Category Archives: Past as Prologue to Future

Boris Yeltsin And The Soviet Coup

Boris Yeltsin, in suit and tie, surrounded by worried colleagues, stands atop a tank in Moscow in mid-August, 1991, twenty-two years ago this month, and reads a statement.

The recent end of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West at the time remained tenuous. Mikhail Gorbachev had become Soviet leader in 1985 and the great draw down of nuclear weapons between the United States and the Soviets began in the years following. Eastern European countries began their movement away from the Soviet orbit in 1989 and 1990. East and West Germany, split since the end of World War II, had united less than a year before.

Now, Russian hard liners wanted to roll back history and reestablish the Soviet Union. They took advantage of Gorbachev’s absence from the capital at that time to attempt a takeover.

Yeltsin led opponents of the coup, jumping on a tank outside the chief Russian government building. He read from a statement calling on citizens to resist this step backward.

They did, and the coup failed. Gorbachev returned to Moscow. The Soviet Union was dissolved a few months later.

In hindsight, we mourn the turn Russia has taken since then: the chaos that overtook that first stirring of democracy; the return to authoritarianism under Vladimir Putin.

Yet, many dissent from Putin’s rule. They can take comfort in the remembrance of Yeltsin, a man with very human failings, daring to overcome his fear and call on his fellow citizens to resist the return to a dead past.

Fear of Secularism

” . . . this preemptive assault on secularism with all it entails, strikes me as frightened and antagonistic.”

—Marilynne Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read Books

“His disciples remembered that it was written, ‘Zeal for your house will consume me.’”

—John 2:17 (NRSV)

No nation has ever belonged completely to God. The Jewish nation repeatedly fell into idolatry. So-called Christian nations, though influenced by Christian teaching, have erred greatly at times from carrying out the principles Jesus taught.

Today in the United States, Christians seem perplexed at secularism’s strength, as though it were something new. Secularism has existed beside Christianity since the first Christian missionaries carried the gospel to the Roman world and beyond.

In the fourth century, the emperor Constantine increasingly favored Christianity as the Roman Empire’s established religion. Before that time, Christianity grew because of the way Christians lived in a pleasure-loving, inhumane world. People were increasingly drawn to the “narrow way” which called its adherents to lives of forgiveness and compassion.

When Christianity became the “established” religion, it tended to succumb to the ways of the world and to seek power. Religious leaders like St. Francis, akin to Old Testament prophets, repeatedly called for a different kind of life, serving as role models for a return to the way of Jesus.

Christians have always lived amid secularism. Secularism wanes when Christians practice what Jesus taught and draw people to him. They are less effective when they seek power.

Subversives

From the time native Americans dealt with British immigrants in the 1500’s at Jamestown and later at Plymouth, diverse peoples have migrated to the country to be known as the United States. Many of the early immigrants were Christians of various Protestant persuasions. Jews entered, too, as well as Catholics and a few atheists and agnostics. Some of the founding fathers were desists, a belief based on reason rather than revelation.

After the United States was formed, Europeans looked askance at the U.S. Constitution for not creating an established church. Surely the nation would fail, lacking any moral compass.

Instead, religion flourished in America. Roman Catholics and Orthodox Christians immigrated in larger numbers, escaping turmoil in the old countries. Catholicism bothered some Protestants, with its ties to Pope and priests, but eventually Catholics were incorporated into the mainstream.

By the time of the Second World War, the majority of Americans wouldn’t have disagreed with their designation as a “Christian” nation, or at least a Judo-Christian one.

The aftermath of that war and the ones to follow again upset established suppositions. Buddhists, Hindus, and Muslims joined the American mix.

Now, it seems, atheism is the latest bubble in the cauldron. As noted, atheists have been present since earlier times, but they have increased in number. According to some reports, the “angry” phase has passed, and the presence of atheism is accepted by many as a part of the mainstream.

Whenever a group loses dominant status, its members may fight to retain their position by the use of laws and/or force. Such a reaction is seldom successful in this country. The freedom from religion as well as to practice any religion runs deeply. However, if Christians take the early church for their example, they will not only survive but thrive. The early church was a subversive minority in a pleasure seeking world directed by elitist power brokers. They showed their faith, not by seeking domination, but by living what they believed.

Christians have been here before. The Roman Empire knew them well.

