1. As I experienced life in a conservative Middle Eastern country, I learned what many Muslims of that country believe about Americans: Americans can’t live without binging on alcohol. Americans abuse drugs. They also favor couples living together without marriage, and they love X-rated movies. They don’t care if their daughters become prostitutes. Muslims who have never lived outside of their culture may believe most Americans are Christians.
2. Rural Muslims tend to become more conservative when they move to the city. Nomadic Arabs that we met while in the desert appeared less strict in matters of dress and other habits than their urban cousins. This reminded me of the denomination I know best, Southern Baptists. Southern Baptists became more conservative when they left their rural roots. In 1990, Nancy Ammerman, then a professor at Emory University, wrote Baptist Battles: Social Change and Religious Conflict in the Southern Baptist Convention, which portrays this shift.
3. In the conservative country where I lived and worked, Christians weren’t free to worship openly, though western Christians usually worshiped without interference if they didn’t broadcast their religious activities or try to convert Muslims. Christians from other areas of the world—Ethiopia or the Philippines, for example—lived less protected lives.
4. Based on my knowledge of the arrests and mistreatment of some Christians in Muslim majority lands, I don’t see actions against Christians in this country as persecution. Some Christians may suffer in the sense that anti-war protesters suffer for civil disobedience, but it is not, in my opinion, persecution.
5. Some Muslims are dismayed at the infiltration of Western culture into their own. One of their writers called it “westoxification.”
Ammerman wrote in her 1990 book: “In a relatively undisturbed setting, religious practices are tightly interwoven into the fabric of life. . . . But when change occurs, everyday patterns of life are thrown into disarray . . .” So it is with Muslims as with Southern Baptists, notwithstanding that their beliefs are quite different.