Bigotry on the Bayou? [by Jake Tapper]
August 23, 2007 12:20 PM
Ugly religious charges and counter-charges have emerged in the Louisiana gubernatorial race, with the Louisiana Democratic Party running a TV ad accusing the frontrunner, GOP gubernatorial candidate Rep. Bobby Jindal, R-La., of having once called Protestants "scandalous, depraved, selfish and heretical." The Jindal campaign says the ad is unfair, pulling and twisting out-of-context quotes from an essay Jindal, a Rhodes Scholar, wrote for the New Oxford Review in 1996, and is instructing television stations to pull the ad.
The 30-second TV spot - said to be running in central and north Louisiana, heavily Protestant areas -- features an actress saying "Most Americans believe we should respect one another's religion, but not Bobby Jindal. He wrote articles that insulted thousands of Louisiana Protestants." The actress says Jindal "questions the beliefs of Baptists, Methodists, Episcopaleans, Pentacostals and other Protestant religions."
You can view the ad HERE <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEAsUtvDEaw>
Louisiana's open primary is October 20; Democratic Gov. Kathleen Blanco is not running for reelection. The major Democratic candidates are Public Service Commissioner Foster Campbell and state sen. Walter Boasso, neither of whom has called for the ad to be pulled.
The full essay is far more complex than the Democratic Party ad would have it, and a couple of the words they use in the attack ad are being twisted. The word "depraved," for instance, is actually Jindal quoting French Protestant theologian John Calvin, and "selfish" is a reference to the desires of all Christians.
But Jindal uses the words "scandalous" and "heresy" in his essay "How Catholicism Is Different" against Protestants, to argue that Catholicism is preferable to other Christian faiths, if only because the Catholic Church is the one source to be trusted when interpreting Scripture.
"The meaning of Scripture is not self-evident," Jindal writes. "Sincerely motivated Christians studying the same texts have disagreed on the fundamentals of the faith, thereby dividing not only Protestants from Catholics, but also particular Protestant denominations from each other. Post-Reformation history does not reflect the unity and harmony of the 'one flock' instituted by Christ but rather a scandalous series of divisions and new denominations, including some that can hardly be called Christian."
Jesus, Jindal writes, would believe in Christian leadership to maintain unity. "The same Catholic Church which infallibly determined the canon of the Bible must be trusted to interpret her handiwork; the alternative is to trust individual Christians, burdened with, as Calvin termed it, their 'utterly depraved' minds, to overcome their tendency to rationalize, their selfish desires, and other effects of original sin. The choice is between Catholicism's authoritative Magisterium and subjective interpretation which leads to anarchy and heresy."
Jindal concluded the essay by writing "I am thrilled by the recent ecumenical discussions that have resulted in Catholics and Evangelicals discovering what they have in common, in terms of both theology and morality, and as exemplified by joining to oppose abortion and other fruits of an increasingly secular society, but I do not want our Evangelical friends to overlook those beliefs that make Catholicism unique. The challenge is for all Christians to follow Jesus wherever He leads; one significant part of that challenge is to consider seriously the claims of the Catholic Church."
Jindal was raised Hindu but converted to Catholicism after a Southern Baptist friend told him that “you and your parents are going to hell."
-- jt