Last week I posted an article which highlighted a Newsweek story by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Her story detailed the Christian suffering around the world often at the hands of people and governments under the influence of Islam. Ali pointed out that we often hear and read in the American media about travesties committed against Islamic people by people in the west. She wanted to bring awareness to the increase and the severity of Christians being persecuted across the globe.
Leave it to a “Baptist Ethicist” to attack Ali’s article feeding fear and hatred in tabloid style. Read my article again and see if it was a gorging on fear and hatred. Not at all.
Robert Parham is the executive director of the Baptist Center for Ethics. Here are some of the problems I have with his article.
She referenced the situation in Nigeria, where a radical Islamic group has attacked churches and killed church members. But she failed to mention that Nigerian Christians have killed Muslims.
I would respond that this was not the purpose of her article. She was writing under the premise that Islamic persecution has been reported. She was pointing out that it is happening to Christians, too.
But the narrative that says Christians are always victims and Muslims are always the perpetrators is a false one.
Please tell me where this is the narrative that was told by Ali. This is an example of building a straw man to tear down. But because it is not always the case, does not mean that it is never the case. Or that it not a growing problem.
For whatever reason, some U.S. Christians need to think and feel that they are persecuted. Maybe it makes them believe they are more akin to figures of faith in the Bible.
Aside from untruthfulness, the theological problem with the narratives that claim Christians are being targeted by Muslims and secularists is that they misread human sinfulness.
They assume that their “tribe” is righteous and the other is evil. They fail to confess their own sinfulness, their own violence, their own self-righteousness.
I don’t even know where to start with these lines. Most people can see the folly of Parham’s words. So I will leave it at that. I just wish the liberal guilt thing didn’t keep unpleasant things from being discussed.
As a Baptist, we have a heritage of standing for religious freedom and for defending the oppressed. I wish this Baptist ethicist could have highlighted that stance instead of diminishing a call to awareness of our brothers and sisters being persecuted.
