"Born Again American"
May. 15th, 2009 06:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfs"When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean." -- Humpty Dumpty
Omaha and I went to Yamaraashi-chan's school today for their annual "come see what we're feeding your child for lunch" lunch. It was an unremarkable affair; we were surrounded by screaming children who left a lot of litter on the floor by the time we were done, ate burgers that were halfway between USDA "Utility" grade beef and ground up unwanted cat, unripened watermelon and cookies with way too much guar gum in them. That brought back a lot of memories.
What made our eyebrows rise, however, was the back of the half-pint milk cartons, on which was a short blurb about the US Declaration of Independence and the URL: BornAgainAmerican.org.
That phrase, "Born Again," is such a loaded term that Omaha and I were very concerned: how could something like that have been distributed into a public school without raising more concerns than just our own?
As it turns out, Born Again American is a Norman Lear project. It's an attempt to take the sting out of the phrase "born again," by associating it not with Christianity, but with something else: a kind of American civil religion unassociated with one theistic creed or another.
Norman Lear is one of America's most successful, pervasive, and persuasive liberals. But co-opting the phrase "born again" just isn't going to happen, no matter how much money he throws at this project. It's too much a property of the evangelicals, and between the wincing the term causes among the secular and the appeal to the religionists, it's not going to fly.
Omaha and I went to Yamaraashi-chan's school today for their annual "come see what we're feeding your child for lunch" lunch. It was an unremarkable affair; we were surrounded by screaming children who left a lot of litter on the floor by the time we were done, ate burgers that were halfway between USDA "Utility" grade beef and ground up unwanted cat, unripened watermelon and cookies with way too much guar gum in them. That brought back a lot of memories.
What made our eyebrows rise, however, was the back of the half-pint milk cartons, on which was a short blurb about the US Declaration of Independence and the URL: BornAgainAmerican.org.
That phrase, "Born Again," is such a loaded term that Omaha and I were very concerned: how could something like that have been distributed into a public school without raising more concerns than just our own?
As it turns out, Born Again American is a Norman Lear project. It's an attempt to take the sting out of the phrase "born again," by associating it not with Christianity, but with something else: a kind of American civil religion unassociated with one theistic creed or another.
Norman Lear is one of America's most successful, pervasive, and persuasive liberals. But co-opting the phrase "born again" just isn't going to happen, no matter how much money he throws at this project. It's too much a property of the evangelicals, and between the wincing the term causes among the secular and the appeal to the religionists, it's not going to fly.