Religious Freedom, Ours and Theirs

The U.S. State Department recently released the annual Religious Freedom reports. The reports measure the freedom to worship or not, according to one’s conscience, in nations around the globe.

Sudden conflict and shifts in population movements bring us into greater interaction with those whose beliefs differ from our own. We may feel threatened, even angered, by the realization that our beliefs are not as widespread as we thought.

How do we remain firm in our own beliefs while allowing others to believe differently? Allowing religious freedom does not mean that we must live an amalgamated religion, with the unique particulars of our personal faith stripped out. Such a system is like an “established” religion, eliciting lukewarm response.

The early Christians in the Roman Empire lived in a pluralistic world much like our own, yet remained firm in their faith, even in persecution. They followed a Christ who refused to use political means to bring in his kingdom, even if it meant crucifixion. Without political power, they lived their faith and attracted others. Their very powerlessness to force their religion on others was a blessing. Indeed, when they later gained power, the faith of many lost meaning, becoming merely a superficial part of their culture.

The best way to destroy the heart of a religion is to force it on others. When we act as God, we usurp his power. If he is God, he is more than capable of working through the lives we live and our nonviolent witness. We do not need to take up the sword for him or use laws and prisons as cudgels. A person sure in his or her beliefs lives by faith, not by worldly power.

Algeria Haunting

My assignment in 1993 to the U.S. embassy in Algiers, Algeria, lasted only about three months. During that brief period, I served as notetaker on an official trip to the western part of the former French colony in North Africa.

We traveled through rounded brown hills that reminded me of the wheat growing region of Washington State’s Palouse. However, an occasional abandoned farmhouse scarred the landscape, left from the bitter civil war between Algeria and France from 1954 to 1962.

Thousands on both sides lost their lives. Torture was common. After the French defeat, the French settlers in Algeria, some of whose families had been there for more than a century, left and wandered France like the exiled Acadians of Longfellow’s poem, “Evangeline” They were called Pieds-Noirs, “black-feet,” a sometimes derisive term that denoted their farming background.

Our official trip in 1993 was shortened when we learned of a terrorist incident in Algiers. Though we did not know it then, the incident foreshadowed a second reign of terror, this time by insurgents against the native Algerian government. An election which threatened to put an Islamist party into power had been cancelled by the government.

A few weeks after our official trip, our embassy evacuated many of the staff, as the insurgency increased, making travel difficult. I left Algeria and never returned.

Some Christian monks who had remained in Algeria were murdered by extremists in 1996. The French movie “Of Gods and Men” is a fictionalized account of the tragedy. The Algerian farmers who were there for so long were mostly Catholic, of course, though the monks served their mainly Muslim neighbors.

I remembered our passage through a village on our long-ago trip. I noticed a building which could only have been a church at one time but wasn’t anymore. I wondered when the last Christian service was held there. Who attended? Where did they go?

Remembering Attacks on the U.S. Embassy Thirty Years Ago in Lebanon

Beirut 1983 On April 18, 1983, fifty-two employees died when a terrorist drove an explosive-laden truck into the U.S. embassy in Beirut, Lebanon. These included Americans and Lebanese. Other innocent civilians were killed as they visited the embassy or walked by on a beautiful spring day. More than one-hundred employees were injured.

Seventeen months later, a van drove up at high speed to a new embassy annex in Beirut and detonated explosives. Twelve people were killed and 63 injured.

Beirut Barracks Between those attacks, terrorists blew up a U.S. Marine Corps barracks near the Beirut airport, killing 221 Marines and other servicemen.

Three of the dead in the first bombing had ties to the U.S. embassy in Tunis, Tunisia, where I was assigned for three years. Two were a couple who had studied at the Arabic language school in Tunis before their assignment to Beirut. One was a Tunisian employee of the embassy in Tunis on a temporary assignment to Beirut.

Beirut memorial in Tunis Their names were carved on a small memorial at the Tunis embassy.When terrorists attacked that embassy last year, the memorial was vandalized. This year it was rededicated on the anniversary of the Beirut attack in which they died thirty years before. When I worked in Tunis, I passed it every day, a reminder of the sacrifice of ordinary people.

Both embassies endure, still staffed by ordinary Americans, Lebanese, and Tunisians hoping for peace in the Middle East.

Religious Communities: Players on the World Stage

“The success of American diplomacy in the next decade will be measured in no small part by its ability to connect with the hundreds of millions of people throughout the world whose identity is defined by religion.”

