LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

And you wonder why we should blog against theocracy...

Here's the story from Talk to Action:

Only Americans will get the dubious privilege of reading "Why We Should teach The Bible In Public Schools" ; Next week people everywhere around the world except in North America will behold an April 2, 2007 edition of Time Magazine issue very different from what Americans will see. In Asian, European, and South Pacific markets next week's Time will feature a cover story image of a menacingly glaring, black turbaned and bearded man alongside a cover story title "Talibanistan". Time seems to feel Americans deserve something else though, and so Time's domestic US April 2, 2007 edition will feature a cover story entitled "Why We Should Teach The Bible In Public School". Dave Van Biema, Time's senior religion correspondent, has constructed a narrative that sounds mild, reasonable, and evenhanded but advances an agenda, probably inadvertently, that is none of those things. "Why We Should Teach The Bible In Public School" displays a startling lack of awareness of issues underlying the controversy and a creepy oblivion to the existence of a substantial minority of Americans who have good reason to be less than thrilled by Bible classes in school.

"Why we should teach the Bible in Public Schools" may well be a good faith effort, by Dave Van Biema and Time Magazine, to negotiate the controversy over Bible classes in public schools, but even assuming good faith Time's cover story nonetheless carries Christian nationalist themes and advances what is probably the key narrative that's driving the Christian right as a political movement, the bigoted myth of the culture war between the Christian right and the "secular left" or "secular liberals" in which only right wing Americans are held to have valid religious beliefs or, indeed, any religious beliefs at all. Time Magazine, and Van Biema, appear to endorse that key Christian right frame, rooted in a narrative of an alleged war between good and evil and acted out on Earth as a battle between (right wing) Christians and Godless atheists ("secularists"). The Christian right narrative Time and Van Biema seem to endorse is bigoted because it asserts that liberal Christians are not true Christians and don't actually even merit mention as such and so are, in effect, really atheists, and just as importantly, also because the Christian right narrative simply "disappears" all Americans with religious beliefs who are not Christians, as if they simply don't exist. Van Biema refers to "secular liberals" and the "secular left", but his presentation of the controversy over Bible classes in public schools acknowledges neither the 45 million-odd Americans represented the National Council Of Churches (NCC) nor the millions of Americans with non-Christian religious beliefs. American media has long displayed a preference for amplifying the voice of the Christian right and ignoring the spokespeople of the American Christian center and left, and a media blackout on a recent peace delegation of US religious groups, including the NCC and representing upwards of 50 million Americans, to Iran was only the most recent expression of a pervasive blackout: on it's return the Peace delegation held a Washington Press Club press conference to almost total media silence, as if the close to 1/5 of Americans represented by the delegation simply did not exist. In other words, Time's "religious cleansing" of the mainstream to left segment of American Christianity is not anomalous but has been, until very recently with an upsurge in media awareness that an American religious left might actually exist, standard practice.

The original article has more, plus the covers. "Talibanistan" indeed... We have our own 'taliban', creeping underfoot like termites undermining the wall between church and state.