Not Everyone Who Calls
I’ve been engaged in an email exchange with someone I don’t know, the exchange coming through a mutual friend. Both the mutual friend and the author of the emails are intelligent, thoughtful people—who see the world differently than I do.
Our discussions have been most generally about the current Middle East (Southwest and South Central Asia) and how it got the way it is. My correspondent, citing Churchill, blames things mostly on Islam; I think the biggest contributor to what is admittedly a mess comes down to the evils of decades, even centuries of colonial exploitation. Our “discussion” is probably at an impasse, but it has been thought-provoking nevertheless.
Still, one thing has been clear…a lot depends on who you allow to define your terms. Does ISIS for example merit the label “Islam” just because its followers claim to be Islamic and call on the name of Allah? Does every televangelist who can muster the bucks to air his or her bigotry in the name of God deserve the title Christian?
For that matter, do we use the term Christian (or for that matter Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, etc.) for local congregations/faith communities that are patently more interested in protecting certain societal and economic privileges than in the gospel. A whole host of so-called American Christianity takes shape around its member’s dominant political beliefs rather than shaping those political beliefs.
My own sense is, first, that the Divinity must variously laugh and cry over what we human beings claim in the name of that same Divine Presence.
Take for instance what I read just the other day: the proposal of a new motto for the State of Vermont. The new proposed motto appeared, as most state mottoes do, in Latin. Immediately a cry of protest emerged. Why was the motto in Mexican? And then someone added, might as well be in Arabic!
Well, we all know nothing good can come of anything in Arabic (read: from anything Islamic), or for that matter anything in “Mexican” (presumably Spanish—but I don’t want to rule out the distant possibility of someone who knows the differences between the Spanish of Spain and that of Mexico—if we can grant that the critic would know the difference between, say, Mexican and Honduran or Guatemalan, etc.)
In one of his essays, Chesterton asks us to think of intent. When someone announces that there’s been an outbreak of some disease in a neighboring community, we should inquire as to why the announcement is being made. It is one thing if it is someone organizing aid for our neighbors, another thing entirely if it is someone seeking to impugn the goodness of God by citing yet another incidence of human suffering.
The truth is, as former Nebraska State Poet Bill Kloefkorn was often wont to point out, we human beings are an ornery lot; or, as an old radio broadcast used to ask, “Who knows what evil lurks in the heart of men?” Or, as Conrad noted, your sense of the world will be considerably skewed if you ignore the “heart of darkness.”
No religion that allows people to belong to it should expect the going to be easy for the prevalence of its most cherished values…those values and those who truly try to uphold them (live them!) will always have to contend with the sometimes rascally nature of the people who claim to be “of that faith.”
By this reasoning, Christianity did not fail in the dark ages because it was Christianity—it failed because it had a great deal to contend with in the way of “the world, the flesh, and the devil.” One might, indeed, extol Medieval Christianity for the fruit it eventually bore.
Similarly, isn’t it clear that Islam is now the religious locale where the greatest battles against the evils of the human heart are being fought? And one of the reasons the going will be slow is that faith conquers fear at about the rate its adherents are willing to live sacrificially for that faith. Since, today, very few Western Christians live sacrificially at all, it doesn’t behoove the Western Christian faith community to point the finger at Islam for being a bit slow to die for a truer and more peaceful faith.
And perhaps a reminder is due. For nearly seven centuries, men (and women) who called upon Allah turned Spain in general and Cordoba in particular into the cultural capital of western civilization. It was noted for, among other things, religious tolerance. Ferdinand and Isabella presided over the end of that Islamic rule and promptly rewarded themselves by graciously accepting God’s reward to them for Spain’s liberation—the exploitation of the New World. In the meantime, it did not take long for men (and women) who called on the name of Jesus to wipe out religious tolerance and create a century of inquisition and holy war.
Jesus warned us: Not everyone who calls Lord, Lord, will inherit the Kingdom. And it doesn’t make, in this instance, a dimes bit of difference if they call Allah, Allah or Incarnation of Vishnu. We like to cloak rapacity and intolerance with nothing so much as religious cant. It is the staple of televised bigotry, where it is only slightly less lethal than the blatant cruelty of terrorist groups
Indeed, if I were teaching a “confirmation” class today for either adults or youth, I think a keystone of it would be the formation of a good religious crap detector! It would go a long way toward the restoration of a faith at once rational and devout, but above all loving and kind.
capeek 