What Can Liberal Christians Say About Islamist Terror?

 

This month’s post is much longer than usual, and is really an extended essay. Its subject matter is too sensitive and too complex to write about briefly. Next month’s post should return to the more usual, briefer, length.

Just as we head into lockdown 2, there has been a renewal of Islamist terror attacks in Europe, and the UK threat level has risen to severe.  This should horrify us, yet between predictions of the NHS being overwhelmed, and an ongoing crisis of democracy in the USA, it’s as much as we can do to note that another UK attack is considered ‘highly likely’.

It’s now 15 years since the 7/7 tube bombings, and though such attacks still appall us, they no longer have the shock of the new. We are too familiar with Islamist terror, and we are used to hearing that yet another plot has been foiled. At the last count, 25 UK attacks have been thwarted since the Manchester Arena attack in 2017.

There’s a third reason for our muted response. We struggle to find a coherent response that recognises reality without stoking community tensions and encouraging the far-right. This can be illustrated by the social media response of some of my liberal friends and acquaintances to the Manchester Arena bombing in 2017. Manchester is my home city, so its magnificent response didn’t surprise me. But those among my liberal friends and acquaintances who responded on social media, did so in a way that I found disquieting.

In the hours and days after the attack they hit Facebook with a flurry of posts disassociating the attack from the British Muslim community, and making pre-emptive attacks on anyone who might have been thinking of taking this out on British Muslims. They also issued warnings about what ‘the right wing press’ were likely to do in the coming days.

They were right to do this, but it worries me that this was the entire theme of their response. It gave the impression that they were more angry with Rupert Murdoch and the Daily Mail than with the man who set the bomb off. Is it not possible to express anger at the perpetrators, and sadness for the actual victims of murder, before going in to bat for potential victims of a backlash? I’m sure that they felt anger and disgust towards the bomber and his accomplices, and that they felt the pain of parents whose teenage daughters had gone to a pop concert and ended up in a morgue. Yet such sentiments, it seemed, went without saying. 

In 2005 many of us responded to Islamist terror by talking about the sense of grievance in Muslim communities over British foreign policy, particularly with regard to the Iraq war, but also with the legacy of empire, through which the UK became inescapably entwined with millions of Muslims.  These considerations do not disappear with time, but surely, fifteen years on, they cannot be the whole of our response. 

A Christian Response from Christian Sources.

How, then to respond? As liberal Christians, let us first attempt to do so from distinctive Christian sources. We do well to look to scripture for inspiration, but let us not go to the Bible looking for proof texts for an already worked out geopolitical view. Scripture should surprise and challenge us, as should prayer. We mustn’t use spiritual resources simply to reinforce what we already think.

One verse that speaks to us in an unsettling way is the second verse of the sixteenth chapter of John’s gospel. Just before he is taken away for torture and execution, Jesus talks at length to his disciples. Some of what he says is teaching, some is prophecy. In 16:2-3 he says:

...Indeed, an hour is coming when those who kill you will think that by doing so they are offering worship to God. And they will do this because they have not known the Father or me. (NRSV)

These prophetic words certainly resonate with contemporary Islamist attacks on Christians and Jews. It’s not an unreasonable connection to make, but it’s an incomplete one. Before we look for a link between these verses and what is happening now, there is a much larger historical context in which we should read these prophetic words.

The Immediate Context

This prophecy was addressed to Jesus’s disciples, and it was fulfilled within a very short space of time. It has, therefore, an immediate context.

Let’s look at the verse again, this time with the surrounding verses, and verse numbers.

“1 I have said these things to you to keep you from stumbling. 2 They will put you out of the synagogues. Indeed, an hour is coming when those who kill you will think that by doing so they are offering worship to God. 3 And they will do this because they have not known the Father or me. 4 But I have said these things to you so that when their hour comes you may remember that I told you about them."

One might conclude from the reference to being ‘put out of the synagogues’ that Jesus is referring to imminent persecution of Christians by Jews. This is by no means a necessary, or even a likely inference. Jesus, a Jew, was talking to his - also Jewish - disciples. They were involved in an intra-Jewish conflict with the religious leadership over the direction in which their common religion should go. 

Remember that the author of John’s gospel was writing sometime between CE 90 and 100. So he wrote these words of Jesus looking back on what had already happened to the disciples.  By the time these words were written, most of them had already been martyred. 

Scripture only records the death of two disciples, Judas, who hanged himself, and James, son of Zebedee, who was killed by Herod. But there are long established claims about the way in which the other disciples and apostles met their deaths.

