“Boykinned!”

Some observers of the recent offensive against U.S. Army Lt. General William Boykin may be tempted to dismiss it as simply more bashing of the media's favorite bogeyman, America's so-called “Religious Right.” This is how the Bush administration has dealt with the situation. “We’re a free people,” said Donald Rumsfeld, countering those who have called on him to fire or “reassign” the newly promoted three-star general from his position as a top terrorism-fighter at the Defense Department. But for the two of us—a practicing Jew and a church-going Catholic—the administration’s response lacks a certain punch. Despite not being eligible members of the Religious Right, we believe that the media’s attack on Boykin is more ominous than its usual antagonism to—and ignorance of—things religious.   

It is difficult to remember another time when American media has teamed up so effectively to eviscerate a public servant for his religious views. The Rev. Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and other assorted whipping-boys are of course routinely trotted out and publicly ridiculed for the edification of readers, as Emmanuel Goldstein was in Orwell’s 1984. Rarely, though, has the media targeted a relatively low-ranking official like Boykin for his or her religious beliefs. For comparable examples, one must go back to the mid-nineteenth century, when yellow journalists championed the anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic views of the Know-Nothings.

Being Boykinned appears similar to being Borked. During Judge Robert Bork’s Supreme Court nomination hearings in 1987, liberal politicians and their allies in the media transformed an esteemed Yale law professor and experienced federal judge into a right-wing zealot who endangered the judiciary and perhaps the entire world. Being “borked” came to mean being the victim of a propaganda campaign bent on destroying someone with conservative political views by mischaracterizing his record and assassinating his character. Current denunciations of Boykin, however, concern the general’s religious belief, which today's media despise as much or more than anyone's political outlook. If secular political conservatives risk “borking,” religious people may now be “boykinned.”

It is difficult to imagine what kind of news story William Arkin, the NBC reporter and L.A. Times columnist, thought he was investigating when he snooped through the bulletins and tapes conserved by churches at which Boykin had spoken. Nevertheless, Arkin reported that the born-again Boykin had dared opine that a fanatical Muslim Somali warlord whose minions slaughtered thousands and dragged dead Americans through the streets in an otherworldly Mogadishu (captured so eloquently in the film Blackhawk Down) “worshipped an idol.”

To nonbelievers, such discourse undoubtedly sounds odd. Arkin probably does not know many evangelical Protestants and he certainly didn’t interview any for his column. For Arkin and others who aped his conclusions, Boykin was accusing all Muslims of worshipping graven images. For pious Christians and Jews, however, an "idol" can be any false object of worship—wealth, power, sex, etc. Most believers and nonbelievers alike would agree with Boykin that a Muslim, Christian, or Jew who thinks that his or her god requires the massive killing of innocent civilians worships an idol.

Such nuances were lost on Arkin. Because of Arkin’s gross ignorance, a large number of Muslims around the world now thinks that an American general said that Islam worships Satan.

Arkin also reported that Boykin told congregants that he believed the enemy in the War on Terrorism was Satan, that the United States was a Christian nation, and that God had played a role in placing presidents Clinton and Bush in the White House. Amazingly, it did not occur to Arkin that these “startling” religious beliefs are shared by tens of millions of Americans. The fact that many Christian Americans would insert “Evil” in place of “Satan” and “Judeo-Christian” in place of “Christian” does not alter by one iota the substance of those beliefs.

Regardless of Arkin’s shock at seeing Christian beliefs he did not recognize, he was out of line treating these beliefs as news. Even the most intrepid of reporters must respect the privacy of a public figure in a house of worship. Custom in the media has always been that what a public figure says or does in church is between him and God. The First Amendment’s “free exercise of religion” clause may have sustained this reasonable custom.

After the media’s rush to validate Arkin’s scoop, perhaps newspapers will begin to embed reporters in churches, synagogues, and mosques. Perhaps Senator Edward Kennedy (D–Massachusetts), after reciting the Nicene Creed at Mass next Sunday, will face a front-page headline on Monday: “Kennedey Acknowledges There Is 'One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church’: Saudis Say Remark Will Anger Muslims.”

Farfetched? Such is the logic behind editorials published since Boykin was "exposed" as a practicing Pentecostal. Newspapers have compared Boykin’s comments to those of outgoing Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad, who said in a speech last month at the 57-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference that Jews ruled the world and had “invented socialism and communism and capitalism” so that “persecuting them would appear to be wrong.” Never mind that Mahathir delivered his anti-Semitic speech at an international conference as government representative whereas Boykin made his innocuous comments as a worshiper at a church service. Never mind that Jews and Christians in the United States and most everywhere else form democracies, not theocracies and dictatorships. The media’s story was that Republican, born-again Christians praying in a church are morally equivalent to violent, anti-Semitic Muslims who practice jihad.

Boston Post columnist Ellen Goodman epitomizes this moral relativism. In her recent column about Boykin, Goodman wrote that the war in the Middle East was not between good and evil, but between “theocracy and democracy.” Describing Boykin’s beliefs as if they were torn from a comic book instead of held by millions of tolerant, religious Americans, Goodman scolds Boykin for siding with the theocrats and “throw[ing] his lot in with the enemy.”

Many in the elite media share Goodman's assumption that belief in the existence of good and evil is the problem, rather than the solution. The solution, for Goodman, is “our civic religion of tolerance” which has “kept us strong in the face of intolerance.” Boykin’s offense was not simply a “strategic error” for Goodman, it was a “sacrilege to our civic religion.”

If Goodman is a typical adherent of this “civic religion,” the creed appears to demand polite atheism or agnosticism, active membership in the Democratic Party, and blind adherence to a peculiar brand of tolerance that requires the tolerant to marginalize and silence all religious folks. Like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose passion for "tolerance" inspired him to advocate that “whoever dares say ‘outside the church, no salvation’, should be driven from the state,” Goodman and her colleagues are hell-bent on banishing Boykin. Some tolerance.

Ultimately, of course, Boykin is not the real target of the media’s demagoguery. The attack on General Boykin is a not-so-implicit threat against President Bush, Attorney General John Ashcroft, would-be federal judges, and any other public figures who believe in the existence of absolute Truth. The logic of this threat is clear: (1) A faith-based belief that sees the United States as possessing a morally superior position over that of another country, or views violent Muslim fanatics as agents of evil or of Satan, or dares to assert that the traditional doctrines of any religion are true, is "intolerant"; (2) Intolerance is the only unforgivable sin in the new civic religion.

And all sinners must be driven from the state. 

Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the Hudson Institute.