Do Religion and Democracy Mix?
Ian Buruma grew up in Holland with an atheist father and a Jewish mother. Quoting writer Adam Gopnick, he said his family expressed that faith only “in the zeal with which they celebrated Christmas.” “We had to have a bigger Christmas tree than the goyim,” he joked with the crowd at MOCA Grand Avenue. While his Holland, he said, was still a profoundly religious place in the 1960s, today’s Western Europe thinks of religion as “a problem that we had licked by now.” Buruma, author of Taming the Gods: …
