ended with his bachelor's degree (and Margaret Mitchell's analysis bears this out).  Based on his PhD it seems his religious studies were focused into a dissertation on modern Islam and modern jihadism with some earlier Islamic history brought to bear on it.  His dissertation is much more about the sociology of a particular religion than on the nature of any religion.

So it would be as though Aslan had completed his PhD dissertation in how 19th century progressivism and how its sociological effects shaped the later presidency of Woodrow Wilson, and then wrote a popular book about how Ronald Reagan was really more of a Franklin Roosevelt progressive than a conservative, based on careful cherry-picking of quotes, referring the reader to an extended bibliography of the thousands of books he supposedly digested to get to this claim, instead of dealing seriously with the many problems that would inevitably haunt such a strained claim.  Maybe in the introduction to this hypothetical book he cold mention an affiliation with the Southern Poverty Law Center that arose after being completely soured on conservatism, and how he wrote the book to make other people disciples of the real Ronald Reagan.

Not that that would at all raise any concerns about bias and objectivity.



Wouldn't be the first time an icon was conveniently appropriated.

Reza Aslan on Authentic Christianity

In his NY Times op-ed urging people to have a more sophisticated view of religion, Reza Aslan starts talking about varied perspectives in a religion with these examples of Christianity:

What a member of a suburban megachurch in Texas calls Christianity may be radically different from what an impoverished coffee picker in the hills of Guatemala calls Christianity.

I think many Christians who have traveled or otherwise engaged different cultures have seen their faith transcend cultural and socioeconomic barriers. (There are such barriers to be transcended even within a "suburban megachurch.")  Given though the centrality of Reza places on "social justice" and a hyper-Marxist "chilling new reality," Guatemala seems like this is a veiled reference to the "liberation theology" advocated or supported by many Jesuits in Latin America.

I was introduced to the historical Jesus at Santa Clara University [in California] by a group of brilliant, academically trained Jesuits. The Jesuits see Jesus through the lens of his preferential option for the poor. Now I also tend to believe that there is really no way to read the Gospels either as a person of faith or as a historian without recognizing Jesus’ preferential option for the poor. But some people — for example, [megachurch pastors] Joel Olsteen and T.D. Jakes, and frankly a great many Republicans in the U.S. Congress — would disagree because they are using the Gospel in an attempt to do away with food stamps and welfare, which blows my mind.*

First of all, as far as I know neither Joel Osteen nor most conservatives I've talked to are attempting to do away with food stamps and welfare.  A more fair generalization would be that conservatives question the explosion of food stamp use in the last 8 years and its efficacy in fighting poverty, and progressives are opposed to it being questioned, content to dismiss it as an unavoidable consequence of the recession.  There is a growing movement to draw deep principles of balancing accountability and liberty in a Christian context, but that is largely orthogonal to the "prosperity gospel," something that cannot be understood in isolation from the "healing gospel."

"The argument of the prosperity gospel, if I can put it flippantly, is that Jesus wants you to drive a Bentley. That is basically what the argument is.*

Aside from how lucrative the gospel of redistribution has been for this apostle of neo-Marxism, this is pure caricature.  It should be beneath a "scholar of religion" though it is par for the course with a political pundit.

University of Chicago Exposes Reza Aslan as "Blowhard"

“The mark of the blowhard is not simply to comment on areas outside his competence, but to do so publicly, with the weight of his reputation behind him, while not doing the appropriate background reading and refusing to seek the opinions of actual experts in the field before publishing. In doing so, the blowhard frequently makes mistakes that would be embarrassing even for those equipped with an undergraduate's knowledge of the area.”

  -- Jeffrey Shallit [emphasis mine]

Prof. Margaret M. Mitchell (pictured) of the University of Chicago has written a scholarly assessment of the scholarly merits of the book Zealot in the article "L'Affaire Aslan."  It is very well stated, very succinct.  While the description above isn't necessarily the dictionary meaning of "blowhard", Mitchell's "L'Affaire Aslan" points out problems with Zealot that educated people should have spoke up about long ago, and casts serious doubt on Reza Aslan's claim to expertise in the field of New Testament history and Second Temple Judaism.  Of course, it is another question entirely whether Aslan's Zealot would have value as the work of an amateur.  Having demanded that the public treat his book as the objective and critical scholarship of an expert in the subject matter, Aslan doesn't have the luxury of being judged by that lower standard.  "L'Affaire Aslan" was written by a someone who can more credibly be taken as an expert in the relevant topics. 

Gay and Jesuit: New "Liberation" Theology?

The male head of the theology department of a Jesuit university decide to marry a man.  Boy, those Jesuits sure seem to be better at "diversity" than they are at defending the values of the Catholic Church.

Why ask why?

Does it matter that so many people are getting their ideas about religion from this guy?   Is he promoting confusion over what religion is and what it may properly be in our lives?

And if what he is saying about religion in general and Islam in particular is largely sophistry and doubletalk, does that mean that we should be careful about the political advice he offers to the Council on Foreign Relations and to his American audience?

Askonas Digging Deeper - Is Reza a Scholar of Religious History?

Jonathan Askonas writes on 7/29/13 in "Digging Deeper into Aslan's 'Scholarship'":

I’ve read the dissertation, and can report that it uses no historical methods or archival research. It solely focuses on the events and movements of the twentieth century, with the exception of one ten-page summary of the life and times of medieval Muslim theologian Ibn Taymiyyah. In the fields of sociology and political science, it seems like a rather unremarkable piece of work (it’s also unusually short for a PhD dissertation, at about 130 double-spaced pages. Dissertations usually run into the hundreds). It also seems likely that much of the research was later published for a popular audience (along with the usual current events punditry) as Aslan’s book Beyond Fundamentalism. Absolutely nothing in the dissertation gives any indication that the author has any interest in, much less qualifications for, New Testament scholarship.  

Aside from content, Aslan’s claim that he is a scholar at all is questionable given the publishers of his books. A Google Scholar search for Aslan’s bibliography shows the author’s trade books (as opposed to books from university presses, the standard for scholarship), newspaper articles, blog posts, and lectures. He has a couple of articles in a “current affairs journal” (normally called a newspaper). His single citation from an academic press is for a forthcoming chapter in an Oxford University Press book The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Violence —a volume edited by his dissertation advisor at UC-Santa Barbara. Literally the only remotely academic article he’s published was a 2003 piece in an obscure UCLA law journal on the sociology of stoning in Islam. Again, Aslan has no scholarly work that would qualify him as an expert in New Testament studies by the standard practices of that field.

Askonas goes on to question Aslan's claim to special expertise in Greek.  He argues that Aslan simply doesn't have the academic background, although given Margaret Mitchell's unforgiving assessment of the evidence in Zealot of knowledge of Koine Greek (not published until recently in Harvard's Criterion periodical), it would seem that his grasp of Koine is even less than what his academic credentials might lead us to expect.