By the end of last week, liberal writers were miffed that anyone should be upset or offended by President Obama’s simplistic, intellectually lazy attempt at the National Prayer Breakfast to draw a parallel between Christianity’s effect on the western world and the ongoing genocide by Islamic State of Iraq and Syria fundamentalists.
“Lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place,” Obama said, “remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”
As far as the Crusades and the Inquisition are concerned, the comparison is at least sloppy, although not completely wrong. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal offered the appropriate eye-rolling reply: “The Medieval Christian threat is under control.”
But far more offensive is the historically illiterate statement about America — an attempt to place slavery and Jim Crow under a Christian banner. As Obama said, the name of Christ has been used to justify all manner of evils. But it takes a very ignorant person indeed to suggest that profit-seeking slaveholders viewed themselves as fulfilling God’s will; or that the Ku Klux Klan and other racists had some kind of point when they scrambled to create ad hoc, after-the-fact religious rationalizations for evils they were already engaged in for other reasons.
What Obama dismisses is the reason such religious rationalizations were concocted — because the racists’ beloved institutions had been under such ferocious attack from Christian fundamentalists — the people we now know as the abolitionists.
The most famous Christian terrorist in American history — perhaps the only truly famous one — was John Brown. He shared his religious fanaticism with most of his fellow abolitionists, but few of them took up arms as he did. Brown’s actions, to this day, evoke mixed emotions, because his motives were clearly just even if his means were not. His plot to restore righteousness to a corrupt world involved paramilitary actions against slave owners and pro-slavery political figures, but his true aim was to incite a nationwide revolution against slavery.
Upon his 1859 conviction in a Virginia courtroom, Brown pointed to the Bible upon which witnesses had sworn at trial. “That,” he said, “teaches me that all things whatsoever I would that men should do to me, I should do even so to them. It teaches me, further, to ‘remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them.’ I endeavored to act up to that instruction.”
With that in mind, go right ahead — compare America’s foremost Chrisitian terrorist to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
A century later, a Christian minister named Martin Luther King would appeal to America’s long-sleeping conscience and, at the cost of his life, help end Jim Crow once and for all.
Obama is right in wanting not to offend those many, many Muslims who view the Islamic State as a barbaric profanation of their culture and beliefs. But he is undermining them. How daft he must be to think he is showing kindness to American Muslims by creating such a false equivalence — coming to the rhetorical aid of the very barbarians who now profane their faith.
Muslims comprise the greater share of those being slaughtered by the Islamic State. Should those Muslims who have lost loved ones feel consoled by Obama’s ignorant suggestion that the West is just as bad? Would it not be more profitable to help Muslims of goodwill embrace the Western values that so offend the barbarians?
Instead of trying to justify the Islamic State’s behaviors as if they were something normal, he should be looking for and encouraging tomorrow’s Islamic Martin Luther Kings, who will bring an end to the current madness.
