By DOUG SAUNDERS

Published: September 17, 2012 in NYT

The author compares American Muslims’ ordeal in USA to the treatment of Catholics decades ago and writes:

“THE short, crude anti-Muslim video that sparked a wave of violent protests across the Middle East did not emerge from an obscure pocket of extremism; it is the latest in a string of anti-Muslim outbursts in the United States. In August, a mosque was burned down in Missouri and an acid bomb was thrown at an Islamic school in Illinois. The video’s backers are part of a movement that has used the insecurity of the post-9/11 years to sow unfounded fears of a Muslim plot to take over the West.

Their message has spread from the obscurity of the Internet and the far right to the best seller lists, the mainstream media and Congress. For the first time in decades, it has become acceptable in some circles to declare that a specific religious minority can’t be trusted.”

“The view that members of a religious minority are not to be trusted — that they are predisposed to extremism, disloyalty and violence; resist assimilation; reproduce at alarming rates, and are theologically compelled to impose their backward religious laws on their adopted home — is not new. From the 19th century on, distrust, violence and, eventually, immigration restrictions were aimed at waves of Roman Catholic immigrants.

As late as 1950, 240,000 Americans bought copies of “American Freedom and Catholic Power,” a New York Times best seller. Its author, Paul Blanshard, a former diplomat and editor at The Nation, made the case that Catholicism was an ideology of conquest, and that its traditions constituted a form of “medieval authoritarianism that has no rightful place in the democratic American environment.”

Catholics’ high birthrates and educational self-segregation led Mr. Blanshard and others — including scholars, legislators and journalists — to warn of a “Catholic plan for America.”

The most surprsing paragrapg in the artcle :

“Many Americans shunned such views, but some liberals did not. Mr. Blanshard’s book was endorsed by the likes of John Dewey and Bertrand Russell, and respected scholars like Seymour Martin Lipset, Reinhold Niebuhr and Sidney Hook debated Catholics’ supposed propensity toward authoritarianism.”

To read the full article click on the link below:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/18/opinion/catholics-then-muslims-now.html

By SIMON CRITCHLEY

In this interesting article in NYT, the author writes about the prejudice against the Mormonism. It also compares it to Christianity,Islam and the (bright) future of polygamy and Mormonism. Incidentally there is a hit Broadway Show “The Book of Mormons”, a satirization of Mormon religion.

The author writes: 

“I’ve spent what is rapidly becoming nine years in New York City. It’s been a total blast. But as a transplanted Englishman one thing to which I’ve become rather sensitive in that time is which prejudices New Yorkers are permitted to express in public. Among  my horribly over educated and hugely liberal friends, expressions of racism are completely out of the question, Islamophobia is greeted with a slow shaking of the head and anti-Semitism is a memory associated with distant places that one sometimes visits — like France.

But anti-Mormonism is another matter. It’s really fine to say totally uninformed things about Mormonism in public, at dinner parties or wherever. “It’s a cult,” says one. “With 13 million followers and counting?” I reply. “Polygamy is disgusting,” says another. “It was made illegal in Utah and banned by the church in 1890, wasn’t it?” I counter. And so on. This is a casual prejudice that is not like the visceral hatred that plagued the early decades of Mormonism — lest it be forgotten, Joseph Smith was shot to death on June 27, 1844, by an angry mob who broke into a jail where he was detained — but a symptom of a thoughtless incuriousness. ”

“There is just something weird about Mormonism, and the very mention of the Book of Mormon invites smirks and giggles, which is why choosing it as the name for Broadway’s most hard-to-get-into show was a smart move. As a scholar of Mormonism once remarked, one does not need to read the Book of Mormon in order to have an opinion about it. ”

“The heretical vistas of Mormonism, particularly the idea of something uncreated within the human being, excited the self-described Gnostic Jew, Harold Bloom. I read his wonderful 1992 book “The American Religion” shortly after my trip to Utah and just reread it recently with great pleasure. Bloom sees Mormonism as the quintessential expression of an American religion and controversially links the idea of the plurality of Gods to plural marriage. The argument is very simple: If you are or have the potential to become divine, and divinity is corporeal, then plural marriage is the way to create as much potential saints, prophets and Gods as possible. Indeed, plural marriage has to be seen as a Mormon obligation: if divinity tastes so good, then why keep all the goodness to oneself? Spread the big love. It makes perfect sense (at least for heterosexual men).”

“In his quasi-prophetic manner, Bloom thought the future belonged to Mormonism, concluding, “I cheerfully prophesy that some day, not too far in the twenty-first century, the Mormons will have enough political and financial power to sanction polygamy again. Without it, in some form or other, the complete vision of Joseph Smith never can be fulfilled.”(p.123)”

“Like Bloom, I see Joseph Smith’s apostasy as strong poetry, a gloriously presumptive and delusional creation from the same climate as Whitman, if not enjoying quite the same air quality. Perhaps Mormonism is not so far from romanticism after all. To claim that it is simply Christian is to fail to grasp its theological, poetic and political audacity. It is much more than mere Christianity. Why are Mormons so keen to conceal their pearl of the greatest price? Why is no one really talking about this? In the context of you-know-who’s presidential bid, people appear to be endlessly talking about Mormonism, but its true theological challenge is entirely absent from the discussion”

Click link below to read full article;

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/16/why-i-love-mormonism/?src=me&ref=general