Schism

The moral of the recent Bobby Jindal dustup is rather banal: people with strong religious convictions tend to think that those beliefs are true, and consequently, that those who hold different beliefs are wrong. The only surprising thing here is that this kind of open conflict doesn't happen more often.

Or maybe not. Politically it has proven very convenient for conservative Protestants and Catholics (and to a more limited extent, conservative Christians and Jews) to join forces to fight "the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians," as well as liberals in general. Ecumenicalism today works more like a political than a religious doctrine, the sacred version of Reagan's "Eleventh Commandment" against attacking other Republicans.

Political expediency, of course, doesn't do away with the deep doctrinal disputes among the various religious sects. If you can bracket Jindal's obvious hubris, there is something almost refreshing about his expression of such a deeply-felt intolerance toward political allies who he knows are all going straight to hell.