Fear destroys love and love is the only motive for any Christian action.
Don’t be confused. Love is not weak, but demands justice for the beloved. Love has mercy, but mercy is not incompatible with a just war. We can do justice without rejoicing in the necessary death of any human being.
The attacks on Paris are frightening, but they should not cause Christians to forget their values. We love the poor, the alien, and the refugee. Our God is also a God of war who demands we protect those who cannot protect themselves.
We are commanded by Sacred Scripture to love our enemies and pray for those who hate us. We are also commanded to protect the innocent and stupidly allowing terrorists into our community would fail at the first in the name of a false charity.
We can be sure of two truths about the refugees from the Middle East: most are the innocent victims of horrific regimes that the West had a hand in creating and some few are or will become terrorists. Should fear of the few cause us to cease helping the many?
It cannot, so help us God.
Should our mandate to help the many cause us to pretend the few do not exist?
It had better not, so help us God.
The hapless policies of President Obama in the Middle East have failed, but we need not allow him to appropriate and disfigure the language of compassion through his impotence. We can help the refugees and do justice to the Islamic State.
We can feed the homeless without inviting them into our bedrooms.
How should we help? This question is more complicated and I am sure of only this: we do not know yet. The United States government can choose how to respond to the crisis, but if we wish our government to reflect our values, it will look with compassion on the suffering of the people of the Middle East. We will feed, cloth, and house the refugees.
Christians, unlike governments, have no choice: we must aid refugees when we find them. How is this best done? It might include bringing some to our nation, but it must include food, shelter, and clothing someplace. What it cannot include is either demonizing those who are mostly fleeing the very butchers who attacked Paris or the naïve and idiotic notion that terrorist states will not use the refugees to smuggle more thugs into good places.
At the moment, we should pause, mourn our dead, and prepare a thoughtful response.
Christians are not helped by overwhelming ignorance of the cultures and people of the Middle East. When Christian “scholars,” few of whom have training in the relevant disciplines, opine that the Prophet Mohamed would be a member of the Islamic State, I groan in frustration at the offensive ignorance. Anyone who makes such a statement is less interested in evangelism than inflammatory statements that drive sales.
Rule of thumb: do not trust any book or learned article on the topic by writers that cannot read Arabic. I rely on those in my Church who do know Arabic, who have lived in the Middle East for years, and who have experience on the ground. I would never write a book or become too definitive on “Islam” or even one nation like brave little Lebanon because the topic is so complicated.
President Bush and President Obama are both right about one thing: Islam per se is not the enemy. They have been too weak in saying that an Islamism is the enemy and have done too little to combat the ideas. Partly this is because we do not grasp that secularism will never defeat the religious idea, because the spiritual world exists.
Secularism is godless and so cannot explain the world as it is to most people. We need a better religious idea to combat Islamism. We will not get that idea through basic ignorance of what our opponents teach. Just as some “scholars” in the Evangelical community have parodied Mormonism, so becoming ineffective, so we have done even worse to Islam.
Let’s start with a basic fact. Muslims all over the world constantly and consistently repudiate the Islamic State. Islam is a huge and complicated religion, containing good people and bad, many of whom distrust Western media. It is also true that huge numbers of Islamic persons have frightening views about terrorism, jihad, and Israel.
We cannot hide from the fact that many Muslims have gone down an evil road. We cannot evangelize as Christians if we do not even understand that this road is not a fundamentalist Islam, but a modernist perversion of Islam.
Just as Christians are right to complain when we are stereotyped by the extremist and the violent in our midst, the Islamic State has as much in common with mainstream Islam as the Lord’s Resistance Army in Africa, a gang of murderous thugs with a weird form of Christianity, has in common with real Christianity.
In the days ahead, let me propose three things for Christians.
First, actually read the Koran. Read a decent scholarly book on Islam like the Oxford History of Islam. Avoid inflammatory works. If you think Islam cannot make peace with philosophy read about philosophy and Islam.
Second, love the refugees. Whatever your opinion on taking them into the United States (and I support a moratorium for a time), support a way of giving them the material support they need.
Third, pray for the conversion of all Muslims to Christianity. The liturgy was sung in Arabic long before the Koran was written. We can love and respect our Muslim neighbors without thinking their religion is true.
We will not convert by force, but by the power of ideas, but since Christianity is true, Jesus is Lord, and God is a Trinity of persons, we pray that all the Middle East put the cross back on the dome of Hagia Sophia and on the mosques across the Muslim world.
If we are to win this battle of ideas, and we must for the sake of souls making ready for eternity, we must be respectful, knowledgeable, and firm. We need not be weak just as my Islamic friends are not weak. We disagree and in our disagreements remain friendly, but the disagreement is real.
Jesus is Lord.
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