Ross Douthat: evaluation

Transcript context

…— and in that, subject to various conditions too complicated to explain (but I’ll mention them so you’re not misquoted), you at least mentioned the possibility of a 10 percent chance that there’s some truth to a synthesis of Judaic, Christian, and Muslim ideas. In that synthesis, highly conditional within your discourse, what’s the element from Islam that appeals to you? That’s a good question. I think for the synthesis, I guess when I think about the synthesis in that case, I gave it quite a low probability because it seems to me that Judaism and Christianity make — and, again, this comes back to the storytelling issue maybe — but I think there’s a more organic and obvious unity in that story than there is in the combined story. So I think for the . . . I don’t think I have a certain answer; I can tell you things — as I just, I suppose, started to — that I admire within the Muslim world. But I can’t tell you definitely, and this is I guess why I am a Christian and not a Muslim. I can’t tell you what I think — how I think that story would fit together. If God’s revelation to Muhammad were as definitive a revelation as the revelations of Christianity and Judaism, I can’t make that story work; so the story then has to be bigger. I guess that for there to be a Judeo-Christian-Islamic synthesis, then it does await some further revelation that would make more sense of the Islamic story to me. As you know I come at all of this as very much an outsider, so let me ask a very naive question. If I look at the Catholic Church, there’s a movement, as you know, called Opus Dei. The priests of that movement, they seem to be less caught up in sex scandals. Parts of the movement seem to have some understanding of what you might broadly call conservative economics. In Spanish politics in the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s they were actually considered a liberalizing force, so they don’t have to be seen as reactionary per se. Why aren’t they simply the good guys? They don’t come up much in your writings. I’m reading you and I think, “Where’s Opus Dei?”…

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