In her Jan. 1 op-ed “The faith personified in ‘Les Mis,’ ” Jennifer Graham calls people like me, who value the separation of church and state, “professional atheists.” She claims that we seek to drive God from the public square. The irony is that many of us who value this separation are not only members of faith communities, but Christian like her. I think we all want God in the public sphere, as Graham does — but just in our hearts, not in our faces.
Lawrence H. Climo
Comments
Fantastically put. Thank you.
I had an enormously negative reaction to Graham's piece. It felt like it used Victor Hugo's literary work for her own purposes, as propaganda. And what also shocked me most is that conspicuously absent from the "religious" aspects she claimed the work captured was compassion, which permeates Hugo's book.
According to her it's all about redemption but the piece is less about God than it is about humanity and humanity's faith in itself. It also reflects a certain French Catholic view of things: that the meek, the poor, the disenfranchised have dignity, are human, and must be respected--a sentiment antithetical to the dominant Protestant abject, horrifying belief that pervades the US that poverty and the other miseries (which are apt to visit some of us through no fault of our own) are deserved and proof of unworthiness.
Thank you again for your great retort to Graham!