Last week in the news there was a story from Oklahoma of a man who was angry about being fired. He walked into the personnel office of his business and decapitated one woman and was in the process of killing another woman when one of the managers came in and shot him. A horrible story...but what captured the attention of everybody (beyond the beheading...CSI episode alert!) was the fact that he was Muslim, and that he had been trying to talk to people about his Muslim faith in recent months. Naturally, the question became not whether this was a horrible crime, but whether or not this was TERRORISM. Whether this was JIHAD. Whether this was part of the evil holy war that Muslims were waging against us good Christian folks.
Everyday in the news here in our good Christian nation there are stories of bad people doing bad things to bad people. A man goes in and kills his girlfriend and then turns the gun on himself. Two school teachers in Louisiana are arrested for having group sex with a 16-year-old student. A politician is found to have traded political favors for his wife getting a cushy job. Bad things happen all the time...but how many do we call these people Christian terrorists? Many bad things are done by good church-going folks, but it's never terrorism when we do it, we think...just bad things done by bad people. Muslims, we say, are told by their religion to do a terrible thing. Christians, we say, could never be told by their religion to do a terrible thing. We overlook the fact that Christians literally 'took the cross' in 1095 when encouraged to go and invade Jerusalem (and many places along the way, Muslim and non-Muslim alike). We forget that various Christian groups declared war on each other in the centuries after this.
Why is it that we continually call every evil thing Muslims do terrorism (and such a product of the culture of an evil religion), but every evil thing a Christian does to be simply an individual choice? We set a double standard for these things, and quite honestly it's not fair. As Christian people we should know better than to engage in hatred and suspicion, of thinking that 'They' are bad unless other wise proven to be good and that 'We' are good unless otherwise bad. Grace should stop this stupid thinking that find ourselves engaging in.
But here's an exercise to help cleanse you of these things: Next time you watch a news report of somebody done somebody wrong, ask yourself, are they Christian terrorists? If nothing is said of their religion, assume that they are. If 85% of Americans still identify themselves as Christians, surely their Christianity played a part in their evil, right? Do this enough times and maybe you'll hate Christians too, just like you hate Muslims. And the culture of fear will have won yet again.
