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The valuable question Emily Tamkin is asking is, in pluralistic religious traditions, does anything count as the "real" tradition, the core of the tradition, and if so, how can adherents find agreement about that core?
This question is not confined to Judaism — not at all, as we're seeing with Christians in the US in the Trump era. See Joy-Ann Reid and Robert P. Jones' conversation about this topic.
Joy:
"This has become the foundational base of white Christianity, of white Christian nationalism. ... White Christians are alone in the belief that there should simply be fewer non-white people in America, that the non-white population must be reduced to as low as possible so that white Christians prevail."
"This has become their theology and they're alone in that theology. In all the different sects of white Christians, they're alone believing this."
Robert:
"It's really plain that what we're seeing today is a battle for the soul of white Christianity in this country. I can just not say it any planer than that. It's not actually new, but it has come to a head under Trump. Trump has really brought it back to the fore."
"I'm actually happy to see this conflict coming because it's been one that white Christianity has just pushed down and never fully dealt with and that's why it's back for us because we never really exorcised this demon of white supremacy from within our midst. ...
And it's a hierarchical worldview that has it has very clear hierarchies. And who's at the top of the pyramid are white straight men."
"That's who's at the top of the pyramid. And everybody else is supposed to find their God-given place somewhere down the hierarchy from there. And if you get out of your place, you suffer the righteous wrath. And that's the way this worldview goes."
"The Christian nationalist dream is like a kind of, I mean it's in fact a nightmare, but for them I think it is this kind of fever dream of a world where God has told them they're the special people."
Note the following interesting breakdowns in Pew Research Center's latest findings about Trump's approval rating, as broken down by religious groupings:
Pew finds that net approval of Trump among US Catholics is 39% and net disapproval 60%.
But break those figures down among white Catholics and Hispanic ones, and an interesting picture emerges:
#Trump #Catholics #WhiteCatholics #Latinos #WhiteEvangelicals
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