【10.04.09 纽约时报】Politics and Faith

青蛙小王子

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/11/books/review/Beinart-t.html

Reading Ian Buruma makes you feel parochial. In “Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents,” he writes intimately about the relationship between politics and faith in Britain, the Netherlands, France, China, Japan and the United States. And beneath every cliché — about American religious fervor, French intolerance or Japanese godlessness — he uncovers ironies that wreak havoc with popular stereotypes. Buruma shows, for instance, that the trendy, anti-imperial multiculturalism favored in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom actually echoes those countries’ policies of colonial indirect rule, in which native cultures were segregated and preserved so they could be dominated more easily. He suggests that America’s militant Christianity and Europe’s militant secularism stem from parallel anxieties about the pace of cultural change. And he explains why the jihadist fanaticism taking root among some of Europe’s Muslim young is more European than Middle Eastern, more modern than traditional, more political than religious.




One can quibble with some of Buruma’s claims about the United States. Dinesh D’Souza notwithstanding, it’s an exaggeration to say that “American Christians . . . sometimes feel more akin to conservative Muslims than to secular liberals.” It would be truer to say that the Christian right moved from an apocalyptic struggle against a godless foe (Communism) to an apocalyptic struggle against a god-fearing one (“Islamofascism”) without missing a beat. Nor is it true, as Buruma claims, that Ronald Reagan “was not very religious.” Reagan may not have attended church much as president, but religion saturated his upbringing; while his faith was at times quirky, it was also deep.
Despite these nitpicks, “Taming the Gods” is an admirably learned book. Buruma’s writing is spare and careful, and one never feels that he is stretching his material to fit some all- encompassing theory. But if that is the book’s virtue, it is also its failing. Buruma is a fox, not a hedgehog, offering up lots of small insights rather than any overarching one. When covering so much terrain in so little space, that’s more honest. As a result, however, “Taming the Gods” seems more like a set of related essays — about Christianity in the United States and Europe, about religion in China and Japan, about Islam in Europe — than a unified book. Near the end, Buruma does express a preference for a state that regulates its citizens’ public behavior but doesn’t try to influence their private beliefs. Yet that argument comes through clearly only in the final pages. In much of the rest of the book, the trees are lovely, but the forest is nowhere to be seen.
If “Taming the Gods” serves a particular purpose, it is to challenge the condescension that both the American right and left express toward Europe on matters of faith. Buruma reminds American conservatives who mock Europe for its grand, empty churches that not long ago Christian Europe was both highly religious and highly intolerant. Whatever its faults, European secularism has helped make the continent a place where Roman Catholics and Protestants (not to mention Muslims and Jews) live mostly in peace, which is no mean feat. And to American liberals inclined to tut-tut about European intolerance of Muslims, Buruma notes that at least Muslims can get into Europe, whereas in the United States visas are “becoming increasingly difficult to come by for people unfortunate enough to be born in Muslim countries or to just have a Muslim name.”
Ultimately, Buruma’s message is that people should respect other faiths while insisting that the faithful not violate democracy’s rules of the game. And in the skeptical, informed, affectionate tone he adopts toward the countries he chronicles, his book exemplifies that spirit.
Peter Beinart is an associate professor at the City University of New York and a fellow at the New America Foundation. His next book, “The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris,” will be published in June.

桔子咪咪

青蛙小王子，为什么不翻译？

青蛙小王子

青蛙小王子，为什么不翻译？
桔子咪咪 发表于 2010-4-10 14:15

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会翻译的
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