The word "extremism" makes me uncomfortable [View all]

[Donald Ian Rankin]

The phrase "a Christian country" can mean one of (at least) two things - a country in which Christianity is the majority religion, and a country in which Christianity is afforded special legal status.

This means that it can be used for wonderful bait-and-switch arguments. Is America a Christian country? Yes, the overwhelming majority of Americans are Christian. Should Christians have special privileges in America? Yes, it's a Christian country. Both inferences are, in a sense correct, but the meaning of "Christian country" has changed in between them, and the final conclusion is wrong.

(Digression that occurs to me as I write: in practice there's no equivalent distinction for "Islamic country" or "Jewish country" - every majority-Islamic or majority-Jewish country officially discriminates against non-Muslims or non-Jews. I'm not sure about other religions.)


But, anyhow, extremism. Extremism gets used in exactly the same way. It can mean "someone whose views are at one end of a political spectrum, and with whom most people disagree", but it also often used "irrational, fanatical, potentially-violent crank whose views are not merely unpopular but wrong".

And the two definitions don't really overlap much. DUer's views tend to be pretty extremist by American standards, but are probably much more reasonable than more mainstream (by American standards), more conservative opinions.

In much of the world, especially but by no means exclusively the Islamic world, ultraconservative religious fanaticism is mainstream, not extremist, and e.g. support for same-sex marriage is very extremist indeed.

But a lot of people still use "extremist" as though it meant "wrong", and quite often as though it had connotations of "violent". I wish people would use the words "wrong" and "violent", instead, and not conflate "how popular is this opinion?" with "is it right?"