Tradition states that Peter was crucified (upside down) on the orders of Emperor Nero. Phillip either died of natural causes, was crucified, or was stoned to death. That is, unless he was flayed then beheaded, or maybe beaten then crucified, in either India or Armenia.

Thomas is said to have been speared to death in India. Bartholomew was either burned, stoned, stabbed or beheaded in Ethiopia. James, son of Alpheus, was pushed from the Temple in Jerusalem while preaching, and then beaten to death. Either that or he was crucified.  Jude was hacked to death, possibly in Syria. Simon the Zealot was crucified, or maybe sawn in half. Either that or he died of old age in either Iberia (Spain), Persia (Iran), Samaria (The West Bank), or Mesopotamia (South East Turkey).

John, the beloved disciple, was exiled to the Island of Patmos and died of natural causes in old age. According to Tertullian, though, he was only sent to Patmos after boiling him in oil failed to harm him. Matthias, who replaced Judas, was either stoned to death by Cannibals in Georgia, or stoned, then beheaded, by Jews in Jerusalem. Alternatively, he may have died of old age in Jerusalem. 

Paul, though not one of the Disciples, was the preeminent apostle, whose theology dominates the New Testament. He was beheaded in Rome. Many other early Christians were martyred in worse ways. Often they were torn to pieces by Lions in the Roman Colosseum, while crowds watched. Others were strapped to poles and set alight, after Emperor Nero cynically blamed them for a series of fires in Rome.

So Jesus’s words will have had immense resonance in the early church.

The majority of the disciples were killed by gentiles from many different national groups, cultures and religions. So should ‘those who kill you’ really specify Jews? I think not.

And contrary to what we might think, it’s not just the Jews in this list that thought they were doing service to God. Jesus, Peter, and Paul were executed by the Roman Empire, and the majority of the other disciples were killed in places under Roman occupation. Roman Emperors were deified, (considered divine,) though they didn’t officially become Gods until they died, at which point they watched over the Empire. Jesus’s prophetic words can certainly be applied to executions performed in the name of the Emperor.

Even outside the Roman Empire there were no atheists, and many religions - particularly in India or Persia (as was) - that included a belief in God. 

Let’s look at these words one more time. A literal translation would go something like this:

THESE THINGS I HAVE SPOKEN TO YOU THAT YOU NOT BE CAUSED TO STUMBLE AWAY FROM THE SYNAGOGUES THEY WILL PUT YOU BUT COMES AN HOUR THAT EVERYONE HAVING KILLED YOU MAY SUPPOSE TO OFFER SERVICE TO GOD AND THESE THINGS THEY WILL DO BECAUSE THEY DO NOT KNOW THE FATHER NOR ME

I have written it this way because the earliest Greek manuscripts consist entirely of capital letters, without punctuation. There are no marks indicating where one sentence ended and another started, or whether something was a statement or a question. Nor is the text divided into chapters and verses, (though there are book titles). Bear in mind, too, that even literal translations vary, because many Greek words have a range of meanings. There is much that translators impose on the text, based on their understanding of its context. All these factors can be significant in interpreting some key texts, and there are many examples where a different choice in translation dramatically alters the meaning.

Therefore, could  ‘AWAY FROM THE SYNAGOGUES THEY WILL PUT YOU’ actually refer to the way that the disciples left their Jewish context when they went to preach in ‘all nations’? 

Can there be more than one application for these verses? 

Can we apply Jesus’s words beyond their immediate context? The answer has to be yes, if we take Jesus’s own use of scripture as our guide. He frequently linked his ministry with prophetic words from the Hebrew Bible, which became, for Christians, the Old Testament. And when he quoted scripture, it was in situations very different from their original context. All the New Testament authors did this. Surely, then, this has to be an acceptable way for Christians to read and apply the New Testament. 

Indeed, an hour is coming when those who kill you will think that by doing so they are offering worship to God

Certainly, these prophetic words apply primarily to the immediate historical context, in which Jesus’s disciples, and the rest of the early church, were horrifically persecuted.  But they also apply to all of history ever since. Because Christians have been consistently killed by people who believe they are carrying out God’s will, for two thousand years. And this includes a very long period, from the fourth to the eighteenth century, in which Christians were killed by other Christians. 

We must not forget that historically we have been the people killing Jesus’s followers. Given our history, we are in no position to throw stones at Islam. From the moment the church made its pact with Emperor Constantine, Christians persecuted other Christians, and of course members of other religions. As they did this, they told themselves they were, offering worship to God. Had we been born any time between the fourth and eighteenth century, we might well have asked whether this appetite for persecuting heretics would be a permanent part of Christianity. 

