Letter #97: Sikh Ye First the Kingdom
Humility? In THIS economy??
Klavan Major,
As if on cue, those saintly prayer warriors that love-heckled you for your contemptible failure to call down hellfire upon Jews have returned to bless us with their valor once again. This time their target is Harmeet Dhillon, the Republican lawyer whose unflappable kindness and steel-plated tenacity in the courtroom have benefitted literally millions of people.
That villain! I ask you, has she even once anonymously sneered at someone online for being insufficiently small-minded and pinched of heart? No. And she had the audacity to be a Sikh, in public, on the stage of the Republican National Convention. Dhillon flaunted her peaceable, decent faith in a prayer for “humility, truth, courage, service, and justice for all.” Those things are no fun! Can’t we have smugness, misdirection, weaseldom, grift, and partiality?
Why yes, we can! Did somebody say “please let’s usher some embittered losers into this discussion?” No? Well here they are anyway. Enter the trolls and the bots, who got snitty about Dhillon’s appearance onstage because of all the lawsuits they have also won for conservative causes.
Oh, wait. That’s not why. It’s because Dhillon prayed in Punjabi after the fashion of her ancestors. I’m almost certain if she had said all the same stuff in English, no one would have batted an eye. The good things she wished on us are generalized blessings that absolutely anybody, of any respectable faith, would consider of divine origin.
Still, the tradition that primarily fostered those ideals in this country and in the West wasn’t Sikhism: it was Christianity, informed by Jewish wisdom. Those faiths are our tried and true routes to God, as you indicate. We should be able to say so, without apology, but also without presuming to constrain the means God may use to work in men’s hearts.
All of which brings us to an interesting question, directly relevant to our conversation. In a country of 330 million people, founded on Christian principles but built to house all manner of law-abiding religious minorities, how big a tent is big enough to shelter us? And how big is too big to meaningfully define “us” anymore?
The age of materialism is coming to an end, and you can see people picking their off-ramps in real time. Some of them lead down dark and twisted roads. There are lots of sham religions out there, most of them going these days by other names. There are hideous sacrifices being made to “technology” and “the environment” and “tolerance.” There are, in a word, so many cults of death.
But there are also good and lovely people who know that things like humility, truth, and courage come from a greater source than evolution or brain chemistry. Many of those people will end up Christians, but not all of them. America’s first allegiance should be to the faith of our fathers. But—call me a squish—when it’s a question of serving a cult of death or worshipping the God of life, I tend to think whoever’s not against us is for us.
Love,
Spencer
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Good ending, Spencer! I perfectly agree.
And that reminds me of a parable, one from which so many seem to have not taken heed. Christ told of an injured man, robbed and beaten by highwaymen, and left for dead. A faithful man came by, one who went to temple every week and observed the sabbath, but ignored the man by the side of the road. A rabbi came by, perhaps thinking of or rehearsing his next sermon, too busy of mind to help someone in need. But someone scorned by the House of Judah, not allowed to worship at the temple, came along and helped the man to an inn, and paid for his room and meals.
Of course, that man was the Good Samaritan. I believe what some forget is the lesson from the parable. The lesson to be learned was that THAT man, who was not a Jew, at a time when Jews thought that only Jews would get to Heaven in the end of days, was more likely to be welcomed into the Kingdom of God than all the self-righteous and the rabbis.
Dang, get em Spencer!