It Puts Your Back Up

In Holy War Over Ground Zero — the “Public Square” section for the October issue, soon to arrive in your mail boxes — Joseph Bottum suggests that New York’s mayor Michael Bloomberg deserves some credit for supporting the Cordoba Initiative, a.k.a. the “Ground Zero mosque, as an important expression of the First Amendment. Indeed, the mayor said, “We would be untrue to the best part of ourselves—and who we are as New Yorkers and Americans—if we said ‘no’ to a mosque in Lower Manhattan.”

And yet, writes the editor,

there’s something in that Bloombergian line that puts one’s back up. Something condescending, superior, and hectoring. Something of the school marm and, more to the point, something of the 1950s high-liberal technocrat who just doesn’t like the messiness of human interaction. And if we could reach down to the root of the mayor’s error, we would have some understanding of how religion actually works in a constitutional democracy.

He goes on to reach down to the root, and explore how religion actually works in this country.