When the irreligious attempt to understand the religious, they usually get it wrong. For example, in 2002, Mother Jones wrote an article about a movement of Evangelical Christians with the sinister goal of “wiping out Islam”. My spot reaction to the sensationalist headline was, “Well, of course that’s their goal. It is also the goal of Islam to wipe out Christianity.” Both faiths have a pretty specific mission, viz., to spread their respective creeds across the entire planet. It is the mission of Christianity to wipe out Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc. etc. Likewise, it is the mission of Islam to wipe out Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc. etc.
The fine folks at Mother Jones, though, appear to have been attempting to squeeze the story into the writers’ and readers’ pre-held meta-narrative of oppressed people of color against whitey. Which would make a tiny bit of sense if either Christianity or Islam had anything to do with race.
Islam, though, is not an ethnicity; it is a belief system that makes some pretty specific truth claims. Ditto Christianity. Strangely, though, people who choose to comment on these faiths generally seem to forget that they are religious faiths and instead react by trying to understand them as having only to do with the early 21st century westerner.
Pat Robertson believes that the First Cause happens to be the Holy Trinity and that the second person of this Holy Trinity became a human being in the person of a street preacher about 2k years ago in Judea. This aspect of his belief is much more central and of much more lasting importance than whom his belief says one can and cannot sleep with. One may flow from the other, but the core really ought to be engaged before the periphery.
Likewise, Joe Muslim believes that the First Cause, Allah, is one and indivisible, and that God sent an angel who choke-slammed a camel merchant in a cave and demanded that this merchant recite God’s uncreated word. This belief has zero to do with any sort of fight against white oppressors.
It would probably take a few weeks for your average writer and reader of Mother Jones to sit down and actually figure out some of the key tenets of Islam and Christianity and what it means for a religion to be a proselytizing one. Knee-jerk reactions about race and sex only obscure the issue. If it turns out that Allah is the creator of Heaven and earth and that I need to be in submission to him as preached by His final messanger, it is this fact that means much, much more than whether or not there is a coalition of oppressed around the world. Likewise, if it turns out that Jesus Christ is the incarnate second person of the Holy Trinity, then that is much, much more important than any peripheral concerns. And if they’re both wrong, well then someone should have the sack to say that as well.
Posted by schizmatic at 09:58 PM