If you are a Congressman and want to ignite a controversy and inflame relations, Representative Peter King is your man. He launched a grand example last month. Instead of holding yet another hearing on terrorism, Representative King stepped into religious territory and held hearings on the ‘Radicalization of Muslim-Americans’.
Known for his anti-Islamic sentiments, Representative King barreled ahead with his contentious showcasing of thinly veiled Islamophobia. King has been often quoted for statements such as “America has too many mosques.”[i] “80-85 percent of mosques in this country are controlled by Islamic fundamentalists.” and “No Muslim leaders [are] cooperating with the war on terror.”[ii]
These statements range from the bias of personal opinion to being provable as blatantly wrong. There are between 4 and 6 million Muslims in this country. A Homeland Security study noted that this population is so concerned about home-grown extremists in their midst that they have not only provided information to help authorities, they have been so watchful that community members have turned in people who turned out to be undercover informants.[iii]
For many people, Representative King’s hearing on Capitol Hill brings back visions of the McCarthy hearings from the 1950’s. Eventually censured for his unsubstantiated claims, Joe McCarthy used his elected position of United States Senator to strike fear in hearts of many Americans by making accusations of disloyalty, subversion, or treason without proper regard for evidence.
Representative King is not Joe McCarthy. But he waves the American flag just as high. He also uses broad rhetoric to enlarge very real but identifiable threats to cast sweeping suspicion onto entire communities. In his show of patriotism, King tapped into well-rehearsed fears in the American psyche. King, like McCarthy before him, tapped into deep-seated fears that go back to the founding of this country.
I strongly believe that to understand the persistence and viciousness of intolerance in this country, we have to go back into history to sort out its deepest roots. Sometimes we have to go way back.
Let’s do a quick re-cap of relevant religious history. Christianity is 2000 years old. Islam is 1400 years old. During the Middle Ages, Christianity expanded its territory in Europe primarily through violent inquisitions and crusades. The Protestant Reformation, started by Martin Luther in 1517, marked the end of the Middle Ages with a defiant split between the Roman Catholic Church and the new Protestant movement. Catholicism was now the archenemy of the fledging Protestant church.
In the meantime, Islam had spread throughout the Ottoman Empire. When the start-up Protestant movement needed outside help to gain momentum against the despised but well-entrenched Roman Catholic Church, the Protestants called on the Muslims. Without the backing of the Ottoman Empire – the Muslims – the Protestant movement would probably have failed.
Let me repeat that. Without the backing of the Ottoman Empire – the Muslims – the Protestant movement would probably have failed.
Our own Unitarian church was officially founded in the midst of this triangulated struggle between the three religions. During the time following the Reformation, there was only one area of Europe that was cut off on all sides and completely surrounded by competing religions. This area stood like a Protestant island with the Catholics surrounding the western edges and the Muslims bracketing the eastern borders. It was the only Protestant territory that bordered the Ottoman Empire. It was an island where anxious Protestantism actually flourished under the protection of the Islamic Ottoman Empire. The Catholic Church would have easily conquered the area, but it did not want to risk direct confrontation with the Ottoman Empire over a small territory. It was in this isolated outpost of Protestantism, called Transylvania, that King John issued an edict of religious tolerance and formally launched the Unitarian church.
Our Unitarian Universalist Church today, owes is very existence to the establishment of religious tolerance. Carving out a peaceful existence in times of open religious warfare, King John of Transylvania refused to give in to either side. Instead, he issued an edict that declared there must be a better way. There must be a better way through religious freedom and we will openly declare it and we will live it. In our lands, let there be peace built on tolerance and non-violence. It will be against the law to attack, defame, or cause harm to a person or his family because he preaches what he believes. Everyone has the choice to listen – or not. It was a bold stand in times of aggressive religious expansion. But King John defined a better way. His official edict of religious tolerance chartered our Unitarian faith. Our religious DNA is built on tolerance and non-violence.
Besides sacred texts, what makes the competing Abrahamic religions of Catholicism, Islam, and Protestantism different from each other? It is interesting to compare. While the Bible is analyzed, formalized and distributed by the church in the Catholic tradition, Islam and Protestantism depend upon direct analysis of scripture, whether it be the Qur’an or the Bible. Neither uses a formal structure to disseminate knowledge. The Catholic Church uses its vast resources to buttress a structural religion, Islam and Protestantism each rest on a rhetorical commitment to a universal mission.[v]
It is perhaps this reliance on individual interpretation and adherence that anticipates the tension in today’s Christian-Islamic relations. Each of these traditions, Protestantism and Islam, has fostered strong religious identities and each has spawned fundamentalist factions and extremists. The tolerant and supportive relationship between Islam and Protestantism during the Reformation did not last.