—From “Engaging Religious Communities Abroad: A New Imperative for U.S. Foreign Policy,” The Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

The United States was a multi-cultural society from its beginning. The first Jewish congregation is dated to the colonial period, in Rhode Island, in the mid 1600’s.

Maryland was founded as a colony for Catholics, while many of the New England settlements were begun by Reformed Protestants. Baptists headed to the freedom of Rhode Island. Some of the country’s founding fathers were deists and even agnostics. Later, atheists and Muslims, Hindus and Orthodox Christians and countless others joined the religious mix.

Our ancestors left behind the world of established religions, countries whose identities were bound up in a particular religion, places where one might be persecuted for different beliefs. They left behind the wars of religion which so devastated Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Eventually, Middle Eastern immigrants left countries where Crusaders had fought Turks and other Islamist believers, as well as Jews.

We began a nation where the First Amendment to our constitution allowed for a religious freedom unknown in the old countries.

The countries they left are still there, and many of them consider religion a part of their national identity. Rightfully, we urge them to protect minorities. However, we should refrain from a feeling of superiority. Critics suggest our tolerance risks becoming antagonism toward any religion. Tolerance differs from denigration. If we denigrate religion, we will have a hard time working in a world where the majority find comfort and guidance from it.

Peace With Justice in the Holy Land

Dr. Lloyd Johnson has a passionate interest in peace with justice in the Holy Land. He is the guest writer today to introduce his novel, “Living Stones,” which touches on this theme and will be available this summer. He writes:

“Ann Gaylia O’Barr, published author of five books and with experience in the Middle East, invited me to write as a guest. I’m honored since we share a common interest in the Holy Land today.

“Living Stones” being published by Koehler, a fiction imprint of Morgan James Publishers of New York, will be available in June as an e-book, and paperback in September 2013. Briefly it’s the story of a beautiful graduate student Ashley Wells who is the victim of a jihadist bombing and is abducted in Jerusalem. She falls in love with a Christian Palestinian and is torn by her Zionist beliefs and her new desire to help the Palestinian cause

She was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Nearly killed in Seattle during a jihadist bombing, Ashley recognizes the synagogue bomber and is later stalked by a hired Muslim hit man in Israel. There she visits the home of Najid, the Christian Palestinian scholar she had left behind at the University of Washington. She falls in love with him, putting her at odds with her Zionist pro-Israeli convictions.

On the run, Ashley sees the beautiful rock churches and shrines. But the living stones, the people of the Holy Land intrigue her. She meets Jews and Palestinians, Rabbis for and against Israeli settlement expansion. Gentle Palestinians like Najid’s family, and those in the West Bank suffering under military occupation. Both Muslims and Christians living peacefully together.

Najid and Ashley find the bomber in Seattle despite the FBI dragnet put out to arrest him. Living Stones is the story of an American woman coming to terms with the truth of the Middle East, and the lies she had been fed. Will she survive the forces that threaten to tear her apart?

Visiting Israel/Palestine twice in past years, and living in Bethlehem this past summer, our hearts broke with the stories of ordinary people suffering the lack of freedom under Israeli military occupation. For 46 years. Imprisonment of kids for long periods, walls separating Palestinians from each other, even from their own farms. Home demolitions, land evictions. Israeli settlers continuing to displace local residents of family land dating back decades. A historic and on-going national effort to cleanse Palestine of Arab citizens. It’s the idea that one ethnic group has the exclusive right to the Holy Land. The “others” must go.

Many Jewish groups of conscience actively oppose the Israeli government’s Zionist ambitions. E.g., http://jewishvoiceforpeace.org/ This cruelty does not represent Judaism’s welcoming the strangers as Abraham did, nor the Good Samaritan teachings of Jesus about loving even our enemies, and doing to others as we would have them do to us.

That wall of separation larger and longer than the Berlin wall promotes the same apartheid we finally shed in the American South, and condemned in South Africa. But now our American tax dollars enable it by funding this injustice. Is this what we in the U.S. really want to do?

Our Christian Palestinian brothers and sisters realize most of us Americans know little of their suffering under military occupation as second-class citizens. Although many excellent books currently available tell their stories, they are non-fiction accounts, often overlooked by all but the most interested readers. (However, “Lemon Tree” by Sandy Tolan has become popular in America, a true story. And Jimmy Carter’s “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.”)

