The other day I put down the Brie I was eating and, heedless of whether or not it meant the terrorists were winning, roared around the corner to get the family Volvo (1996, 140,000 miles) its periodic oil change. Like most public places in the country nowadays, the waiting room in the quick-lube place has a loud TV pinned to the wall. You might try to read the paper, but the noise will break through. And the talk-show controversy of the day was “Jesus Boot Camps.” Hallelujah, Havoline!

The point at issue was whether the intensive gospel-shock of these camps amounts to emotional abuse of children. On the screen came a short clip of evangelism in action: eight- or nine-year-olds, swaying in the communal chant, weeping with their faces all twisted up in sorrow, repentance and gratitude. I have to say that my first reaction was visceral indignation. I don’t like to see people helpless and manipulated, whether emotionally or physically. If somebody tried that kind of stuff on my kids, I would not be all sweetness, relativism and light. Moreover, when people’s emotions have been played on in that way, they often think back on it in calmer times and realize that they were being treated as pawns, and those intense feelings from the past turn to anger. A long-term cohort study of the Jesus Boot Camps may reveal that they are great recruitment posters for the Unitarians, the atheists and the agnostics.

But I do believe in religious freedom, even the freedom of Syrians to become Scientologists, and I know that for a lot of people, it ain’t religion unless it comes with a big dose of tears, groveling and catharsis. I don’t belong to what my grandmother used to call the “shouting churches,” but I went to school with lots of kids who knew they were Saved. It’s part of their traditional mores. Let them put their kids through it and when the kids are grown, let them think it over. It’s not for my kids, thanks very much, but in the ACLU spirit, I defend those people’s right to be weird, short of actual bodily harm.

-- And short of mental torment; but about that the definitions are less clear. I leave this issue to Richard Dawkins and whomever he selects for the opposite podium.

So, all right, there I was, suppressing my dismay at the sort of Nuremberg-looking stuff people put their kids through (though with the best of intentions), and the talk show switched to the debaters. The anti-boot-camp person played right into the net, advocating that children be treated with antiseptic gloves and not “indoctrinated,” an obviously unrealistic and somewhat Sovietish proposition with no clear lines anywhere. The pro-boot-camp person, the female pastor of a suburban evangelical church, knew she was riding high, because for her more Christianity meant more patriotism, which was clearly what we need since we’re at war with Islamic terror—a position most people watching midmorning TV would presumably endorse.

(I mentally replayed the tape of sobbing, cranked-out children with a soundtrack that chanted: “Yes, we all aspire to put on the suicide bomber’s vest! Little and weak though I am, let me, O God, avenge the victims of Gaza and Lebanon!” Run that on the TV and see if the viewers still think there’s nothing sinister or manipulative about it all.)

And then the pastor went all out and used a hermeneutic move that always sticks in my particular craw, which is the reason I’m writing about it today. Roughly paraphrased from memory: “As Christians, we can’t stand by indifferently as our religion and our nation are under attack by the Enemy. You can’t tell me to check my beliefs at the door or at the voting booth…”

Phrased in the terms beloved of multiculturalists, this would come out as: I’m a locally situated agent of description X, with commitments to Y and Z, and context Q which makes my specific actions meaningful. To compel me to act as if I were a universal, indifferent actor is violence against my Sitz-im-Leben and my existentially experienced truth, and moreover it’s asking me to be something that doesn’t exist. Variants of this argument have been preached by proponents of “strategic essentialism,” communitarianism, etc.; tracing the intellectual history would take us out of our way. I'd rather think about how such arguments fail to provide a basis for law (however much they offer themselves as remedies for hermeneutic injustice).

Madam Pastor, let’s think for a minute about the difference between “is” and “ought,” and about a wacky little idea known as doing unto others as you would have them do unto you. (Where does he get this stuff, you wonder.) Your theological education obviously skipped over the early Christians and the Reformation. Those folks, not to mention the uncooperative Jews of Roman Palestine, the Albigensians, the Vaudois, and so on and so forth, were sore afflicted, hard-pressed and smitten hip and thigh, nay, put to the sword, by people in the service of state-supported religions who “wouldn’t check their beliefs at the door.” You might attend the Ecumenical Prayer Breakfast with a mental reservation to the effect that your religion is the best and the truest. Nobody is asking you to give up that or any other bit of conceit or superstition that may infect your world view. But if you were to consider temporal matters with a bit of humility, and lay off the Constantinian triumphalism, you might imagine a place or time in which your beliefs were persecuted by actual persecutors, not simply disprized by non-believers who find your expansive self-centeredness a bit squinky. In other words, you would have to learn to “check your beliefs at the door” of fairness.

The sheer hooliganism of the point of view expressed by the pastor, in which mere tolerance is construed as an attack on one’s own commitment to one’s private truth, sums up everything that makes me desperate about my country these days. That, and the volume of the TVs.