The Foolish, Historically Illiterate, Incredible Response to Obama's Prayer Breakfast Speech

Ta-Nehisi Coates on The Foolish, Historically Illiterate, Incredible Response to Obama's Prayer Breakfast Speech

"Now, Christianity did not 'cause' slavery, anymore than Christianity 'caused' the civil-rights movement. The interest in power is almost always accompanied by the need to sanctify that power. That is what the Muslims terrorists in ISIS are seeking to do today, and that is what Christian enslavers and Christian terrorists did for the lion's share of American history.

That this relatively mild, and correct, point cannot be made without the comments being dubbed, 'the most offensive I’ve ever heard a president make in my lifetime,’ by a former Virginia governor gives you some sense of the limited tolerance for any honest conversation around racism in our politics. And it gives you something much more. My colleague Jim Fallows recently wrote about the need to, at once, infantilize and deify our military. Perhaps related to that is the need to infantilize and deify our history. Pointing out that Americans have done, on their own soil, in the name of their own God, something similar to what ISIS is doing now does not make ISIS any less barbaric, or any more correct. That is unless you view the entire discussion as a kind of religious one-upmanship, in which the goal is to prove that Christianity is 'the awesomest.'"