Fiction appeals to many. Who doesn’t like a good story with lots of adventure and a bit of romance? So I am offering “Living Stones” as a story that will entertain, but also inform and leave readers questioning what they have always believed. It may become another voice for peace with justice in the Holy Land. At least I hope so.”

www.lloydjohnson.org

http://www.koehlerbooks.com/books/living-stones/

Easter Meditation: Christians Grounded in Two-Thousand Years of History

The course of Christianity has been marked by pulsations of advance, retreat, and advance.

–Kenneth Scott Latourette, Volume I, Christianity in a Revolutionary Age

Christianity is a faith that is solidly grounded in history.

–Robert L. Thomas and Stanley N. Gundry, preface to The NIV Harmony of the Gospels

That history includes periods we’d like to forget but can’t because of their lingering influence. Reasons for the Crusades of the Middle Ages were as much economic as religious, a desire for new lands and wealth. We inherit fallout from the Crusades to this day in many of the conflicts in the Middle East.

Colonizations in the Americas evidenced the same split personality. Jamestown vied with Plymouth. Our country inherits this conflict, careening back and forth, stressing economics at one time and community in another.

Some Christians lived more closely to what Jesus taught than others. While Crusaders marched, religious orders treated the ill and destitute in Europe. As the industrial age dawned in the 1700’s, with its disregard for the vulnerable, Christians began schools for children of the poor. They fought against slavery and inhumane working conditions and crowded prisons.

Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it, so the saying goes. Sudden change burst on the world stage—terrorist attacks or revolutions in Arab nations. Others creep in more slowly—social changes due to increased numbers of women in the work force or new methods of birth control. In either case, knowledge of history gives us a better ability to develop reasoned and compassionate responses to such changes.

Hippies, Flower Children, and Other Heralds of Our Time

“Stories about World War II, Pearl Harbor, and the like, are always popular,” an editor told me. By contrast, I find more intriguing the decades following this war, the decades of the hippies and the flower children. If the child is father of the man, as the poet William Wordsworth wrote, these years spawned the present that we now inhabit.

The turbulent sixties and the years following led to 1989, the watershed year of the Tiananmen Square massacre in China and the collapse of the Soviet Union. The texts and twitters of the Arab Spring in 2011 and beyond mirrored the earlier events.

All wars change the societies that experience them. World War II brought the United States, kicking and screaming, onto the world stage. We have often played our role reluctantly, much more interested in domestic issues. The Vietnam War tore the country apart. The meshing of the antiwar movement and the New Age reverberates with us to this day, precursor of current polarization.

Quiet Deception, a novel of mine billed as a mystery, follows the protagonist, a college professor, from the days, seemingly so innocent, of his childhood shortly after World War II. His participation in the horrifying Vietnamese conflict transforms him. He stumbles into the society that follows, with its loosening of age old constraints.

How he and the other characters resolve the jarring collision of tectonic plates from two eras is the subtext of the mystery’s solution.

Post-Christian or Post-Christendom?

“Do you think we’re in a post-Christian age, like a lot of people say?” asked Taylor.

Patrick leaned forward. “To talk about post-Christian seems a bit chauvinistic to me—Western chauvinistic, I mean. I think I’d use the term post-Christendom. Christianity seems to be retreating in large parts of what we call the West, but it’s growing rapidly in much of the rest of the world.”

—From my novel Searching for Home

Do we live in a post-Christian era or a post-Christendom one? The difference in naming is critical. One is oriented toward previous Western dominance, the other is more inclusive.

The term Christendom denotes a time when European countries espoused a common faith. Christianity may or may not be thinning in Europe and North America. It is certainly not diminishing in Africa, Asia, and South America.

New Secretary of State; Thoughts on Christian Conscience and Diplomacy

John Kerry is now slated to head the Department of State, home for U.S. diplomacy.

An age ago when the Cold War with the Soviet Union was at its height, a famous American diplomat made the following observations:

” . . . while Christian values often are involved in the issues of American conflict with the Soviet power, we cannot conclude that everything we want automatically reflects the purpose of God and everything the Russians want reflects the purposes of the devil. . . . We must concede the possibility that there might be some areas of conflict involved in this cold war which a Divine Power could contemplate only with a sense of pity and disgust for both parties, and others in which He might even consider us to be wrong.”

