ABC Chief Political Analyst Matthew Dowd, a Bush 2004 campaign chief strategist, doesn’t have a glorious history with religious commentary. Just a month ago, he tweeted that Christianity had nothing to do with, you know, actually believing in God:
This rather idiotic note made the rounds on the interwebs, as Christians of all stripes pointed out that this ran counter to virtually the entirety of the Bible.
Now Dowd is back at it. On Thursday evening, he tweeted:
This, it turns out, is not close to true.
The vast majority of “fundamentalist radical Christians” have no desire for theocracy on earth. They also do not harbor warm feelings toward terrorism. There is no “fundamentalist radical Christian” global movement that kills tens of thousands of people on a yearly basis. The same cannot be said for “fundamentalist radical Muslims,” who are responsible for tens of thousands of dead in terror attacks around the globe annually, plus more tens of thousands of more dead in internecine warfare, plus the most repressive and violent regimes on the planet.
This sort of stupidity is what makes Americans believe the mainstream media are out of touch. Fully 24% of Americans believe the Bible is the literal word of God — presumably, what Dowd would call the “fundamental radical Christian” position — and yet we don’t see widespread warfare and murder of non-fundamentalist radical Christians. Weird how that works.
Equating all religions and all religious fundamentalists is tiresome, intellectually lazy, and morally obtuse. That’s a perspective that fits right in the bubble of the media elite.