"...When Christianity conquered Rome..."

I was channel-surfing yesterday evening.


I came upon the Channel News Network. I’ve long viewed twenty-four news as a wasteland, but I went ahead and watched for a few minutes. In transmission was the programme hosted by Anderson Cooper, who is the great-great-grandson of nineteenth-century shipping magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt. At discussion was a “controversial” advertisement for a Republican candidate for U.S. congressional elections this November. The subject of the ad was a mosque to be built nearby the site of the former World Trade Centre in New York city, destroyed by Islamic fascists in the September 11, 2001 attacks. The ad portrayed the proposed temple as “victory mosque” that, over the centuries, Muslims have built in lands that have been conquered from other religions (such as the mosque that once resided on the former Hagia Sophia Orthodox church in the former Constantinople, now Istanbul — the site was converted into a museum by the Ataturk regime).


This so-called “ground-zero mosque” became an issue over the summer, with public-opinion polls showing that a majority of Americans are against an Islamic temple being built so near where the World Trade Centre stood. My own view is that, as a believer in liberty above all, law-abiding Muslims should be able to build a mosque anywhere they wish, be it two blocks from the old WTC, right across the street from there, or on the site itself, if they were able to purchase the deed (the real scandal in this whole affair, as some pointed out at the outset, is that nearly a decade following the 9/11 attacks, construction has yet to commence on the proposed “Freedom Tower” development, where the twin towers once stood). As to whether Muslims ought to build a shrine is a matter of indifference compared to their absolute right to do so.


The American over-class, as apparently represented by the likes of Anderson Cooper, have rather stronger views on the matter: received opinion holds that Muslims not only have the right to build a mosque near the site of the September 11 mass-murders, but that everyone ought to be in favour of it, lest they be “intolerant” of Islam. One wonders, though, if this same view would hold if, for example, avowedly anti-abortion Catholics or Pentecostals were to construct a “religious centre” across the street from the site of an abortion clinic where doctors and other practitioners of premature infanticide had been murdered by fanatic anti-abortionists.


To dispense with the hypothetical, there was a similar controversy in Poland a number of years ago, when an order of Catholic nuns had planned to build a retreat nearby the Auschwitz death-factory, responsible for the murder for the systematic murder of as many as one million Jews during the Holocaust. The Enlightened believed that it was distasteful for the nuns to do so, though as far as I know, no one believed that the religious order was directly or indirectly responsible for the murder of Jews in Auschwitz or anywhere else.


The Republican party, after being shut out of power following the elections in 2006 and ‘08, seem poised to retake the House of Representatives (but not the Senate) in the November mid-term vote. CNN and other mainstream news-services are trying their best to prevent this from happening, by portraying the Republican party as “racist” and “intolerant”, and beholden to the “tea-party” demonstrators. Accordingly, Cooper’s guest on the programme last evening was the candidate who aired the “victory mosque” ad in her North Carolina constituency.


One of Cooper’s questions to the candidate, who is apparently Catholic, was to state that Islam differs in no way in from other religions in building shrines over the temples of vanquished faiths. This was an admission, I take it, that it cannot be denied Islam engages in this practice. It is the same tact that mainstream news organizations take in response to Islamic-fascist terrorism: “Sure, there’s terrorists among Muslims, but you can’t deny that Christians murder abortion doctors...”


Cooper’s “example” in reference to this assertion, was to say that, when “Christianity conquered Rome, weren’t pagan shrines replaced with Christians ones...” The candidate tried her best to parry such an inane question, but evidently wasn’t informed enough in history to demonstrate what an empty suit Cooper must be in making this statement. (The video can be viewed here.)


To wit: Christianity did not conquer Rome, as Cooper seems to believe, in war. After many centuries of persecution, in the early fourth-century of the calendar the Roman emperor Constantine declared official tolerance in regard to those practising Christianity, some years before he declared it the official religion of the empire itself. Thus it was that many pagan shrines in Rome (such as the Pantheon) and throughout the empire were converted into Christian churches (although the Pantheon didn’t become a Roman Catholic cathedral until centuries after the collapse of the empire itself). The remaining pagans of the Roman realm were thus displaced, though in fact the official gods of the Romans had long ceased to be worshipped by most of the imperial population, who in turn had become faithful to many renegade “mystery cults”, of which Christianity was only one of many, though probably the most popular. It was the abandonment of the traditional pantheon by most Roman citizens, that prompted their rulers to adopt Christianity as a “binding” mechanism in the first place.


But this is very far from an invasion by alien religionists and their utter destruction of holy sites (in many cases, when Muslims conquered lands throughout eastern and southeastern Asia, north Africa and southern Europe), or in the case of Hagia Sophia, their conversion into mosques. More to the point, though, it is irrelevant. Even accepting Cooper’s wrongful premise, it is irrelevant. Pagan shrines were converted to Christianity during classical times. Can Cooper come up with an example, say in the last four hundred years, when Christian “invaders” turned any the temple of any other religion into a church?


This is one of the reasons why I stopped watching the news, or reading the newspaper in the first place, the bland conformity of viewpoints expressed therein, almost always skewed to the left. This is demonstrated in the web-log on the website of Cooper’s CNN programme, almost all the entries of which are devoted to skewering some or another Republican or conservative. Can it really be the case that only Republicans are engaging in controversy?