The Contemporary Context

Today, similarly grotesque persecution of Christians is a persistent reality in much of the world. In places like China, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Iran, or Nigeria, Jesus’s words read like they could have been spoken yesterday. 

What about Christians in the UK? There is some anti-Christian bias, prejudice and hostility in the democratic West, and some of it comes from powerful institutions. But it insults Christians in places like Saudi Arabia, or North Korea, to call this real persecution. 

It’s not only in Muslim majority countries where Christians are persecuted, but targeted terror attacks on Christians now come almost exclusively from extremist Muslim attackers. We’re not just frightened by this fact, we’re deeply discomfited.

Contemporary Islamist violence is directed at Jews as well as Christians. If there are more attacks on Christians than Jews, it is only because there are two billion Christians in the world and only twenty million Jews.

Jesus’s prophetic words are prescient, or at least relevant, in addressing the threat to Christians in Nigeria from Boko Haram. They will resonate, too, throughout the Islamic world, where ISIS, Al Qaeda, Al-Shabab and Boko Haram kill more Muslims than they do anyone else.  

But for those of us in the UK without connections to these lands, Jesus’s words are likely to make us think of the most recent attacks in France.

There have been many attacks in France, as there have been in the UK, and they have often involved large scale, indiscriminate slaughter. But one distinctive feature of the French attacks has been the choice of specifically religious targets. As well as the bloody attack on satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, and the Bataclan theatre, there have many arson attacks on churches and synagogues, and the targeted murder of Christians and Jews. 

On January 9th 2015, hostages were taken in a Kosher supermarket, as Islamists sought the release of the Koachi brothers, who were then under siege after their attack at Charlie Hebdo, two days earlier.  Four Jewish hostages were killed after they confronted the attackers.

On 26th July 2016, two Islamist terrorists attacked a Mass at a Catholic church in Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray, Normandy. Armed with knives, and wearing fake explosive belts, they took six people captive, and later killed one of them, 85-year-old priest Jacques Hamel. They slit his throat. They wanted to cause widespread terror, and they did. I was leading worship a few days later at a mid-week service, and again the next Sunday, and it didn’t seem impossible that there might be copy-cat attacks. 

On 6th July 2017, six weeks after the Manchester Arena Bombing, a police officer was attacked with a hammer at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.

Two weeks ago yesterday, three people died in an attack in Notre Dame Cathedral in Nice. One woman was decapitated. This came thirteen days after the decapitation of school teacher Samuel Paty, for leading a class discussion on the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that had caused so much offence when they appeared in Charlie Hebdo.

And on Tuesday there was an Islamist terror attack in Vienna, in which the Synagogue may have been a target.

Attacks on Christians and Jews by Islamist terrorists are indeed murders done by people who believe they are doing the will of God. This makes us all very anxious, and not just from fear of future attacks. We worry that these attacks will fuel a far-right response, which now preoccupies our security services along with Islamist threats. 

When visiting the local synagogue for events organised by the Council of Christians and Jews, we are always admitted by a security guard. Jews are a target of Islamists and the far right. There have also been far-right attacks on Mosques, many of which also feel the need to employ security guards. Thus far, unlike in France, UK churches have been spared. 

Let’s be clear that we have a problem with far-right terrorism as well as with Islamist terrorism. But when it comes to the religiously motivated murder of followers of Jesus, we know, even if we dare not say so, which direction the threat is currently coming from.

‘This has nothing to do with Islam…’

We know very well that the vast majority of Muslims are peaceful and tolerant, and so after each Islamist attack at least one politician says ‘This has nothing to do with Islam.’ But Is this true? Is it helpful? If so, who does it help?

We know what is meant by the statement. The beliefs and actions of these Islamists are, it is said, not Islam, but a perversion of Islam. A strong case is put by mainstream, and progressive Muslims that this violence is unIslamic, because it goes against the values of Islam, and it contradicts some Qur’anic verses and Hadith. Jihad, we are reminded - and I have taught this to many school pupils - is peaceful struggle for Islam, except in extreme circumstances in which there is no alternative to violence.

But we also know that each attacker believes that their actions have everything to do with Islam. And they have Qur’anic verses and Hadith that they quote to support their actions. 

We insist that ‘this has nothing to do with Islam’ because we are, rightly, anxious not to demean the faith of our Muslim neighbours, and we don’t want to give encouragement to far-right groups, who see anxiety about Islamic terrorism as their best means of recruitment.

But this doesn’t take into account how strange and confusing it sounds to much of the non-Muslim population when we say that these attacks have ‘nothing to do with Islam’.  The statement is badly lacking in nuance, and it creates the impression, particularly among those that the far-right wish to recruit from, that we liberals are in denial, and frightened to accurately report what is happening.

