SACKCLOTH AND ASHES
Brian McLaren, the secular world’s house evangelical, places the blame for the current round of Islamic insanity where it clearly belongs. With American evangelical Christians:
I was raised as an evangelical Christian in America, and any discussion of Christian-Jewish-Muslim relations around the world must include the phenomenon of American Islamophobia, for which large sectors of evangelical Christianity in America serve as a greenhouse.
At a time when U.S. embassies are being attacked and when people are getting killed over an offensive, adolescent and puerile film targeting Islam – beyond pathetic in its tawdriness – we must begin to own up to the reality of evangelical Islamaphobia.
Two “Islamophobias” in two paragraphs. What does McLaren mean by that word? Bri-Bri cites a couple of extreme examples before getting down to brass tacks. “Islamophobia” basically means believing that the Christian religion is right, the Islamic religion isn’t and that Christ’s death on the Cross is the only thing that can get you home to God.
Many sincere and good-hearted evangelicals have never yet had a real Muslim friend, and now they probably never will because their minds have been so prejudiced by Islamophobic broadcasts on so-called Christian television and radio.
Janet Parshall, for example, a popular talk show host on the Moody Radio Network, frequently hosts Walid Shoebat, a Muslim-evangelical convert whose anti-Muslim claims, along with claims about his own biography, are frequently questioned. John Hagee, a popular televangelist, also hosts Shoebat as an expert on Islam, as does the 700 Club.
Many Christian bookstores that (used to) sell my books, still sell books such as Paul Sperry’s “Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated Washington” (Thomas Nelson, 2008). In so doing, they fuel conspiracy theories such as the ones U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minnesota, promoted earlier this year.
Considering how enthusiastic the Episcopal Organization is about him, I think it’s fair to frequently question McLaren’s Christianity.
In recent days, we’ve seen how irresponsible Muslim media outlets used the tawdry 13-minute video created by a tiny handful of fringe Christian extremists to create a disgusting caricature of all Christians – and all Americans – in Muslim minds. But too few Americans realize how frequently American Christian media personalities in the U.S. similarly prejudice their hearers’ minds with mirror-image stereotypes of Muslims.
Such as? If you’re too stupid to see how patently obvious they are, McLaren isn’t going to waste any of time on you.
Meanwhile, many who are pastors and leaders in evangelicalism hide their heads in the current issue of Christianity Today or World Magazine, acting as if the kinds of people who host Islamophobic sentiments swim in a tiny sidestream, not in the mainstream, of our common heritage. I wish that were true.
Many, if not most Christians “hate” Muslims, Bri-Bri? You know that for a fact? Or does the fact that some “Biblical scholar” higher criticized that bearing false witness bit out of your way mean that you can just make crap up and claim that it’s true?
I tried to watch [the movie], but I couldn’t make it halfway to the 13-minute mark. Everything about it was tawdry, pathetic, even pornographic. All but the most fundamentalist believers from my evangelical Christian tribe who watch that video will be appalled and ashamed to be associated with it.
It is hate speech. It is no different from the anti-Semitic garbage that has been all too common in Western Christian history. It is sub-Christian – beneath the dignity of anyone with a functioning moral compass.
So is filthy language and explicit sex on television. And I’ll tell you what everyone tells those of us with a “functioning moral compass” who object to such things on our TV sets.
You don’t want to watch that stuff? Change the channel. You don’t want to watch that video on YouTube? There’s plenty of free Internet porn out there.
Even though everyone agrees that that film was just a pretext for attacks that had been planned long before, here’s the bottom line. Our Lord and Savior gets insulted and maligned all the time and we Christians don’t go bat crap whenever we hear about it.
We certainly don’t like it but we don’t start killing people when it happens. Know why that is? It’s because we’re not barbarians any more. So off the top of my head, I’d say that my religion isn’t the one with the problem.
What should happen now? How can evangelicals repent of their “Islamophobia?” For a start, thinks McLaren, Christians need to dump that way-truth-life-no-man-comes-to-the-Father-except-through-Me garbage and stop pushing this Cross nonsense.
Islamophobic evangelical Christians – and the neo-conservative Catholics and even some Jewish folks who are their unlikely political bedfellows of late – must choose.
Will they press on in their current path, letting Islamophobia spread even further amongst them? Or will they stop, rethink and seek to a more charitable approach to our Muslim neighbors? Will they realize that evangelical religious identity is under assault, not by Shariah law, not by the liberal media, not by secular humanism from the outside, but by forces within the evangelical community that infect that religious identity with hostility?
If I could get one message through to my evangelical friends, it would be this: The greatest threat to evangelicalism is evangelicals who tolerate hate and who promote hate camouflaged as piety.
That’s one way of looking at it. The correct view is that the “greatest threat to evangelicalism” is that brain-dead agreement with Muslims in order to avoid hurting Islamic “feelings” will eventually mean the extinction of not only evangelicalism but Catholicism, Judaism and every other non-Islamic religion in the United States.
First and foremost, Brian, Christians are obliged to tell the truth, regardless of who it offends. That is, of course, assuming you still believe it and you haven’t morphed into a theologically and intellectually spineless “many paths to God” jellyfish.
