From the Logic of Hate, Deliver Us O Lord

I grew up in a neighbourhood with a lot of Muslim immigrants, and as I think about the events in Paris tonight I can’t help but feel heavy hearted both for the French people and for the many peaceful Muslims who are going to face the brunt of renewed Islamophobia in the days and weeks to come.

I know that there are those out there who will argue that violence is inherent in Islam. They’ll give the relevant quotes from the Koran, and point out that the claim that Jihad refers to a spiritual warfare is a revisionist claim. And in a sense that’s true. But it’s equally true that Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism and most of the major religions in the world have, at some time or another, justified the practice of holy war. It’s equally true that you can still find Catholic hawks calling for the bombing of Muslims in the name of God.

Violence is a universal human temptation, but it’s one that strikes deeply at our consciences. We do not kill easily. Even in war, it’s estimated that only about 15-20% of soldiers will actually fire their guns at other human beings. Most either won’t fire at all, or deliberately shoot too high. Apparently this isn’t a new thing – it was true in older wars as well. On a very deep level humans feel that it is wrong to take another person’s life, even if they have been trained to do so and believe the cause is just.

This is where religion and violence intersect. To do something that is profoundly evil it is necessary to convince yourself that it is a great good. And since there is no greater good than God, God all too often gets roped in to our most hideous human acts. We want, need, to believe that He is on our side in the slaughter. So we invent stories to convince ourselves He is.

But at the heart of the killing, God is not there. Religion is not there. These are psychological excuses that are used to justify the unjustifiable. Get rid of God and the hatred will still find a way. It will just find pettier, lesser gods to kill for. The Emperor. The Party. The Reich. Democracy.

Muslims do not kill Westerners because Allah commands it. They kill Westerners because Westerners kill Muslims. What we experience as the War on Terror, Muslims in the Middle East experience as the bombing of their homes. What we experience as terrorism, they experience as just retribution against the enemies who have destroyed their homeland.

In the same way that Westerners blame Muslims living among them for the violence and the terror, Muslims blame Christians living among them for the aggression of the West. The only reason that we go no further than racial profiling, vandalism of mosques, inflammatory rhetoric and the occasional torture of suspected terrorists whereas they behead, rape, and exterminate is that we are less affected. We live with the gruesome reality of terror once every couple of years, Most of us don’t get any closer than seeing it on TV. They live with the reality of war day in, day out, for years.

And I know that in the coming days, the coming weeks, we are going to see the logic of hatred at work again. It’s already started. I’ve seen it on Twitter, in my FaceBook feed. Amid the hopes and prayers and calls for peace, the voices have begun to cry for blood. Good Christians saying that we’ve been peaceful long enough, that it’s time to start dishing out God’s vengeance on the infidel. Not in exactly those words, of course. If we put it that way, we’d realize that we sound just like them.

But it’s what we say. We will kill. We will bomb. We will have vengeance. God is on our side.

And so it goes on.

It’s not enough to pray for peace. We must also work for forgiveness, for reconciliation. We must practice these virtues ourselves, in the circumstances of our own lives. We must become people who seek understanding, who love our enemies, pray for those who persecute us, turn the other cheek. Instead of complaining that Islam is a religion of jihad, we need to show that Christianity is a religion of peace. Not easy peace. The peace of cowards. Hard peace. The peace of a man who hangs on a Cross.

So while we are praying for the people of Paris, as we should be, let’s also pray for the people of Syria, the people of Iraq, the people of Afghanistan. Let’s pray for the young men who are this very night turning their eyes towards Allah, asking him for the courage to give their lives in the righteous fight against the Satanic West.

Let’s pray that He gives them, instead, the grace to forgive.

A note for the combox: attempts to justify Islamophobia will just be deleted. I’m very pregnant, and I don’t have the energy to argue with hate. Or the desire to host it on my site.

Image courtesy of pixabay.