Finally had a chance to skim through Ann Coulter's latest thesis nailed to the front door of public debate, "Godless." Skimming is the best way to go through this work, Coulter hurls insults at all liberals believe in in and presses our hot buttons like a participant in a behavorial experiment by Stanley Milgram. In just one example, in the space of little over a page she manages to dis the Episcopalian Church, Broadway choreographers, and anyone who believes there just might be an element of scientic fact behind evolution.
But you don't even have to read the main contents, just a glance at the index indicates the shallowness of Coulter's main argument against liberalism, that it is "godless" and inherently evil and anti-American. There is no mention of the Rev. Martn Luther King, Jr. perhaps the greatest American this country produced in the last century, and who left a legacy of the use of non-violence to achieve social justice and end U.S. militarism overseas. There is no mention of Reinhold Neibuhr, pre-eminent scholar of Christian ethics and one of the giants who provided the moral and intellectual foundation for the strategy of containment that successfully ended the Cold War without a shot being fired beween us and the Soviets. It's probably too much to expect, in our degraded public debate, for some commentator to take Coulter on with these great historical examples, let alone challenge her on theological grounds. Coulter's version of Christianity, like her political views, are strictly comic book quality. She has no idea of what Christianity may mean in a world after the Holocaust, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and what the martyred anti-Nazi German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer called "godless Christianity," that is, religious belief in a world where a supernatrual supreme being is no longer necessary to explain the workings of the universe. Coulter's criticism of the 9-11 widows was morally abhorrent, her take on religion in the 21st century is morally ignorant.