Moslems and freedom
Call it futile, call it watching a train wreck, call it what you will, but I read blogs like this one, lurk on message boards like this, and keep track of Christians that I share common ground with and vehemently oppose.
The blog entry I’m going to talk about today was written by KDNY–I don’t know if he aims to be anonymous online, so I won’t use his real name. He and I overlapped in seminary (as did Dru, another frequent Christian commenter here) and I stumbled on his blog about a year ago. Normally I don’t dive into comments, because I consider it like interrupting a conversation (I’m not his intended audience). But this post amazed me:
Islam is an idolatrous and wicked religion. They are not a "great" religion, but a terrible religion that needs to be opposed at every turn. From a Christian standpoint the answer is the Gospel. That they need to repent of their idolatry and turn to Christ, and this cannot be done via U.S. government. Yet, the civil magistrates should consider banning Islam and Moslems from public office.
The context for KDNY’s comments is Rep. Keith Ellison’s comparison of Bush to Hitler in a speech given to Atheists for Human Rights. Ellison’s analogy, though, is not to Hitler’s horrific genocide or invasion of sovereign states, but to the emergency powers that Hitler gave himself after the German Parliament Building was burned in 1993.
Now, I think a Hitler analogy is never a good idea. Regardless of how carefully you position the context, people will always think of Auschwitz and complain that the comparison is unfair.
But KDNY’s problem is that 1) Ellison is a Muslim (he uses the term "Moslem") and his religion has "a history of genocide, rape, pillaging, pedophilia, and Crusades, and that’s just its founder - Muhammad" 2) Muslims hate Jews, so it is hypocritical of Ellison to use Hitler as an example and 3) Muslims are dangerous to democracy, anyway, so they shouldn’t be allowed to hold office.
This kind of rhetoric, coming in flame wars on the Internet, irritates me. Coming from someone who I know, even if only in passing, saddens me.
KDNY raises the spectre of "idealogues", whose core tenets threaten democracy, gaining power. But he makes the mistake of believing that Christianity does not threaten "personal freedom, private property, and freedom from tyrrany (sic), including conscience in worship." The problem is that theological systems do not exist apart from practitioners. It’s all very well to say that Christianity (as a system) is not a threat, and that Islam (as a system) is a threat, but whose Christianity and whose Islam are we talking about? Kinists trace their racist beliefs to the Bible. Or maybe the "real" way to interpret Christianity is along the lines of Gary North and his fellow Dominionists? If we are going to set up boundaries based on theology, we quickly enter dangerous waters. We’ll draw the circle too small or too wide. Theological debates are for adherents of religions, not public officials.
I’ve been reading Gary Scott Smith’s Faith and the Presidency before bed recently, in small snippets. It’s a good counterbalance to both the conservative (Our Founders loved Jesus and want you to love him, too!) and the liberal (The Founders were card-carrying members of the ACLU and were all agnostics or Deists) stories. Given opportunities to put explicitly Christological statements into the Constitution, they demurred. Religious conscience was one of the rights of the American people, which meant that the focus of the government’s power was upon actions, not opinions (see Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists).
This is where KDNY is missing the real danger to the Constitution. The current president has threatened American civil liberties in astonishing ways, offering falsified and tendentious justification for his actions. At the same time, he espouses a form of Christianity. Am I to link his theology to his actions and begin to fear my evangelical neighbors? Ironically, the entire point of Ellison’s (unfortunate) metaphor is that the Constitution is being threatened. And we ought to exclude Muslims from public office? While personal religious beliefs cannot help but shape approaches to public policy, we need to keep our discussion on pragmatic grounds, and reasons which are accessible to anyone, regardless of creed.
If Ellison argues that Bush is acting wrongly based on a hadith, I’ll be one of the first to step up and criticize the representative. But if he argues based on the Constitution and upon the harm to our civil liberties, I (and KDNY) can talk reasonably about that claim, even if the claim is simultaneously moored (no pun intended) in Muslim theology.
KDNY is clear that he doesn’t consider the US a Christian Nation, but he wants to exclude Muslims from participating in government. At this point, I’ll begrudgingly take up the Nazi metaphor. Suppose a Nazi wanted to run for US representative. Should s/he be allowed to, or excluded based upon his beliefs? I’d say that s/he can go ahead and run, but good luck. And if, by some chance, the Nazi were to be elected, we have checks and balances in place for a reason. Unfortunately, they don’t always work–witness the current state of civil liberties–but once we open the door to exclude candidates for popular office due to religious or ideological beliefs, we are setting ourselves up for serious trouble.
Image from Truthforce.info.