The diplomat, George F. Kennan, advocated that his beloved country take the high ground, that it develop its moral principles first and that military power only be used when absolutely necessary.

Further, he said:

“A government can pursue its purpose in a patient and conciliatory and understanding way, respecting the interests of others and infusing its behavior with a high standard of decency and honesty and humanity, or it can show itself petty, exacting, devious, and self-righteous. If it behaves badly, even the most worthy of its purposes will be apt to be polluted, whereas sheer good manners will bring some measure of redemption to even the most disastrous undertaking.”

These quotations are taken from “Foreign Policy and Christian Conscience” which The Atlantic Monthly published in May, 1959.

The U.S. never fought the Soviet Union directly in a war that may well have involved nuclear weapons. Kennan’s influence in no small part led the country to wait patiently. Eventually the Soviet Union caved from its own weaknesses, as Kennan had predicted.

Religion’s Major Role in the New World Order

In the late 1970’s, Iranian students, inspired by Islamic leaders, seized the United States embassy in Tehran.

Thumbing their noses at international law, they held U.S. diplomats hostage for 444 days. Religion entered as a major actor on the world stage. Over three decades later, the murder of American diplomats in Benghazi, Libya, by religious terrorists indicates that the religious script is still in play.

What happened? Though at the time of the Iranian revolution, the Soviet Union would not tumble for a few more years, the Cold War was thawing. The United States and the Soviet Union signed agreements limiting nuclear weapons. Egypt and Israel endorsed the Camp David accords. Optimists saw glimpses of an upward march to worldwide peace, individual freedom, and economic advancement.

Not all were buying in. The money from Iran’s oil industry allowed Western-style consumerism that seemed empty to many Iranians.

The student revolt was nationalistic, an attempt to root out foreign influence and government brutality, but it included yearnings for a less secular culture. Now recent revolts in Tunisia and Egypt have dethroned secular governments and elected Islamists.

How can the United States, which prizes freedom of religion for all its citizens, deal with states whose laws favor one specific religion?

In recognition of the need for more understanding, the U.S. State Department created the position of an Ambassador for International Religious Freedom in 1998. Its mission is to promote religious freedom as a core objective of U.S. foreign policy. The report for religious freedom in 2011 is now public.

Palestinian Christians in the Middle East

As the first Gulf War (early 1990’s) against Saddam Hussein threatened, I worked at the U.S. Consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. One of our tasks was aiding Americans who lived and worked in Saudi Arabia but who now wanted to leave before the war began.

Our consular unit included three U.S. Foreign Service officers and six locally hired employees. Two were Palestinians. Both had served at the Consulate many years, using their long term contact with Saudi Arabian officialdom to help us in our tasks. Without them, our work would have been more difficult: checking on Americans in prison, for example, or setting up visits with foreign parents of American children involved in custody cases.

One of the American women we helped to evacuate expressed unease at riding to the airport with one of the Palestinians, despite the fact that he was aiding her in getting home to the U.S. Perhaps she thought all Palestinians were terrorists, a laughable view considering the dedication of our hardworking employees.

I thought of this incident recently when I listened to Elias Chacour, Archbishop of Galilee in Israel for the Melkite Greek Catholic Church. Melkite Christians trace their origins back to Syrian Christians in the early days of Christianity. They have endured centuries of conquests, persecutions, and minority status in the tumultuous Middle East. Archbishop Chacour was born in Palestine in 1939 in a Christian village. He is an Israeli citizen, a Palestinian, and a Christian.

In the 1980’s, he began a school which today is one of the top schools in Israel. Its students include Christians, Muslims, and Jews. Archbishop Chacour is a committed Christian who works for peace in a conflicted land.

He tells his story in several books, including Blood Brothers: The Dramatic Story of a Palestinian Christian Working for Peace in Israel. It is available online in digital and print editions.

Perhaps his story and that of others like him will give us a more balanced view of the inhabitants of that stretch of the Middle East known to Christians as the Holy Land.

Religion’s Dilemma: What To Do When It Works

“I do not see how it is possible, in the nature of things, for any renewal of true religion to continue long. For religion must necessarily produce both industry and frugality, and these cannot but produce riches. But as riches increase, so will pride, anger, and the love of the world . . . .”

