Does a Hindu statue in Sugar Land, Texas, threaten America’s stability and cohesion? Andrew Beck thinks so. He wants the government to “curate or protect the dominant and preferred culture of its historic people.”
In a column I wrote to which Beck responds, I suggested America’s Christian culture is not imperiled by a lone statue in a community like Sugar Land, where Christianity and churches are quite strong. Recalling the U.S. Nazi Party based in the community where I lived during my 1970s boyhood, I extolled the U.S. Constitution for protecting free speech—even for the “absurd and the hateful,” which is “parcel to our freedom from despotism.” The Constitution, I argued, “expresses a providential trust that if truth and virtue are free to argue their case, they can in the open market of ideas survive and even prevail, at least to a certain extent, in our fallen world.”
Continue reading at The American Mind here.
Comment by David on August 14, 2025 at 9:15 pm
The Trinity and incarnation are not part of the Jewish tradition, but Hindus had them long before the Christians. One can find many cases of gods having children on earth in the Greco-Roman world and even in Genesis, but not incarnations.
Comment by Mark on August 14, 2025 at 9:43 pm
And all major world religions have some variation of Golden Rule they follow, which strikes me as the most basic starting point for classical liberal government. Hinduism and Judeo-Christian religion also share a belief in a universality of humanity based in creation. One could argue that the instinct toward democracy should be even stronger in Hinduism because it has always teached that humans stripped bare of their temporal modes of identity: class, race, caste, place of origin, etc. are all part of one universal spiritual essence that will return to the divine source from which it all originated in the end.
Comment by Thomas on August 15, 2025 at 10:46 pm
I don`t think people should feel threatned by Hinduism at all. There would be much more reasons for worrying about Nazis, so I disagree with Mark Tooley in that. There never could be a Nazi Party in the United States, because of their racist and antisemitic ideology. Same goes for Germany and any other country.
Comment by Chris Rudzki on August 15, 2025 at 11:54 pm
Unlike Mr. Tooley, I myself do not find toleration to be the value most salient in the continued existence of the U.S. Nazi Party. On the contrary, what I see is the impotence of its observer, mistaking fatal relativism for moral sophistication.
America’s stability and cohesion is not quite threatened by the Hindu statue in Sugar Land. It is threatened alongside the souls of those who’ve come to refuse to regard it, perhaps even to themselves, as strange.
Comment by John on August 18, 2025 at 4:11 pm
Chris,
Our you concerned with saving souls or saving America?