"Jews do a disservice when they lump American evangelical Christians in with Medieval Christians."

We spent a great deal of time in elementary and high school listening to, repeating, reinforcing, repeating, spreading, repeating, absorbing, and helping to establish as rock-solid truth the axiom that one of the most important principles of learning and knowledge was to understand other cultures outside of our own. Along with it came the judgement that it was wrong to judge other cultures as better or worse than ours. By the Seventies we also had established in the public discourse the "truth" that there was no such thing as "American culture" and consequently that there was no such thing as struggling to maintain or keep American culture.

Years later, with this inviolable truth firmly ground into our minds--so much so that this principle underlay just about everything we thought--I realized that these people who had been so thoroughly trained in "understanding and tolerating other cultures" were incapable of understanding or tolerating anything that smacked of Western culture, Western history, Western values, or Western attitudes. If it was from our ancestors, it was bad. There was never, not once, any attempt to understand the thoughts or feelings of the Renaissance, or the colonial period, or the middle ages. Not if we're talking about Europe, that is.

Let some native from the most barbaric tribe in the deepest backwoods torture babies for fun as part of his adulthood ritual and that's fine. But let a Christian from the seventeenth century find that truth is important enough to have a fight over, and your twentieth-century student turns into a raving lunatic for whom "tolerance" is so important he could kill.

Never let it be said that we tried to "understand" our own society or where we came from.