David Michael Miller
Is it “radical Islamic” or “radical jihadist” terrorism that is represented by groups like ISIS and al Qaeda?
We can all agree that it is radical and that it is terrorism, but qualifying it as Islamic or jihadist matters a great deal. Republican candidates for president and conservative commentators heavily criticize President Obama and Democratic presidential candidates for refusing to characterize the terrorists in religious terms. They want to point the finger of blame not just at a violent group waging a misguided holy war, but at an entire religion. They should be careful about that.
Even Jeb Bush, among the more reasonable candidates in a field of cranks, called for the U.S. to admit only Christian refugees from Syria. It was not clear exactly how that would be determined. Do you need to have a Christian identity card? If you were raised Christian but no longer practice do you still make the cut? What’s to prevent a terrorist from just saying he’s a Christian to get into the country?
Bush’s suggestion didn’t make any sense, probably not even to him, but it was a way for him to score some political points with the intolerant, frightened base that Donald Trump has been exploiting so effectively. Trump, of course, takes an even more extreme view, calling for registries of Muslims and the monitoring of “certain mosques,” probably just the bad ones I suppose.
But the desire to name this terrorism as Islamic is widespread among conservatives, not just those running for president. The goal, apparently, is to gain political capital by drawing a distinction between good Christians and bad Muslims.
It would be just denying the facts to say that this terrorism doesn’t have a religious overlay. When a young person puts on a suicide vest and screams, “God is great!” before blowing herself and others to smithereens, that doesn’t happen without a fervent belief that she will be rewarded in some afterlife. It is warped religiosity, but there is an undeniable religious motivation nonetheless.
But how far do conservative Christians really want to take this? It wasn’t very long ago that Ku Klux Klan members burned crosses on the property of those they targeted for harassment, beatings and murder. They certainly believed that they were defending their Christian faith along with their white supremacist social order.
And just last week the killer of three people at a Colorado Planned Parenthood clinic seemed to have been at least partially motivated by his Christianity. So, were these radical Christian terrorists? Should we have registered Christians and monitored certain churches?
Sometimes strong faith motivates people to perform extraordinary acts of kindness and self-sacrifice and sometimes it causes people to commit acts of unspeakable cruelty. In this case the Democrats are trying, appropriately I think, to keep the focus on the secular causes of those horrendous acts. If conservative Republicans succeed in this debate of semantics, and terrorist events such as those in Paris are defined as Islamic in the public mind, then that is a very dangerous thing for all religious communities. Down the line, when the terrorist is a Christian, what’s to prevent a backlash against all Christians?
What prevents that right now is simply numbers. Christianity is still the dominant religion in America. But what will happen as we continue to become more secular and more Muslim? My view is that what has conservative Christians so terrified and so eager to blame Islam is their assumption that once Christians are in the minority they will be treated with the same intolerance that they now direct at others.
For all those reasons it would be better for all of us, religious and secular, to keep the focus on the horrendous acts of these terrorists and not on their skewed view of their religion, even if that religion plays some misguided role in their mayhem.