–John Wesley

Christians who take seriously the teachings of Jesus are less likely to abuse alcohol and other drugs. They are more likely to marry and to remain faithful. They are more likely to devote time to the rearing of their children. They are more likely to search for careers with meaning and to work harder in those careers when they find them. They are more likely to give money to causes outside of themselves and to be careful with the rest of their money.

Such habits encourage productive lives and often result in greater financial rewards. Then, according to Wesley, founder of the movement that began the Methodist denomination, the cycle kicks in again. Serious religion and its disciplines languish, he suggested. Christians become more interested in the fruits of their labor than in the labor itself or the life altering decisions that guided them. They fail to curb self-seeking tendencies.

Is it possible to avert this cycle? No doubt, but surely it takes a conscious decision not to yield to the goals that so consume us when our material lives improve. One must continue to grow spiritually, to choose intentionally rather than drift, and to remember the less fortunate after one is no longer one of them.

Unfortunate Choices and Their Consequences

Past choices bring consequences, for individuals and for nations. Our past choices, for example, limit us in the help we can offer the uprising against the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. Thousands of men, women, and children have died in brutal circumstances. Tens of thousands more have fled and become refugees.

The issue of chemical weapons hovers over the conflict. Bashar al-Assad has chemical weapons and has threatened to use them. No one doubts the brutality of the al-Assad famly. The father of Bashar massacred and obliterated the village of Hama in 1982 because of its opposition to his rule.

We can choose to send weapons to the Syrian opposition, but the opposition is fractured. It includes extremists like al-Qaeda. How can we be sure who is receiving the weapons? The opposition is fluid: groups frequently change alliances.

Our entry into Afghanistan and then Iraq after 9/11 wearied us and taught us the limitations and the costs of military involvement. Our actions in Iraq lost us good will among the Arab nations when no weapons of mass destruction were found there, which we gave as our reason for entry to that country. Whether true or not, other nations now assume that any move we make in the area is because we want the oil and has nothing to do with compassion for the Syrians or anyone else.

Our support for dictators in the Middle East haunts us. We supported them because they kept a lid on Islamist regimes, at the same time becoming both corrupt and brutal to their own people. Now that dictators in Tunisia and Egypt have been overthrown, the new government leaders remember our support for the dictators who sometimes tortured them.

Decades ago, in 1973, oil producing nations began an oil embargo against the United States because of our support for Israel. Gas prices soared. U.S. President Richard Nixon led the nation in measures to reduce our oil consumption. We talked glibly of loosening our dependence on oil in the Middle East. Once the crisis passed, we chose to return to business as usual, willing to pay a higher price at the pump. Eventually we paid on 9/ll and in Afghanistan and in Iraq.

Our desire for the oil of the Middle East has driven much of our foreign policy in the region since the Second World War. We are reaping the results of those policies.

The Deaths of 23,000 Americans in a Single Day

September 17^th of this year marked the 150^th anniversary of the date when more Americans lost their lives in a single day than ever before or since. At least 23,000 Americans were killed in the Civil War battle of Antietam, near Sharpsburg, Maryland in 1862. At the end of the day, the lines of battle were hardly changed.

Why was the Civil War fought? Why did two peoples, sharing a common heritage, end up fighting eyeball to eyeball in the sunken road at Antietam?

Otherwise reasonable people became too angry to discuss differences. Southerners cared more for their cotton economy and its slave labor than in justice. The North knew its own exploitation of immigrant labor, yet often saw itself as superior and worked from a position of self-righteousness in dealing with the slavery issue.

Yes, slavery was abolished, but segregation took its place because war did not change people’s minds. Wars seldom do. The excesses of the gilded age in the North continued well into the twentieth century, with its exploitation of cheap immigrant labor.

Unfortunately, the angry Antietams remain with us: the world wars of the twentieth century; 9/ll; mass killings in schools, workplaces, and houses of worships in this country; the bloody riots of the last few weeks in the Middle East, and our own political attack ads.

A fitting tribute to those who died would be our dedication to civil discussion in our own communities and politics, then our support of groups who seek to bring opposing sides together in the flashpoints of the world.

An Extreme Makeover of Christendom

The columnist Ross Douthat suggested that American Christians must find a way “to thrive in a society that looks less and less like any sort of Christendom—and more and more like the diverse and complicated Empire where their religion had its beginning . . .” (From The New York Times News Service, 2010.)

