Can the history of religion tell us anything about religions role in President Bushs reelection bid?
No religion is just one thing. Every religion has a wide range of denominations that form a spectrum from the right to the left. Orthodox Judaism, for example, is right wing pretty conservative. But there also are “conservative”, “reform” and “reconstructionist,” each further to the left than the other. Islam has a similar range. The Muslims we hear about when we talk about terrorists are far right. Christianity ranges from the more conservative evangelical Protestants to more liberal groups such as Episcopalians, to even more liberal groups than that. The history of the Western world is, to a large extent, the history of religious warfare. There were Crusades between Christians and Moslems and in the 16th and 17th centuries, lots of violence between Protestant denominations. There also were great battles in England about the power of the church. The whole modern democratic notion of tolerance, of the acceptance of religious difference, comes out of this practical need to get religions
