For several weeks CNN has been hyping their upcoming miniseries God's Warriors as an "unprecedented six-hour television event." The series, which begun last night, dedicates two hours each to "God's Jewish Warriors", "God's Muslim Warriors", and "God's Christian Warriors." Prior to the first airing, CNN invited several bloggers to preview a few clips from the series and to submit a question for their chief international correspondent Christiane Amanpour to be answered during a special webcast.

The three clips provided by CNN each highlighted one of the "fundamentalist" branches of the three Abrahamic faiths:

* God's Jewish Warriors: theocratic Israeli settlers, including the man who assassinated Yitzhak Rabin

* God's Muslim Warriors: theocratic British students, including the London subway bombers

* God's Christian Warriors: Jerry Falwell and Liberty University

(Can you guess what CNN thinks that these three groups have in common?)

I asked Amanpour if the juxtaposition could be viewed as guilt by association, equating Falwell with religious fanatics who are driven to murder. Her response:

All right. You know, he has a – he has a point. I don’t know how those individual clips were chosen and put out, but all I ask is that people look at the totality of each two-hour documentary, because clearly there’s going to be the spectrum from the violent to the legitimate.

I would say that we’re trying not to focus just on violence, because we feel that has been done over and over again in legitimate daily news coverage and many documentaries before. What we’re trying to show is the way religion is experiencing a real surge as a political tool and as a political outlet, and how religion is impacting our cultures in the Islamic, Jewish, and Christian worlds.

Later on she reiterated that the producers had no intention of creating a "moral equivalency" least of all "in the tactics used." Fair enough. So she doesn't think that the kids at Liberty are equivalent to suicide bombers and political assassins.

While the producers of the series are not attempting to establish a moral equivalency, they are establishing an equivalency of ideology. According to their narrative, Falwell, the "religious right", and other conservative Christians, may not be violent, but like the fundamentalist Jews and Muslims, they are attempting to circumvent the inviolable status of secularism.

Indeed, this seems to be what Amanpour believes: "[I]n the Western and in the developed world, perhaps here in the 21st century we would have expected secularism and governance and politics to be what governs our daily lives," Amanpour told the bloggers. "We would not have expected, and perhaps we still don’t expect, religion to play such a real, present role in our daily lives, politics, and culture."

Aside from unreconstructed Marxists, pollyannish Secular Humanists, and pessimists that thought the future would resemble a George Orwell novel, who really ever expected our daily lives to be governed by "secularism and governance and politics?"

Amanpour's surprise and dismay encapsulates the difference in perspective between people who believe that their faith informs all of life—including politics and culture—and those who believe religion should be kept secularly locked within in the walls of the church, synagogue, or mosque.

Article Source: http://www.articleated.com

The author writes at www.evangelicaloutpost.com