Now, the headline may seem a little stranger for a diary on a progressive blog. And don't get me wrong: I think ThinkProgress is great. I read it every day, and I find their news and analysis spot-on, almost all the time.
This is one time where that is not the case. I've just seen an article from them, analyzing the recent Christian terrorist attack at the Mexican consulate in Texas by an anti-immigration extremist. The article is a good article. It shows the harm that Christian terrorism has caused, shows why it is a threat, and identifies the terrorism as Christian.
The article is called "The Christian Terrorist Movement No One Wants To Talk About". Here are some parts of it:
But there is a long history of terrorist attacks resembling McQuilliams’ rampage across Austin — where violence is carried out in the name of Christianity — in the United States and abroad. In America, the Ku Klux Klan is well-known for over a century of gruesome crimes against African Americans, Catholics, Jews, and others — all while ascribing to what they say is a Christian theology. But recent decades have also given rise to several “Christian Identity” groups, loose organizations united by a hateful understanding of faith whose members spout scripture while engaging in horrifying acts of violence. For example, various members of The Order, a militant group of largely professed Mormons whose motto was a verse from the book of Jeremiah, were convicted for murdering Jewish talk show host Alan Berg in 1984; the “Army of God”, which justifies their actions using the Bible, is responsible for bombings at several abortion clinics, attacks on gay and lesbian nightclubs, and the explosion at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia; and Scott Roeder cited the Christian faith as his motivation for killing George Tiller — a doctor who performed late-term abortions — in 2009, shooting the physician in the head at point-blank range while he was ushering at church.
[...]
Christian extremism has ravaged other parts of the world as well. Northern Ireland and Northern India both have rich histories of Christian-on-Christian violence, as does Western Africa, where the Lord’s Resistance Army claims a Christian message while forcibly recruiting child soldiers to terrorize local villages. Even Europe, a supposed bastion of secularism, has endured attacks from people who say they follow the teachings of Jesus. In 2011, Anders Behring Breivik launched a horrific assault on innocent people in and around Oslo, Norway, using guns and bombs to kill 77 — many of them teenagers — and wound hundreds more. Breivik said his actions were an attempt to combat Islam and preserve “Christian Europe,” and while he rejected a “personal relationship with Jesus Christ,” he nonetheless championed Christianity as a “cultural, social, identity and moral platform” and claimed the faith as the forming framework for his personal identity.
But ThinkProgress was unable to establish the same link between religion and ISIS when the religion in question was Islam. Their article on this question was called "
Why ISIS Is Not, In Fact, Islamic". Their explanation is as follows:
Indeed, even from the viewpoint of a casual observer, ISIS is an abomination to Islam. Explosions tend to capture the media’s attention more than peaceful coexistence, and a minuscule minority of extremist groups claiming to be Islamic have exploited this fact as a way to reinvent Islam as a “violent” religion. But just because you shout God’s name while committing murder doesn’t make your actions righteous. Islam, as millions of Muslims can attest, is a peaceful religion that calls on its followers to choose community over conflict, or, as it says in Surah al-Hujurat of the Qur’an (49:13): “O mankind! We created you from a single (pair) of a male and a female, and made you into nations and tribes, that ye may know each other (not that ye may despise [each other]).”
But ISIS clearly has little regard for this or other fundamental tenets of Islam. They have sparked the rage of Iraqi Muslims by carelessly blowing up copies of the Qur’an, and they have killed their fellow Muslims, be they Sunni or Shia. Even extremist Muslims who engage in warfare have strict rules of engagement and prohibitions against harming women and children, but ISIS has opted to ignore even this by slaughtering innocent youth and using rape and sexual slavery as a weapon.
They finish it off like this:
Ultimately, the decision of whether or not one is or isn’t religious is left up to God. But we are all tasked with religious life here on earth, where the opinion of a religious community should matter, and Muslims the world over have made their position clear: No matter how many people they kill to gain power, how many fellow Muslims they terrorize into submission, or how loudly they scream their self-righteous blasphemy to the heavens, ISIS is not — nor will ever be — Islamic.