The ‘nothing to do with Islam’ statements are said with the best of intentions, but they end up fuelling the far-right - the very thing that the statement is meant to avoid.

And if these attacks have absolutely nothing to do with Islam, should we not say that the Inquisition, the Crusades, and the centuries of violent persecution by Christians, often of Christians, has absolutely nothing to with Christianity? 

Could we claim that slavery had nothing to do with Empire?

Might it be argued that the gulag has nothing to do with communism? 

And what would we say to a neo-Nazi who says that the gas chambers had nothing to do with National Socialism?

The last example is the point at which we rush to refute, and rightly so. Hitler signaled his intentions clearly in Mein Kampf, so the gas chamber cannot be separated from the ideology. 

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in the Gulag Archipelago, stresses that the need to repress political enemies with severe measures was not just some Stalinist aberration. It started with Lenin, and was openly discussed decades earlier in the correspondence of Marx and Engels. 

The point is that with Communism and National Socialism, the potential for cruelty and repression was baked in from the beginning. 

Are we really prepared to let Christianity off the hook for its bloody history? I will insist that the crimes of Christendom were a perversion of what Christianity can and should be. But it would be an evasion of responsibility to say that they have nothing to do with the faith that I hold. 

I do not see how Christians can credibly say that burning heretics at the stake had nothing to do with Christianity. Christians justified the judicial murder of so-called heretics from theology that was drawn from our scripture, our institutions, and our history. They may have got the essence of the gospel wrong, but it’s very easy to see how medieval Christians drew the conclusions that they did. We know all too well that our religion carries within it verses that can easily be used to justify, not just the killing of heretics, but aggressive war and conquest, colonialism, imperialism, slavery, antisemitism, anti-black racism, sexism, racism and homophobia. We can’t just walk away from all this and say it has nothing to do with us.

We can say that Islam and Christianity need not have anything to do with terror. But we cannot say that either religion has nothing to do with terror.

This is a problem for all religions, and for many secular ideologies as well. If our religion or ideology springs from sources that can easily become pretexts for evil, then it does have something to do with our faith.

The perception of many people is that Christianity used to be prone to killing heretics, but it has finally outgrown this. They express frustration that, although the vast majority of Muslims condemn terrorism, Islam has not rid itself of lethal intolerance to the same extent that Christianity has.

Is this a fair comparison? Islamic persecution of Christians, and other non-Muslims dates from the seventh century to the present. This is a similar period of time to Christianity’s centuries of intolerance and violence. 

Many people, including most Muslims, hope and believe that Islam will follow a similar trajectory to Christianity, eventually ridding itself of the poison of murderous intolerance. But this is not straightforward. Many in the Islamic world also see the last three hundred years of Christian history as a story of inexorable decline, a loss of faith and power, and rapidly increasing irrelevance. They see nothing in this to envy or emulate.

It’s true that Christianity has become more tolerant over the same time it has lost power and influence. Can Islam follow the same path towards tolerance as Christianity, without experiencing the same collapse in adherence? We just don’t know. 

We also cannot know whether Christianity, were it to undergo significant revival, would not once again become aggressive and intolerant towards non-Christians. Conversely, western Christians cannot say that we would not have the same problems as Islam if our faith had not collapsed so spectacularly.  It’s easy to boast of how tolerant you are when you have no means with which to oppress non-believers.

If we want to know whether Christianity has what it takes to be powerful without being dangerous, we will have to look to Africa and South America where Christianity is strong, and getting stronger. And also to East Asia, where it is growing rapidly. Huge churches in South Korea are packed to overflowing, and in China there are now more Christians than there are members of the Communist Party.

Maybe it is in China that Christianity can one day successfully balance power with ethics. If this does happen, future generations will have to figure out why Western Christians failed so spectacularly to achieve this, prior to their decline.  China, under the control of its Communist Party, frightens me. But there is a different, Christian China that may replace it. Perhaps then, Chinese Christians, untainted by our colonial past, will forge a better relationship with the world’s Muslims.

This may be a Utopian hope. It’s certainly nowhere near a present-day reality. For now, it behoves all faith communities, in fact anyone with any sort of creed, whether religious or secular, to look for the root of evil within their own tradition, whether it is a true reflection of their faith or not. 

And when people kill in the name of God, let’s think harder, deeper, and with more courage, about how we respond.

If you’d like to do something to support persecuted Christians please visit Christian Solidarity Worldwide at csw.org.uk. They chiefly support persecuted Christians but, unlike similar organisations, they also run campaigns on behalf of members of other faiths, who are experiencing persecution. 

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