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Kasich’s bad plan for combatting ISIS
Published: November 30, 2015
Presidential contender Donald Trump’s cryptic set of plans targeting Muslim Americans has been widely derided as the worst idea following the terrorist attacks in Paris. The unanimous call on the Republican side to reject all Syrian refugees (or possibly worse, to only let in the Christians) is surely the second worst.
For third worst, I would nominate Ohio Gov. John Kasich’s proposal to create a federal agency to promote “Judeo-Christian values” in the Muslim world. It is such a bad idea that when people started criticizing it on church/state grounds he walked it back almost immediately, claiming that all he really meant was that we should revive the Voice of America to engage in a “battle of ideas” with radical Islam.
The “Judeo-Christian values” that Kasich intends to go into battle with are Western political values, including “freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, the ability to gather to address our grievances, the equality of women.”
While this clarified formulation of Kasich’s plan might appear to soften the church and state concerns, it still has at least two other deep flaws: the values Kasich cites are not uniquely Judeo-Christian and it would be disastrous to persuade Muslims that they are.
Little can be found in the Bible supporting the modern, small “L” liberal values that Kasich wants to label “Judeo-Christian.” The New Testament differs from many other religious texts in that it does not include a coherent theory of statecraft. Aside from Jesus’s admonition to “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's,” the Christian Bible concerns itself more with how an individual should live than about the relationship between the individual and the state.
Partly that is because of the nature of Jesus’s project and partly because of His time. Jesus was preaching under foreign occupation. Unlike, other religious figures like Mohammed or Confucius, Jesus was neither a political leader, nor did He have the ear of one. He was, rather, a renegade rabbi from a backwater rural district of a province under Roman rule. As such, the New Testament contains little to override the statecraft in the Old Testament which is decidedly authoritarian.
The values that Kasich cites did arise in the Western tradition and religious thought in that tradition has been largely Christian. But those values arose out of the repeated questioning and rethinking of Christian doctrine and its interaction with science and government which occurred from the Renaissance to the Reformation to the Enlightenment to the American Experiment through the Civil Rights Revolution.
Because most of the heavy lifting that formulated modern liberal political philosophy happened during the Enlightenment, liberal political values are commonly called Enlightenment values. While it is true that some of the philosophers who built those ideas -- John Locke and Adam Smith, for example -- were men of strong faith, others like David Hume, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill dissented to one degree or another from the religious orthodoxy of the day. In any event, none of these philosophers relied on the Bible to establish first principles from which they derived their ideas.
So the part of me that insists that people say things that are true is offended by labelling Enlightenment values as “Judeo-Christian.” Meanwhile, for those of us who hope to see more of the Muslim world accept such values, the ability to trace their origin to something other than a competing religious tradition is a good thing.
Fundamentalists like ISIS base their recruiting propaganda on the widespread fear that modernization within the Muslim world necessarily means Westernization which in turn necessarily means Christianization. Propagandizing Western political values is by itself likely to be counterproductive; tying those values to religion means abetting ISIS in their most effective propaganda.
We in the West (and plenty of people in the Muslim world as well) are rooting for modernization in Muslim countries. While that modernization is happening now, much of it must occur within the Muslim world with Muslim leaders and thinkers as the main drivers. Moreover, European history suggests that it will likely be messy. The political and religious disruption of the Reformation resulted in decades of sectarian warfare; the Enlightenment culminated in the long and bloody French Revolution.
To be sympathetic to Gov. Kasich, proposing that the best plan of action is to sit back, support moderates as quietly as we can, and be prepared to defend ourselves if things get out of hand is a difficult platform for a politician to adopt. But that’s no excuse for misreading both history and current events this badly.