Question: What's more agonizing to watch than a Bill Moyers' interview?

Answer: A Bill Moyers interview that has ANYTHING to do with religion in America.

The June 30th episode of Moyers' "Faith and Reason" (on PBS) featured an interview with Mary Gordon, who, according to the New York Times, is "her generation's preeminent novelist of Roman Catholic mores and manners."

I know, I know...it should have been clear to me from the start that any show entitled "Faith and Reason", which was also hosted by Bill Moyers, would have precious little of any worth to say about either "faith" or "reason".  But I watched it anyway, and wasn't at all surprised to discover that Mary Gordon, an intellectual elite, is disgusted by the "stupidity, banality, and grossness" of American culture.  What was surprising, however, was her unabashed sympathy and borderline apologia for bin Laden himself:

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MARY GORDON: Well, I think that Osama Bin Laden was a person who got disgusted. And sometimes when I look, there are some things in the world that disgust me to the point of despair. So that, for example, some of the things that kids will do on the Internet now. Somebody was telling me about young girls from very good schools who will photograph each other having sex, and put it on the Internet, so that people can, you know, see them, access them having sex. Thirteen, fourteen year old girls are doing that.  And I see something like that, and it makes me despair. And I think there is something so wrong with this culture that, wipe it out. Start from-- start from zero. It's too corrupt. It's too far gone. There's an almost physical revulsion that I can have from some of the glut and some of the-- just some of the ugliness that I see. And I believe that that's what Osama Bin Laden saw in the West. That he saw a kind of disgusting corruption that made him feel very, very, very sick. Conrad gives us the example of some people who...

BILL MOYERS: Joseph Conrad.

MARY GORDON: Joseph Conrad, who was just disgusted by a kind of behavior that they found incomprehensible and so gross, that it made them want-- it's as if you were in a swamp. And you were covered with stink. And you just wanted to be on a high, dry rock. And I can understand that very well.

BILL MOYERS: I am sympathetic to the angst on the Christian right towards popular culture.

MARY GORDON: Yes.

BILL MOYERS: Towards the banality.

MARY GORDON: Yes.

BILL MOYERS: The sheer ugliness of it.

MARY GORDON: Yes.

BILL MOYERS: And I share that sense with them. You obviously do too.

MARY GORDON: Yes. And I think if you can put yourself in that place and say, you know, and sort of ratchet it up, you can say, I understand Osama Bin Laden. That, if I have to-- I mean, this is absurd -- but if I have to look at all the violence, all the stupid violence that's on TV and some of the stupid violence that teenagers seem to think is fine, and kids carrying guns. And kids shooting other kids. And eleven and twelve year olds having all sorts of sex that they can't possibly really connect to pleasure. And the greed that this, to tell you the truth, to see people driving Hummers sometimes makes me feel so sick that, you know, I want to just drive them off the road and say, okay, in the name of Christ, in the name of peace and justice, I'm just going to shoot you because you have to get out of your car now. We live in a very stupid, banal, gross, greedy and rather disgusting culture.

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Yes, that's right: even though she is compelled to call such a thought "absurd", in this privileged woman's twisted intellectual calculus, Osama bin Laden is nevertheless understood simply as a fellow impassioned crusader for the higher moral virtues, wiping the world clean of a "disgusting corruption" which sickened him enough to provoke him to kill thousands of innocent people.  That bin Laden is also an anti-Semitic, hate-fueled, misogynistic mass murderer apparently doesn't diminish Ms. Gordon's unvarnished "understanding" of their shared revulsion at Hummers and violent American television programs.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but is she...nuts?  I've worked in academia for over 10 years now, and am still surprised when I hear such utter nonsense coming from the mouths and minds of such (presumably) well-educated people.

Despite the literary accolades, Gordon (also a professor at Barnard College) obviously doesn't speak for all Catholics—certainly not for  me and my family! But her thinly-veiled and artfully qualified anti-Western / anti-Capitalist & (frankly) anti-American bias (closer to loathing, really) is instructive, I think, because it helps to expose a rising tide of lunacy amongst many mainstream American religious thinkers, writers, clergy, and congregations vis-à-vis the war against Islamism in particular (and traditional Christian & American values in general).

Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to the expressed purpose of my new blog: exposing muddle-headed religious thinking about the post 9/11 world.  Much is made of the political left's opposition to the war against Islamism, but the virulence of anti-war (and sometimes anti-American) rhetoric coming from some mainstream Christian denominations seems to fly mostly under the radar, and is often far, far worse!

Entering into a perpetual, open-ended, and inherently one-sided "dialogue" of tolerance with Islam is bad enough (as has recently been proposed by the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Migrants and Travelers); worse yet are the pernicious ravings of misguided intellectuals and theistic humanists, like Mary Gordon, whose apologies for terrorism are meant to be understood—and even applauded!—as a natural outgrowth of their deep, God-driven compassion for all humankind.  Talk about (in Gordon's own words) "stupid, banal, and gross"!!

Thanks for reading!

-Mikey