Praise the Lord and Pass the Creationism Act

Robert Kuttner writes in yesterday's Boston Globe (link from As'ad Abu Khalil):

In the United States, meanwhile, reason is on the defensive as we head backward toward creationism and religious absolutism. This is one of those moments when people all over the world, threatened by cultural and economic assaults far beyond their local control, are turning to fundamentalisms. Author Ben Barber sums it up in three words: Jihad vs. McWorld.

What is uniquely alarming in the United States today, among all the democracies and in our own history, is that a president of the United States is explicitly on the side of antimodernism. Never before has an American chief executive worked deliberately to foment a fundamentalist absolutism that is ultimately tribal, theocratic, antiscientific, and incompatible with pluralist democracy.

What are we who believe in reason and democracy to do? We need to revive the American tradition of appealing to citizens based on their multiple selves, including family selves, civic selves, and economic ones. We need an uncharacteristically fierce alliance of the tolerant -- good people of diverse faiths who share a basic humility about the multiple ways to worship, or not.

Despite George W. Bush's dangerous role as self-appointed proselytizer in chief, most Americans are not yet zealots. God help America if they ever are.