Daniel Larison on Ben Carson's recent comments about Muslim unfitness for office.

[randomness]

Daniel Larison points out the strangeness of Ben Carson's statements on Muslims' fitness for public office:

Ben Carson said some objectionable things yesterday about Muslims, but I thought this defense of his position was by far the strangest one he could offer:

Muslims feel that their religion is very much a part of your public life and what you do as a public official, and that’s inconsistent with our principles and our Constitution.

I say this is the strangest defense he could offer because it is extremely easy to imagine this same argument being deployed against Carson–or any religious conservative–in exactly the same way. A significant part of Carson’s support comes from evangelicals, his public rhetoric is full of expressions of his religious faith, he invokes Scripture when talking about policy, and I suspect he would be among the first to condemn attempts to drive Christian teachings out of the public square. More than most of his competitors, Carson would presumably affirm that Christianity ought to be “very much a part of your public life and what you do as a public official” and he would object to the idea that it be kept strictly separate from political life. Indeed, many Christian conservatives are rallying behind him because of this.

One of his commenters followed up by asking:

Did Carson just throw Kim Davis under a bus?

Comments

[dpolicar]

One of the things that it took me a long time to learn about mainstream Protestants in the U.S., and I still often forget, is that they genuinely don't think in terms of a superordinate category "religion" of which their religion and other people's religions are all instances.

This ought not surprise me, really... I mean, that's how unmarked cases work. White people don't have a race, straight people don't have a sexual orientation, men don't have a gender, USians don't have an ethnicity, middle-class folk don't have an economic class, and so forth.

Still, I find myself expecting U.S. Protestants to support religious freedom out of self-interest, and surprised when they don't.

[drwex]

Well-said. When people like Carson say "religion" they mean what we would mean by "religion other than mine." Or sometimes "religion other than my interpretation of conservative Protestant Christianity".