I was raised as an evangelical Christian in America, and any discussion of Christian-Jewish-Muslim relations around the world must include the phenomenon of American Islamophobia, for which large sectors of evangelical Christianity in America serve as a greenhouse.
At a time when U.S. embassies are being attacked and when people are getting killed over an offensive, adolescent and puerile film targeting Islam – beyond pathetic in its tawdriness – we must begin to own up to the reality of evangelical Islamaphobia.
Two “Islamophobias” in two paragraphs. What does McLaren mean by that word? Bri-Bri cites a couple of extreme examples before getting down to brass tacks. “Islamophobia” basically means believing that the Christian religion is right, the Islamic religion isn’t and that Christ’s death on the Cross is the only thing that can get you home to God.
Many sincere and good-hearted evangelicals have never yet had a real Muslim friend, and now they probably never will because their minds have been so prejudiced by Islamophobic broadcasts on so-called Christian television and radio.
Janet Parshall, for example, a popular talk show host on the Moody Radio Network, frequently hosts Walid Shoebat, a Muslim-evangelical convert whose anti-Muslim claims, along with claims about his own biography, are frequently questioned. John Hagee, a popular televangelist, also hosts Shoebat as an expert on Islam, as does the 700 Club.
Many Christian bookstores that (used to) sell my books, still sell books such as Paul Sperry’s “Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated Washington” (Thomas Nelson, 2008). In so doing, they fuel conspiracy theories such as the ones U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minnesota, promoted earlier this year.
Considering how enthusiastic the Episcopal Organization is about him, I think it’s fair to frequently question McLaren’s Christianity.
In recent days, we’ve seen how irresponsible Muslim media outlets used the tawdry 13-minute video created by a tiny handful of fringe Christian extremists to create a disgusting caricature of all Christians – and all Americans – in Muslim minds. But too few Americans realize how frequently American Christian media personalities in the U.S. similarly prejudice their hearers’ minds with mirror-image stereotypes of Muslims.
Such as? If you’re too stupid to see how patently obvious they are, McLaren isn’t going to waste any of time on you.
Meanwhile, many who are pastors and leaders in evangelicalism hide their heads in the current issue of Christianity Today or World Magazine, acting as if the kinds of people who host Islamophobic sentiments swim in a tiny sidestream, not in the mainstream, of our common heritage. I wish that were true.
Many, if not most Christians “hate” Muslims, Bri-Bri? You know that for a fact? Or does the fact that some “Biblical scholar” higher criticized that bearing false witness bit out of your way mean that you can just make crap up and claim that it’s true?
I tried to watch [the movie], but I couldn’t make it halfway to the 13-minute mark. Everything about it was tawdry, pathetic, even pornographic. All but the most fundamentalist believers from my evangelical Christian tribe who watch that video will be appalled and ashamed to be associated with it.
It is hate speech. It is no different from the anti-Semitic garbage that has been all too common in Western Christian history. It is sub-Christian – beneath the dignity of anyone with a functioning moral compass.
So is filthy language and explicit sex on television. And I’ll tell you what everyone tells those of us with a “functioning moral compass” who object to such things on our TV sets.
You don’t want to watch that stuff? Change the channel. You don’t want to watch that video on YouTube? There’s plenty of free Internet porn out there.
Even though everyone agrees that that film was just a pretext for attacks that had been planned long before, here’s the bottom line. Our Lord and Savior gets insulted and maligned all the time and we Christians don’t go bat crap whenever we hear about it.
We certainly don’t like it but we don’t start killing people when it happens. Know why that is? It’s because we’re not barbarians any more. So off the top of my head, I’d say that my religion isn’t the one with the problem.
What should happen now? How can evangelicals repent of their “Islamophobia?” For a start, thinks McLaren, Christians need to dump that way-truth-life-no-man-comes-to-the-Father-except-through-Me garbage and stop pushing this Cross nonsense.
Islamophobic evangelical Christians – and the neo-conservative Catholics and even some Jewish folks who are their unlikely political bedfellows of late – must choose.
Will they press on in their current path, letting Islamophobia spread even further amongst them? Or will they stop, rethink and seek to a more charitable approach to our Muslim neighbors? Will they realize that evangelical religious identity is under assault, not by Shariah law, not by the liberal media, not by secular humanism from the outside, but by forces within the evangelical community that infect that religious identity with hostility?
If I could get one message through to my evangelical friends, it would be this: The greatest threat to evangelicalism is evangelicals who tolerate hate and who promote hate camouflaged as piety.
That’s one way of looking at it. The correct view is that the “greatest threat to evangelicalism” is that brain-dead agreement with Muslims in order to avoid hurting Islamic “feelings” will eventually mean the extinction of not only evangelicalism but Catholicism, Judaism and every other non-Islamic religion in the United States.
First and foremost, Brian, Christians are obliged to tell the truth, regardless of who it offends. That is, of course, assuming you still believe it and you haven’t morphed into a theologically and intellectually spineless “many paths to God” jellyfish.
No comments:
Post a Comment