Now, here are my thoughts on the link between religion and terrorism. This applies to all religions.
We often hear the importance of not generalizing about a religion, painting it all the same. And this is correct. It's impossible to homogenize a religion. All religions are very diverse, with many different interpretations and different practices. However, those who place a strong emphasis on not homogenizing a religion sometimes seem to be reluctant to accept the inevitable result of not doing so. And that is that religions include bad elements. It's hypocritical to say that you shouldn't generalize and then to dismiss a religion's bad elements as not part of the religion. That, in and of itself, is generalizing, even if one doesn't realize it, because it limits a religion to only the elements that one finds positive. Thus, one is saying that the all of the religion is positive. This is generalizing.
If one is seeking to defend a religion, they may claim that the extremism of the religion is not the true form of the religion. This may very well be correct; however, this is a subjective belief. There is no definitive answer to what is and isn't the true form of the religion. That's why there are different sects and interpretations in the first place. No doubt we would find it silly when one sect tells another sect that they are not actually of the religion. We find it silly that Protestants and Catholics disagreed over who are true Christians, and we find it silly that Sunnis and Shias disagree over who are true Muslims. We would believe that both are adherents of Christianity and Islam respectively. But if we are going to be accepting adherents of different interpretation of the same faith as adherents of the same faith, then unfortunately, that has to apply to extremists as well. The Christian Identity movement and ISIS are both Christian and Islamic respectively. We can believe that they are not true Christians and not true Muslims, and we can try to convince them of this. But their interpretations of their faith are just that: interpretations of their faith. As such, they are elements of their faith. As such, they are their faith. Good Christianity is Christianity. Bad Christianity is Christianity. Good Islam is Islam. Bad Islam is Islam. This is not to say that we shouldn't condemn the bad elements as not true forms of the religion, to try and make their adherents see why they are wrong. I applaud all the Muslims who have stood up to ISIS and said "you are not true Islam." It's only a problem when you make that claim to try to deny that religion is a factor at all, which ignores a big part of the problem.
I saw a clip of David Miliband appearing on Bill Maher's show when they were discussing the High Court of the Pakistan province of Lahore uphold the death sentence of a Christian woman who allegedly spoke ill of Mohammed. Miliband's explanation for why the incident shouldn't be used to criticize Islam was that "it's one thing to take on a religion. It's quite another to take on the people who are abusing the religion, and those are two very different things." This isn't right. It would lead us to the conclusion that religion is completely innocent every time an act of religious violence, and can just be dismissed simply by saying "it's the people, not the religion". This prevents actual, meaningful discussion on what the causes of the violence are. And in it, we also see the belief that elements of Islam that he disagrees with are not Islam, but just the abuse of it by people. This is the generalization by limitation that I was talking about before. Milibank refuses to accept that there are bad elements of Islam, instead choosing only to believe that the good elements are Islamic, thus generalizing the whole religion as good. The talk of "abusing the religion" is also interesting, because we cannot be sure that the extremists are the ones doing the abusing. We strongly believe it, but we cannot definitively prove it. They would think that the moderates are the ones abusing the religion. And so, if we are not going to homogenize the religion, then we have to conclude that both the extremists and the moderates belong to it.
In August of 2010, Bill O'Reilly went on The View, arguing against the construction of Park51, and said that "Muslims killed us on 9/11." In July of 2011, after the Norway attacks, he said that Anders Breivik is not a Christian. He was rightly mocked and derided by liberals. But with ISIS in the news, I'm seeing some liberals now do the same thing: point out the Christianity of Christian terrorism, while denying the Islam of Islamic terrorism. Whenever an act of religious violence is committed, let us all not bend over backwards trying to rationalize why the religion is not responsible, for all religions.