{"id":22,"date":"2010-06-25T17:50:19","date_gmt":"2010-06-25T17:50:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/06\/no-apostates-need-apply.html"},"modified":"2010-06-25T17:50:19","modified_gmt":"2010-06-25T17:50:19","slug":"no-apostates-need-apply","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/06\/no-apostates-need-apply.html","title":{"rendered":"No apostates need apply"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"PeterOn June 29, 1106, a Jewish intellectual named
\nMoses Sephardi had himself baptized into the Catholic church in Huesca,
\nSpain. Taking the name Peter Alfonsi<\/a>,
\nhe went on to achieve fame throughout Christian Europe as an astronomer
\nand author. In his Dialogues against the Jews<\/i>, he presents his
\npresent self arguing against his former self in the most important
\nanti-Jewish polemic of its era. <\/p>\n

Just as Peter Abelard<\/a> (at
\njust the same time) established the Western model of the Parisian
\ncelebrity philosopher, so Peter Alfonsi established the model of the
\ncelebrity apostate. It’s a good gig because your new community treasures
\nthe special insights you have, or claim to have, into the (false) world
\nof your old community. Moreover, you represent in your own
\ndistinguished person the triumph of the new community over the old.<\/p>\n

The
\ncommunities in question can be secular as well as, strictly speaking,
\nreligious. At the height of the Cold War, America’s great apostate from
\nCommunism (aka the God the Failed) was Whittaker Chambers. These days,
\nthose hostile to Israel embrace anti-Zionist Jewish writers like Norman
\nFinkelstein<\/a>. Those hostile to Islam have a range of picks.<\/p>\n

For
\nexample, the secularist intelligentsia have Hirsi Ali<\/a>, the
\nSomali-Dutch activist now ensconced at the American Enterprise
\nInstitute. And the evangelicals have Ergun Caner, Dean of the Baptist
\nSchool of Theology at Liberty Baptist University. Or at least they
\nthought they did.<\/p>\n

Caner’s problem, however, is that he
\nmay be a faux apostate<\/a>–not the ex-jihadi from Turkey he claims to
\nhave been but a kid born in Sweden and raised in Ohio who chose the
\nreligion of his Christian mother rather than his Turkish father. Later
\nthis month, Liberty will release a report determining whether he really
\nis the apostate he claims to be.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, it might be a
\ngood idea for the rest of us think about dialing back on apostates of
\nall sorts. The trouble with apostasy is that it’s too good a gig. The
\npassion of the convert, real or faux, connects with audiences only too
\neager to hear the worst. That’s not a healthy connection.<\/p>\n

Update: <\/b>As commenter Shinar Squirrel notes, Liberty has fired Caner as dean–but retained him as a professor. <\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On June 29, 1106, a Jewish intellectual named Moses Sephardi had himself baptized into the Catholic church in Huesca, Spain. Taking the name Peter Alfonsi, he went on to achieve fame throughout Christian Europe as an astronomer and author. 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}