We have witnessed an extreme makeover of the Christian-oriented western culture that was called Christendom. Christianity has lost much of its influence in the larger society. Much conflict in the stories I write focuses on the struggles of American Christians to deal with the changed views that surround them. Often the characters live for a time in other cultures where religion remains a part of everyday life.

They understand, as I did after similar experiences, how closely intertwined are religion and government in some non-Western nations. It is a part of the national identity of those societies. Should one group’s religion be forced on a society to preserve that identity?

Is preservation what drove the early Christians? Perhaps one key is found in Douthat’s observation that today’s society is much like that of the Roman Empire. The Christians of that day did not try to change the Empire with a political movement. Instead they caused the Empire to change itself because their way of living attracted people to Christianity.

Once Christianity became compulsory for all, it lost much of its power. Small groups within the state churches dared live the radical lifestyle of Christ and pass on the Christain faith. The outer life, which springs from the life within, cannot be forced.

What If We Burned Every Religious Text?

A letter to the editor of our island newspaper suggested that we “gather together a handful of free thinkers . . . and stage a burning of Korans, Bibles and Torahs to protest ALL the Abrahamic religions. Perhaps their pernicious belief in One God, a male god who plays favorites, metes out violent punishments and promises dubious rewards in a fictional Heaven—perhaps these beliefs are the true malignancy and cause of all our suffering. Maybe, if we just burn those pesky books, all the evil in the world will go away . . .”

As a Christian, I could profess anger at the man’s suggestions. But why? The man expressed a sincere conclusion from what he sees in the world. Better to examine why he sees such evil in religion, including Christianity.

His letter was written when a small church in Florida caused a media sensation by burning the Muslim Koran. No matter that leaders of all major religions protested the actions of the fringe group.

I suspect this fringe group was the straw that led to the writer’s suggestion. No doubt he was appalled by terrorists who cause unneeded suffering in the name of religion. Perhaps he remembered the Crusades of the Middle Ages. He appears also to have read passages in the Old Testament written when the Hebrews first sought to understand their God, before prophets like Amos called for justice for the poor as few nations had previously known and which call us today (“let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream”).

If we got rid of all Biblical writings, we would no longer have Jesus’ instructions to his followers to love one another. We would not have his example of forgiving those who hated him. We would not have the New Testament letter which encourages Christians to “bless those who persecute you . . . Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all . . if your enemies are hungry, feed them . . . ” We would not have Christians inspired by Christ’s teachings to care for the hungry, the thirsty, strangers, the naked, the sick, and the prisoners.

Do some people who call themselves Christians do despiteful things? Certainly. But so do people who profess no religion. Christ told us how to tell his true followers. “You will know them by their fruits.” Christian teachings don’t cause evil, but the failure of Christians to live them out does.

“Even the Good Parts of It.”

Sometimes good works are done for wrong reasons or out of ignorance.

Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. diplomat who brokered an end to the genocidal Balkan wars of the 1990’s, was influenced during his entire career by the tragedy of America’s involvement in Vietnam.

He spent his first diplomatic postings in the 1960’s in that country, taking part in efforts to “win the hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese. He saw those efforts fail, and disillusionment followed as he realized that American power, great as it is, has limits.

Holbrooke wrote: “But then finally it all seemed to come down to one simple, horrible truth: we didn’t belong there, we had no business doing what we were doing, even the good parts of it.” (quoted in The Unquiet American: Richard Holbrooke in the World, page 105, from an article he wrote for The New Republic, May 3, 1975.)

Holbrooke died suddenly in the middle of his diplomatic mission in another war, this one in Afghanistan. He saw differences with Vietnam, including the fact that America had been deliberately attacked by enemies with bases in Afghanistan. However, he also detected similarities with the quagmire that became Vietnam: ” . . . the existence of an indefensible border harboring enemy sanctuaries; American reliance on a corrupt partner government; and, most critically, the embrace of a counterinsurgency doctrine, which he had learned through painful experience was an exceedingly difficult military and civilian strategy to execute.” (The Unquiet American, page 95.)

How did the United States become involved once again in nation building? Because we allowed our justifiable anger at the 9/ll attacks to carry us too far. To attempt even good things that we had no business doing. Emotion overrode reason.

Ann Gaylia O'Barr

Culture and World Events from a Christian Perspective