Who Is the Founder of Islam? Just because she wasn’t on a shortlist of conservatives who prepared their whole life for this moment doesn’t make her any less conservative … “If she is really centered on Christ, then that’s even more important than not caring what Ivy League law schools think about her,” says Marvin Olasky, editor of the Christian conservative World magazine. Feebly, the archbishop’s supporters have tried to defend him, reporting that he is “completely overwhelmed” by the hostility and “in a state of shock.” Arguing that his remarks were misunderstood, misinterpreted, and taken out of context, his office even took the trouble to publish them, both in lecture form and in a radio interview version, on his official Web site. “This is classic elitism,” says a senior administration official of the GOP opposition to the Miers nomination. GOP evangelicals fight intellectuals over Harriet Miers. Dicko frequently offered his sermons over two local radio stations, La voix du Soum (“The Voice of Soum”) and La radio lutte contre la désertification (“Radio for the Fight against Desertification”). FDR was the only President of the United States to serve more than two terms.

On the one side, James Dobson, Miers’ fellow parishioners at Valley View Christian Church, and President Bush speak for her heart. At the heart of the coalition is an uncomfortable mix between, on the one hand, right-wing intellectuals, including the neoconservatives whose backing for the Iraq invasion has been so important, and, on the other, the evangelicals who turned out in such numbers to vote for a man who boasted that he was one of them. On the other, George Will and William Kristol and others who swooned for John Roberts decry her unimpressive legal mind. Theoretical physicist Steven Weinberg, a Nobel Prize winner who works out of the University of Texas at Austin, once likened himself to a prisoner in Plato’s cave. But in the end, we are all trapped in a cave… For the prisoners, the shadows are their reality. All that we can know are shadows of the reality that exists in the sub-atomic world.

The archbishop’s language is mild-mannered, legalistic, jargon-riddled; the sentiments behind them are profoundly dangerous. One Daily Telegraph columnist called the archbishop’s statement a “disgraceful act of appeasement“; another called it a “craven counsel of despair.” An Observer columnist eruditely wondered whether the archbishop’s comment might count as a miracle, according to David Hume’s definition of a miracle as a “violation of the laws of nature,” while the notoriously sensationalistic Sun launched a campaign to remove the archbishop from office. That’s why-if there is to be war between the British tabloids and the archbishop-I’m on the side of the Sun. Some of the early leaders of the early republic (1912-49), such as Sun Yat-sen, were converts to Christianity and were influenced by its teachings. But the archbishop’s speech actually touched on something far more fundamental: the question of whether or not all aspects of the British legal system necessarily apply to all the inhabitants of Britain. Certainly, it is true that, since last Thursday, when Rowan Williams-the archbishop of Canterbury, spiritual leader of the Church of England, symbolic leader of the international Anglican Church-called for “constructive accommodation” with some aspects of sharia law and declared the incorporation of Muslim religious law into the British legal system “unavoidable,” practically no insult has been left unsaid.

The debate within the Republican Party over Harriet Miers has quickly devolved into a simple question: Is the nominee qualified because of her religious faith, or unqualified by her lack of intellectual heft? The Bible-thumbing armies may carry the elections, but they sometimes make the elites in the Republican Party as uncomfortable as they make Maureen Dowd and Michael Moore. In this battle, the White House has clearly sided with the churchgoing masses against the Republican Party’s own whiny Beltway intellectuals. In return, the mega-church attendees are mistrustful of the party’s often secular, often not-Christian pundits and wizards. They only know of the world via shadows that are cast on the wall opposite of them. Of particular interest is his Allegory of the Cave, which appeared in The Republic, written around 380BCE. In it, Plato describes a group of prisoners which are chained to a wall within a cave, and have been all of their lives. “If God’s ways are followed, then a contented family will result under our culture.” When I press him on the fairness of this, he argues they are all – men and women alike – following divine command. Instead, we must embrace the notion of “plural jurisdiction.” This, in other words, was no pleasant fluff about tolerance for foreigners: This was a call for the evisceration of the British legal system as we know it.