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Jewish World Review December 12, 2012/ 28 Kislev 5773 The GOP --- not a club for Christians By Jonah Goldberg
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
In the scramble to make the President Obama did spectacularly well with Asian Americans, garnering nearly three-quarters of their vote. This runs counter to a lot of conventional wisdom on both the left and the right. On average, Asian American family income is higher and poverty is lower than it is for non-Latino whites. Entrepreneurship, family cohesion and traditional values all run strong among Asian Americans, and reliance on government runs weak. And yet, Asian Americans -- now the fastest-growing minority in America -- are rapidly becoming a core constituency of the I've joked for years with my Indian American relatives and friends that they are the new Jews because their parents bury them in guilt and overeducate them. It turns out it doesn't end there. Sociologist And maybe for similar reasons. The comparison to Jews is instructive. Perhaps the most common explanation for the According to Pew studies, barely a third of Chinese Americans are Christian and less than a fifth of Indian Americans are. "Whenever a Gujarati or Sikh businessman comes to a Republican event, it begins with an appeal to My friend and colleague That rings true to me. I've attended dozens of conservative events where, as the speaker, I was, in effect, the guest of honor, and yet the opening invocation made no account of the fact that the guest of honor wasn't a Christian. I've never taken offense, but I can imagine how it might seem to someone who felt like he was even less part of the club. A few years ago, The villain isn't racism or bigotry or anything so simple. The phenomenon is much more complex. Indeed, it's not clear why this happens, but it's clear that it does. Economic inequality and cultural attitudes do not matter much. "Americans raised in the 1970s," Putnam writes, "seem fully as unnerved by diversity as those raised in the 1920s." Part of the explanation stems from the fact that people with shared experiences and cultures draw strength from working together, whereas with strangers, language often becomes guarded, intentions questioned. The As someone who's long argued for theological pluralism and moral consensus on the right, it strikes me as nuts for the Twenty years ago, conservatives started referring to Judeo-Christian values in an effort to be more inclusive. The challenge now is to figure out how to talk in a way that doesn't cause decent and dedicated Christians to pull in like a turtle, while also appealing to non-Judeo-Christians and the nonreligious. That'll be hard, requiring more than name-dropping Confucius or Krishna.
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