Dennis Prager Spreading More FUD

Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt – the watchwords of personalities like Dennis Prager.  In a new piece at Human Events, Prager seems to desire the deepening of cultural divides in America – but gets a bit ahead of himself in doing so.

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If you want to predict on which side an American will line up in the Culture War wracking America, virtually all you have to do is get an answer to this question: Does the person believe in the divinity and authority of the Five Books of Moses, the first five books of the Bible, known as the Torah? (“Divinity” does not necessarily mean “literalism.”)

I do not ask this about “the Bible” as a whole because the one book that is regarded as having divine authority by believing Jews, Catholics, Protestants and Mormons, among others, is not the entire Bible, but the Torah. Religious Jews do not believe in the New Testament and generally confine divine revelation even within the Old Testament to the Torah and to verses where God is cited by the prophets, for example. But “Bible-believing” Christians and Jews do believe in the divinity of the Torah.

And they line up together on virtually every major social/moral issue.

Keith Ellison posing for a photo with the Quran instead of the Bible is apparently about some mythic “culture war” going on in America   Prager goes on, and hangs himself on his own words:

Very often the dividing line in America is portrayed as between those who believe in God and those who don’t. But the vast majority of Americans believe in God, and belief in God alone rarely affects people’s values. Many liberals believe in God; many conservatives do. What matters is not whether people believe in God but what text, if any, they believe to be divine. Those who believe that He has spoken through a given text will generally think differently from those who believe that no text is divine. Such people will usually get their values from other texts, or more likely from their conscience and heart.

If the goal of organized religion is to establish dominance of one creed over another, then Prager is right, Ellison should pose with the Bible.  However, if the goal of organized religion and the texts held in reverence by each is to give people something higher than themselves in which to believe, then Prager has just admitted that Ellison ceremonially swearing on a Quran is no problem. 

Ellison, a Muslim, holds up the Quran as the word of the same God as that of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.  He prays to that God five times daily.  America’s values, however, did not come from the Quran, or the Bible, or the Torah, or any other holy text.  American religious values came from a desire to protect ALL religions from governmental or otherwise majoritarian pronouncements on their free practice.

Prager is trying to use fear, uncertainty, and doubt about the course of our nation’s values to prove himself right about an issue gone by. Using big concepts and expert-sounding prognostication about a “new civil war” in America does not make his essay any less a veiled attempt to insert religious bigotry into our national and political conscience.

Shame, Mr. Prager.  Shame.