It’s All About Love . . . or Is It?
Some 2×2 readers who live in the Middle East are being seriously impacted by the recent violence prompted by a single video posted months ago on the internet that was suddenly discovered by Muslim viewers all over the Middle East. Most Americans have seen no more than one frame in the news magazines. We are told it ridicules Mohammed.
Behind the rage is the misunderstanding that one person’s view does not necessarily represent an entire nation’s sentiment. It is the view of the people who made and posted the film. Americans, for the most part, never noticed it sitting out there in “American” cyberspace.
So blood is spilled and lives are lost because the views of very, very few are projected onto the entire American nation. The lives of Christians in predominantly Muslim countries—not an easy position even in peaceful times—are disrupted needlessly.
Other nations view America as a Christian nation. It is undeniable that our founding values were rooted in the Christian understandings of the time, but Americans know that freedom to not be Christian is also part of the American tradition. The fabric of American life is a tight weave of many religions.
The actions that incited the current violence were not the actions of America—a difficult point to make amidst the rhetoric of gunfire.
Most religions are about good values. Christianity is centered on love. But the message is all too easily put aside by the desire to be right and the desire to dominate.
We don’t have to go to the Mideast to see these powerful anti-Christian sentiments displayed by people who consider themselves to be religious. It is the stuff of history — in the early church, in the Crusades, in the Reformation, in our own era of slavery and Indian wars. We can see it today in our local churches—the need to win at any cost.
That cost is the abandonment of our very purpose.
We are praying for the Christians in Middle East just as hard as they are praying for the Lutherans in East Falls.