Washington Post art critic Philip Kennicott was brought in Saturday to denounce the closed-minded Islam-bashing bigots in Saturday’s Style section. By the end, Kennicott was complaining that religion needs desperately to be removed from the public square. Mayhem will continue without secularization: "unless we commit not just to leaving religious certainty in the home, but the deeper metaphorical thinking that gives religion its primal force as well."
Kennicott's "Critic's Notebook" began with Twitter straw-man remarks, from tweeters with 41 followers and 127 followers, respectively:
“This is for all you muslims in America, go back where you came from before we have to kick you out,” read one angry tweet, from a user whose profile includes an image of a mushroom cloud. [AND a Minion from "Despicable Me."] “Kick Islam out and save Western civilisation from savages,” said another man, whose Twitter page also encourages readers to “Always keep an open mind.”
It came naturally to Kennicott to cluck about how the murder of 12 people exposed more ignorant Islamophobic ugliness:
It was an ugly moment in the evolution of one of our deepest, most emotionally fraught metaphors for coexistence on the planet, the dynamic between the guest and the host. In this way of thinking, France, whether conceived as a Christian country or a great beacon of secular pluralism, is only hosting Islam, and the terrorist attack has brutally broken the sacred codes of the host-guest relationship.
Kennicott turns the violent-extremist trope around on the Christian “far right” who wants Islam curtailed in Europe:
But no sooner do you start to parse these questions than you realize you are right where you were before this attack happened: struggling to defend fundamental freedoms against a small but dangerous bunch of extremists who justify their violence with religious certainties. There can be no grand eviction, no easy lapse into platitudes about Islam and violence.
Yet even people who struggle to think rationally will feel the tug of the host-guest dynamic, a lingering, painful sense that something so fundamental to goodness and morality has been violated that we must seek out ingrates and abusers of trust and purge them.
Kennicott’s arrogance oozes badly from the phrase about how “even people who struggle to think rationally” (i.e. liberals) have to deal with violent ideologies with foreign inspirations.
Christian impositions on the public from the “host” on the “guest” are an irritant he has to protest:
Much of the ugliness in our debates about immigration and religion is a macroscopic extension of the irritations that arise from the power dynamic of this relationship. Once you know who the host is, you can begin compelling the guest to act in certain ways, whether that is to give up his or her native language and learn English, to stop wearing the veil in public or to accept that Christian holidays are also national holidays. People who find themselves perpetually in the position of being guests will begin to feel that the relationship is not one of giving and receiving, but of basic social control and inequity.
Kennicott wound down his article by demanding that primitive religions have to give way to modern secular values:
The conviction that some people exist only at the sufferance of others, a belief often fueled by religion, is leading fanatics to kill, and that fanaticism is the one thing that can never be tolerated, even in the most tolerant world. Religious tolerance isn’t an act of generosity; it is an essential tool for survival.
There is only one way forward. Enlightenment ideals of freedom and equality may have been partially responsible for bringing us to this moment of dangerous global communion; but they are also the only ones that can lead us out. There are no hosts, or guests, when it comes to nations and religions. It is not paradoxical to be intolerant of intolerance. There is no prerogative to be offended. We can think only of rights and freedoms, derived not from God, but agreed upon collectively. This evolution of thought will, very likely, be more difficult for people of deep faith than those who prize secular values.
Many of the basic narratives of right or wrong, be they religiously sanctioned or embedded in fables such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses, are too often linked to violence or coercion to be useful in our crowded, pluralistic world. Before kind old Baucis and Philemon became trees, Zeus destroyed their town, and everyone in it, and made the elderly peasants stewards of his temple on the ruins. That is where all our temples will be built, presiding over ruins, unless we commit not just to leaving religious certainty in the home, but the deeper metaphorical thinking that gives religion its primal force as well.
As usual, Kennicott is preaching like he's the one favoring inclusion, even as he wants religion censured and driven underground. In 2011, Kennicott explicitly insisted that it was time to ban any homophobic arguments in the art world, championing “an emerging consensus: that the acceptable level of anti-gay bigotry at an institution such as the Smithsonian is now zero.” No one should be allowed to object that a taxpayer-funded museum shouldn’t celebrate homosexuality and offended traditional religious believers. Kennicott mourned “It’s clearly too early to write an obituary of homophobia,” but he wants one.
