gracchusdixit

The separation of church and state guaranteed by our Constitution has never stopped Christians, particularly evangelical Christians, from acting as if their faith were the “established church” of the nation.  The National Prayer Breakfast is merely one example of their presumption.  Though not officially “Christian,” it might as well be, and every year since Dwight David Eisenhower began the practice, the Presidents of our supposedly secular democracy have dutifully shown up to express their allegiance to the predominant religion of the land.  Presidential appearances at this annual ritual have generally been innocuous, with our chief executives confining their remarks to platitudes and predictable pieties,  walking a delicate line between declarations of “personal faith” and the official non-religiosity of the land.

The current President of the United States, however, kicked over a hornet’s nest when he addressed this year’s National Prayer Breakfast.  Barack Obama decided to turn his attention to the horrific acts of radical Islamists in Iraq and Syria.  He observed that extremism is not unique to Islam, that many religions, including Christianity, have at various times incited or justified similar atrocities.  For uttering these incontestable truths, the President was immediately assailed from both right and left.

Critics on the right pilloried him for daring to draw any comparison between Islam and Christianity, because they would have us believe that Christianity is morally superior to every other creed on the planet.

Critics on the left were more fastidious, carping that Christianity’s lapses—the Crusades, the Inquisition, the witch trials of the 17th and 18th centuries—happened long ago, before Christianity was “reformed” by Enlightenment values, the discoveries of science, and the steady march of modern progress.

Let us put aside for a moment the reality that both these points of view are at best questionable and focus on the more consequential fact that most of the President’s critics chose to ignore his central point.  His central point was that radical extremists like ISIL do not represent the “true Islam,” just as the zealots of the Inquisition did not reflect the  “true Christianity”.

Barack Obama is not the first to have expressed this anodyne thought.  George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, among many others, preceded him, and it has been parroted around the globe by political elites who do not wish to be seen criticizing religion.

In any event, the notion that radical extremism is a distortion of the “true” Islam is undoubtedly well-intended.  But it is also naive and—worse than naive—flatly wrong.

Radical extremism is not a distortion of Islam—it is an intrinsic part of any religion that claims a monopoly on the truth, whether that creed is Islam or Christianity or the Judaism on which both are based.  Absolutist religions breed intolerance and—inevitably—persecution.  The Christianity that gave us Saint Francis and Pope Francis also spawned Torquemada and the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.  The Bible that gave us the Sermon on the Mount also glorified the murder of Isaac and the slaughter of the first-born of Egypt.  A faith that glorifies the “martyrdom” of its own believers is by definition prepared to condone the murder of non-believers.  Martyrdom and murder are interdependent and inseparable.

Thus, there is no way of separating good religion from bad religion, of pretending that one religious vision is “truer” than another.  Nor is there any way of imagining that any absolute religion can be reformed by Enlightenment values, tamed by the modern world, or sanitized by science.  Like some infinitely adaptable virus, such religions are immune to these curative forces.  They may lie low for a while, pretending to be quiet, until they inoculate themselves against the cure and come pluming back with explosive force.

In the United States, deeply unenlightened evangelicals have all but highjacked the political agenda of the Republican Party.  In the name of “life,” they want to return the lives of women to the Middle Ages, and they have incited the murder of physicians and health care workers who provide women with abortion services.

In Israel, orthodox extremists have undermined that country’s noblest secular and civic traditions, making any prospect of conciliation with Palestinians and Israel’s Arab population all but impossible.

In Saudi Arabia, the home of Islam’s holy places, Wahabi fundamentalists stole the country from its infinitely more tolerant Hashemite rulers a century ago and have imposed a stern and violent vision of Islam on its population.

In India, the world’s largest democracy, a country founded on the principles of secularism and cultural diversity, a new prime minister was recently elected by promising jobs and growth.  The man who made these convenient promises is first and foremost a Hindu demagogue, who not long ago incited the murder of thousands of Muslims.

The President of the United States was incontestably right to remind us that radical extremism is not unique to Islam, but he was sadly wrong to suggest that radical extremism is a perversion of  the “true” Islam or any other religion.  There is no doubt that radical Islam is a problem.  The infinitely greater problem is the radicalism of religion itself.   Pretending otherwise will not help us solve the problem.