Let’s engage in a thoughtful exercise for a moment.
Say the Ku Klux Klan, a self-prescribed “Christian” organization, was continuing consistent attacks on African Americans or other minorities today. Despite their best efforts to use the Bible as a source of justification for their misdeeds, Americans far and wide would condemn their actions. Moreover, everything from their Biblical claims to their attempt to identify themselves with a Christian community would all be laughably dismissed even by evangelicals. The fact that the Ku Klux Klan does not represent mainstream or really even right-wing Christianity is just common knowledge in America.
Like the KKK of our day, though admittedly not as violent, there’s also West Boro Baptist Church, which pickets military funerals because of their certainty that the God of the Old and New Testament brings wrath upon our nation for its love ethics and for its progressive leanings toward homosexuality. Their website attempts to show where in the Bible exactly God turns up as a wrathful, vengeful God citing where the divine “abhors” creation in the text.
Again, we dismiss those theologies. For the most part, it’s not our experience with Christianity. The average Christian believes God to be loving and can share in that story, despite the fact that our religious text does hold some troubling talking points. Over the years, I’ve heard different rationalizations for those talking points, those “texts of terror,” ranging from a complete dismissal of the Old Testament in favor of the so-called “New covenant” in Christ (supersessionism or replacement theology) to a theology where God’s wrathful actions are explained away as though God were forced to work through the sinful people who were there. That is, it’s not as though God wanted to bring death and destruction, they say; it’s just that the people were that evil and truly deserved nothing less.
I think all of those viewpoints are at fault. I think we’d be better served to recognize that there are aspects of the Bible, horrific texts so-to-speak, that are in this holy book not because they say something about the reality of God but because they say something about the reality of us, of humanity and how humanity has changed in its understanding of the divine over the course of a few thousand years. In the same way that a member of the KKK or West Boro Baptist Church misconstrues the divine today, we can see within our scripture that religious people throughout history have long struggled with ways to describe God and God’s relationship to creation. And sometimes, even in our holy book, they got it wrong. It’s our responsibility, then, to question these hate-filled texts or even where hate theologies grab hold of religion and society and misconstrue it.
The trick is holding those theologies accountable without letting those fundamentalist theologies pretend as though they are representative of an entire religion. Can you imagine if America suddenly began a war against Christianity and Christian people in reaction to groups like the KKK or West Boro Baptist Church? Norway, recently, was given plenty of reason to do just that.
But we would never do that. At least not with Christianity. Why? Because we’re educated in Christianity. It’s not new to us or foreign. Most of us grew up with it. Even non-Christians in America have enough understanding of Christianity to know that the KKK, West Boro Baptist, and the Norway killer are espousing versions of Christianity that are completely foreign to Christ’s call to “love your neighbor as yourself.”
Unfortunately, though, we’re not educated on other religions, and it’s those places where we’re uneducated that fear and violence creep in to overtake our society and lead to the sort of atrocities where hundreds of thousands of innocent people die because a tiny syndicate of terrorists succeeded in making the United States believe that they were exponentially larger than they ever really were, that they represented a religion they did not actually represent. In Iraq, alone, a conservative estimate of civilian deaths falls somewhere in the low 100,000 range with more liberal estimates getting dangerously close to the one million mark. Why have we allowed that to happen? How could we, especially if we are – as so many wish to say – a “Christian nation,” allow even one person to die over hate toward a different, misunderstood religion? Since when did we choose to follow “eye for an eye,” even if it’s someone else’s eye of the same race instead of “love your enemies”?
I can’t help but think lately that our efforts to keep religious education out of the public sphere might explain some of our qualms with Islam. When I encounter Christians picking apart the Qur’an, citing references to Jihad or violence, as the popular Nashville group ACT for America is doing, I just think, “Have you bothered reading the Bible? Because it’s a whole lot scarier than the Qur’an if you want to interpret religious texts that way.” Maybe the First Amendment is actually hurting us more than it’s helping us. Or rather, the fundamentalist attempt to keep Christianity out of the public sphere in an aim to ensure peace and religious freedom for all people has actually had the reverse effect of making America religiously stupid and, ergo, sewn seeds of hate rather than peace. If the average American were as well-versed in the Qur’an as in the Bible or if the average American were able to make the effort to get to know Muslims as well as Christians, atrocities like what’s happened in the Middle East the past dozen years or so could never have happened. If we’d just been more educated, we would’ve known in the wake of September 11 to dismiss terrorists the way we dismiss the KKK or Westboro Baptist. So, maybe instead of closing the public sphere, especially public education, to all religion, that public space should be an open forum encouraging comparative religious work and a sharing of beliefs and ideas. The longer it’s not, the easier it is for fundamentalism to creep in and sew more lies about Islam, more lies about people who are “different” from “us.”
After all, everywhere, it seems, America is being overtaken with fundamentalism, but it isn’t the fundamentalist version of Islam people have feared since September 11. It wasn’t Muslims who hijacked the economy over the debt ceiling debate threatening default. It wasn’t Muslims who tried to cut spending to entitlement programs like Medicare or Social Security or veterans benefits. It wasn’t Muslims who worked hard to ensure that the wealthiest corporations, oil companies, and top 2% of America continued to receive tax cuts while a further burden was placed on the middle class and the poor. It wasn’t Muslims.
It was a small syndicate of American citizens (people like Sarah Palin or Michelle Bachman or Ron Paul and anyone who follows them), by and large evangelical Christians, who believe themselves to be symbolically starting the second American revolutionary war. They even wave a flag that suggests as much. And what are they fighting? They’re fighting their own fears, most of which are unfounded. They’re engaged in a fight where an “us” vs. “them” dichotomy has been falsely constructed by the media to suggest that anything different from White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (patriarchal and capitalist) ideals is a threat to the new America they hope to create. And through it all, I can’t help but wonder how much of this “fight” was exactly, to a T, what the patient and conniving Al Qaeda wanted for so long. I doubt that Al Qaeda was smart enough to foresee it playing out like it has, but the painful genius of Al Qaeda’s plan is that they sought simply to instill fear in America, a fear that would eventually cause us to turn against each other the very way we have today – a fear that would make us terrorists against ourselves.
Is that what’s happening to our America?
When you volunteer two years of your life to serve the United States government in a way that’s supposed to help better our world, you carry with you, I think, a sense of patriotism and pride to be an American. And if you didn’t have that sense of pride and patriotism before you left America, it grows on you in a powerful way once you’re abroad. Because I moved to an Islamic country, I came into this service believing that a huge responsibility I had in fulfilling the goals of the Peace Corps was to educate people back home about Islam, to provide a front seat account on how that religion was not the evil, scary religion American media has portrayed it to be. The longer I’ve been here, the more urgent that responsibility has become. And the longer I’ve heard stories back home of hate from a “Christian nation,” the more strongly I’ve come to feel about what it means to be an American. Or rather, what it doesn’t mean. And starting the second revolutionary war – metaphorically or not – it seems to me is both insulting to the sacrifice given that established our great country in the first place and distrusting of the idea of democracy in the second. That is, what is democratic about a small group of Americans hijacking the economy until legislation is passed that only they approve of? That’s not the democratic country my grandfather fought to protect; it’s not the democratic country I signed up to volunteer for; and it’s certainly not the democratic country I want to return to when my service ends in 2012. Democracy tells a different story altogether.