About the time the Ottoman Empire began a period of decline, Europeans were discovering the New World. It was the Protestant vision of America that has most shaped our national character as well as our current struggles. As the Puritans fled religious persecution in England and embarked on the treacherous cross-Atlantic voyage, they compared themselves to the ancient Israelites fleeing bondage in Egypt and wandering for forty years in the dessert. The ancient Israelites had Moses and Joshua; the Puritans had John Winthrop.
On the ships bound for the Massachusetts Bay, Winthrop preached fiery sermons that exalted the Puritans as God’s new chosen people who were embarking on a sacred journey to the Promised Land. Before they even landed, Winthrop implanted into the Puritan mind that America had special power. As children in England, some Protestants were taught that God would work through the English faithful to bring about the ultimate redemption of mankind. America represented the great victory. God’s chosen people were called to a special destiny in the New World.[vi]
When the Puritans first reached the Massachusetts shore, the primeval forests were as great and dark a wilderness as the vast and dangerous dessert was for the Israelites. And when the chosen people met the Indians, they saw them as the Devil’s children, much like the Old Testament enemies the Philistines, Hittites, Jebusites, and Amorites. For the Puritans, even though the Native Americans were here first, America was promised to God’s chosen people.[vii]
The Puritans believed they were settling the New Jerusalem, the ‘city on the hill’. This became a sacred story that gave the settlers purpose and assigned meaning to their individual and collective lives. The Puritan Myth became part of our country’s founding narrative.
Eventually, the Puritan myth began to fade. Then people became reminiscent and during the 1740’s, a Great Awakening revival rekindled the hearts and minds of Americans – the chosen people – to the idea that God’s greatest work was yet to be done. Led by Jonathan Edwards’ preaching, which was full of hellfire and brimstone, Americans were emboldened with the idea that God was breaking forth new light for the world. Indeed, in a few years, victory over the British became proof of God’s blessing on America.[viii]
By the time the founding documents of this country were written though, another thread had appeared in the American mindset. The old-fashion Puritan myth began to give way to the more rationalistic and progressive social and political doctrines of the European Enlightenment. While the founding fathers still believed in God as well as America’s destiny, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and John Adams led the way in establishing political reform and a progressive democracy.
I believe that it is these two strands of American narrative, the Puritan Myth and the European Enlightenment, which set the stage for many of this country’s ugliest and most brutal battles. When the doctrine of Americans as God’s chosen people is extended into its most fundamentalist extremes, it is easy to see how white supremacy groups are buttressed in flag-draped religious dogma. After all, the Puritans were white Anglo-Saxon and didn’t God choose them? And doesn’t God heap blessings and riches on those who are successful, even if it means massive accumulation of wealth by the very few?
But a democracy promises rights and freedoms. The high-water mark of American liberalism in the 1960’s was the passage of the Voting Rights Act, which gave African-Americans the right to vote, the Medicare and Medicaid Act, and the Immigration Act of 1965.[ix] All of these are being actively challenged, whether by the incarceration of the majority of young black men,[x] defunding healthcare programs, or attacking undocumented workers and passing draconian laws against ‘illegal aliens’.
The current spat of Islamophobia, which is premised as a response to the horrific terrorist attacks on 9/11, provides a platform for the extremist version of the Puritan myth – white supremacy – to rattle its saber. The chosen people are being attacked and challenged by terrorists, and increasingly by massive immigration of non-Anglo-Saxons into the Promised Land. I might add here that Hispanics now comprise 17% of the U.S. population. Hispanics, who are mostly Catholic, are part of a structural religion that is occupied with its own internal challenges, although their sheer numbers present a clear and present danger to the establishment. But it is the Muslim presence that most irritates the Protestant worldview. Protestants, like Muslims, have the freedom of individual interpretation of religious belief. To this end, many conservative Christians have collectively elected politicians who endorse a return to a Puritan ethos built upon a sanitized Christianity. There is no room for the other.
Representative Peter King’s hearings on Capitol Hill seem to officially sanction scrutiny of an entire population as suspect. To be sure, there are Muslim terrorists. But Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber was Christian. So are the vast majority of those who commit school shootings, church bombings, and cross-burnings, including the white supremacist suspect who planted a pipe bomb laced with rat poison along the route of this year’s MLK parade in Spokane.[xi] Home-grown radical Americans who are white and Christian. In a sad note, after the Tucson shooting rampage, I remember hearing a commentator murmur, “God, I hope the shooter is not Hispanic or Muslim.”
