Ross Douthat, the NYT's conservative writer who's clearly there to balance out all that so-called "liberal bias" of the Gray Lady, has a very bizarre (creepy, actually) column today which appears to approve of Pope Benedict's "targeted proselytism" as part of what he calls "Christianity's global encounter with a resurgent Islam."
Here Catholicism and Anglicanism share two fronts. In Europe, both are weakened players, caught between a secular majority and an expanding Muslim population. In Africa, increasingly the real heart of the Anglican Communion, both are facing an entrenched Islamic presence across a fault line running from Nigeria to Sudan.
Where the European encounter is concerned, Pope Benedict has opted for public confrontation. In a controversial 2006 address in Regensburg, Germany, he explicitly challenged Islam’s compatibility with the Western way of reason — and sparked, as if in vindication of his point, a wave of Muslim riots around the world.
...
There are an awful lot of Anglicans, in England and Africa alike, who would prefer a leader who takes Benedict’s approach to the Islamic challenge. Now they can have one, if they want him.
According to Douthat, Anglicans in Europe and Africa are being threatened by what he deems the "Islamic challenge." His evidence for that? The increase in Muslims in the general population of those regions, and because the Pope declared Islam to be incompatible "with the Western way of reason." Douthat then goes on to morbidly speculate on the possibility of a "united Anglican-Catholic front" against Islam, which he labels "Christianity’s most enduring and impressive foe."
That's not all. Douthat also mentions this:
By contrast, the Church of England’s leadership has opted for conciliation (some would say appeasement), with the Archbishop of Canterbury going so far as to speculate about the inevitability of some kind of sharia law in Britain.
Douthat never mentions who those people are who call the Church of England's outreach strategy as "appeasement," nor does he back up the assertion with any empirical evidence about the public's opinion on the Church of England or their beliefs about the "inevitability of some kind of sharia law in Britain." Instead, he employs the standard Fox News "some say" tactic, all for the purpose of scaring readers with the unjustified fear that Muslims in Europe might one day impose sharia law, despite the fact that, as of 2001, Muslims made up a whopping 2.8% of the population of Great Britain.
If that's not enough, Douthat repeats what he sees as the Pope's call to "serious religious faith," which apparently excludes the acceptance of progressive-minded positions on social justice, global warming, and "even erotic love." Douthat also laments the Catholic Church's descent into "bureaucratized complacency," which he claims was borne out of a half-century's worth of "the major denominations of Western Christendom....being exquisitely polite to one another." This era of "being exquisitely polite to one another", as Douthat infers, also contributed to the drift of "the more ecumenically minded" Christians to either agnosticism or more rigid denominations, such as Pentecostalism and Evangelicalism.
In Douthat's mind, waging war in two separate Middle Eastern countries (while saber-rattling at a few others), or locking up and torturing Muslims suspected of terrorist activity without trial, or military chaplains instructing U.S. forces in Afghanistan to "hunt people for Jesus", or even just the Pope's forceful and zealous denunciations of Islam itself, have nothing to do with Christians being turned off by the leadership of the Catholic Church, because all of those things are compatible with "the Western way of reason." But being polite and tolerant of others and their beliefs (or lack thereof)? The horrors!
Obviously, Douthat has the right to pen whatever opinions he might have on "the Western way of reason," the "Islamic challenge," and "Christianity's global encounter with a resurgent Islam." But for a supposedly liberal media outlet, the editors at The New York Times are doing its readers a real disservice by publishing (and thereby attempting to legitimize) such blatant fear-mongering and bigotry towards the Muslim community.
(h/t to Glenn Greenwald)