I wish these stories were simply reports of random acts of violence. But the roots go deeper, much deeper. These crimes are outgrowths of rampant religious idealism intent on a battle of domination. At least domination from the American viewpoint since about a decade ago the term domination appeared in our Defense Department mandate. But domination also represents the age-old Christian push to evangelize the world.
Were the attacks of 9/11 radical Muslim attempts to conquer America? Or was it seething retaliation for America’s imperialistic policies in the Arab world? That discussion was sidelined by our haste to Shock and Awe the world. We still need to have the conversation.
But America is not ready. Until we undress the Puritan Myth that blindly drives our domineering, isolationist, and racist actions, we will only be talking about symptoms. Religious freedom is constitutionally guaranteed in this country. Even so, we need to have an honest conversation about religion and values, or this country will continue to both thrive, and at the same time, be held hostage to its founding narrative – a narrative that we outgrew in the 1960’s if not before.
This week I learned that renegade pastor Terry Jones of Florida followed through on his threats and burned the Qur’an. This is the same Pastor Jones that caused an international uproar last fall when he threatened to burn copies of the Qur’an in a huge bonfire on the church lawn. In protest, we at Northlake held an Interfaith 9/11 service not only to honor the victims of the original tragedy, but also to show that religious tolerance is a much better way. This church was packed to overflowing with supporters from the entire community saying we abhor the violence and are willing to make a stand for peace.
On March 20th, two weeks ago today, Pastor Jones held a mock trial complete with attorneys and jury. The defendant, the Qur’an, lost and by a poll of the jurists, the punishment was selected. Inside the church walls, a copy of the Qur’an was burned.
With the video camera running, Pastor Jones made sure this gross act of intolerance and disrespect was available to the Muslim world. They heard it. They saw it. In response, a U.N. outpost in Afghanistan was attacked and twelve people were killed.
Pastor Jones has no regrets.
And I have no regrets that last fall this church made a stand on 9/11 for religious tolerance and peace. Extremist on both sides, Muslim and Christian are defaming their own religions with violence, terror and murder. There must be a better way. As a Unitarian Universalist, and as a minister, I choose to stand upon my religious birthright and say there must be a better way. And I am willing to work for it. I believe you are too. And I believe we will not be alone.
Religion can be a powerful force for good in the lives of individuals and the collective. It is our way of finding meaning and purpose in life. The religious impulse is embedded deep within our very being. But there will always be a struggle between individual interpretations that go too far and oppressive structures that only a few saints can break through. There is plenty of room in the middle. There is plenty of room for good. There is plenty of room for religion. And I believe that it is through religion, not its abandonment, that healing can begin.
Before we can listen to each other however, we must lower the volume. We must make room for justice. We must make room for peace. We must make room for our neighbors.
In speaking about justice, I agree with Ebu Patel, an interfaith activist and Muslim American, when he said, “The forces of inclusion have always defeated the forces of injustice, and they always will.”[xii] Amen.
Peace. Salaam. Shalom.
Blessed be.
[i] Woodward, Calvin and Sullivan, Eileen. “Congressional Hearings on Radical Islam Compared to McCarthyism” Associated Press. 3/9/11. http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/congressional-hearings-radical-islam-com
[ii] Esposito, John. “Peter King’s Hearings: Islamophobia Draped in the American Flag” http://onfaith.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/panelists/john_esposito/2011/03/islamophobia_draped_in_the_american_flag.html
[iii] Esposito.
[iv] Protestantism and Islam. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestantism_and_Islam
[v] Protestantism and Islam. Wikipedia.
[vi] McAdams, Dan P. The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By. Oxford University Press: New York. 2006. pg. 101-102.
[vii] McAdams. pg. 102.
[viii] McAdams. pg. 103.
[ix] Daniels, Roger. “The Immigration Act of 1965: Intended and Unintended Consequences. Amercia.gov 4/3/08. www.america.gov/st/educ-english/2008/April/20080423214226eaifas0.9637982.html
[x] Eckholm, Erik. “Plight Deepens for Black Men, Studies Warn.” New York Times. 3/20/06. www.nytimes.com/2006/03/20/national/20blackmen.html
[xi] Johnson, Gene and Geranios, Nicholas K. “Spokane MKL Bomb Suspect Tied to Hate Group, Fort Lewis” Associcated Press. The News Tribune. 4/3/11. www.thenewstribune.com/2011/03/09/1576988/federal-official-says-suspect.html
[xii] Foley, Elise. “Keith Ellison Tears Up at Hearing on Muslim-American ‘Radicalization’” Huffpost Politics. 3/31/11. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/10/keith-ellison-tears-up-muslim-hearings_n_833981.html
No comments:
Post a Comment