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As noted in my last post, I’d like to address how Christians can respond to Islam, as well as why the secular media so thoroughly misrepresent Islam (as well as Christianity). Ironically, I just read an article clearly highlighting the media bias against Christianity – particularly Catholicism – and Islam’s protected media status: http://cnsnews.com/commentary/l-brent-bozell-iii/when-child-sex-abuse-isnt-news

The article compares the many times the Catholic sex abuse scandal has made the front pages of, e.g., the New York Times, or garnered time on major news channels, versus the scant attention given to the 1000+ cases of sexual abuse by Pakistani Muslims perpetrated on white girls in England over the past 13 years. British police apparently failed to address this horrendous abuse for fear of seeming racist. The U.S. secular media, in the rare cases in which the outrage has made the news at all, have avoided identifying the perpetrators as 1) Pakistani (since the readers would identify them as probably Muslim) or 2) (more directly) as Muslim. U.S. journalists have no such shyness in identifying Catholic clerical sex abusers as such.

Why would this be? According to Robert Spencer, in Not Peace, But a Sword, because Muslims in the U.S. are a minority, the U.S. media tend to treat them with the same kid-gloves, politically correct approach with which it treats other minorities. That worldwide, nations with Muslim majorities tend to be brutally oppressive of minorities seems to escape most U.S. journalists. On the other hand, Catholics and other Christians (at least nominal ones) are in the majority in the U.S. – so, of course, they couldn’t possibly be persecuted.

But committed Christians believe in moral and philosophical absolutes, and oppose the more and more normative depravity of U.S. secular society. Such “intolerance” and “judgmentalism” is the unforgivable sin in the media’s eyes; it must be punished and eradicated. Ironically, the very freedom of the press to attack Christians arises out of the Christian emphasis on freedom of conscience, religion, and expression that undergirds the Deistic beliefs of the Founding Fathers. Should sharia law become the law of the U.S. (which Heaven forbid!), the secular media (not to mention the ACLU) would be the first to be silenced, imprisoned, or executed.

My wife would wisely say, “Sean, this is just the ‘world’ (in the Biblical sense of the life of society as lived without reference to God) being the ‘world’. It has always hated Christianity and always will.” True. So how can we as Christians respond to that hatred?

The only possible response is to speak the truth in love. As Pope Emeritus Benedict the XVI pointed out in his encyclical Caritas in Veritate (Love in Truth), truth spoken without love isn’t really truth, and love given without truth isn’t really love. So we must speak out. We do no one any favors by pretending that mainstream Islamic practice isn’t filled with problems: it is. We help no one by minimizing the profound differences between Islamic and Christian belief, and how these differences lead to equally profound differences in practice: those who live Christianity in all of its fullness we rightly call “saints”. Those who live Islam in all of its fullness, very unfortunately, support or act on the abhorrent practices outlined above. These are simple truths; they need to be spoken. One cannot love another and lie to him or her at the same time.

But it is truth in love that must be spoken and lived. I was dismayed, after 9/11, that although many church marquees I saw encouraged the faithful, “Pray for the victims of 9/11”, not one added, “…and for our enemies”. This is where the Christian rubber hits the road; not only “see how these Christians love one another”, but “see how these Christians love their enemies“. Love of enemies is the single most effective witness to Christ. The beginning, end, and middle of the Gospel is this:

“In Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us.” (2 Cor 5:19)

God forgave me everything, so I must forgive others everything. I have freely received God’s love; I must freely give it. This doesn’t mean that war crimes can’t be prosecuted; it doesn’t necessarily rule out military action against, e.g., ISIS, to prevent the continued slaughter of innocents. But if I am truly to be a minister of reconciliation – our primary vocation as Christians – I am forbidden to hate; I am charged to love and pray for persecuted and persecutor alike; I may not dehumanize or objectify those who commit outrages; I must, however reluctantly, admit, “There but for the grace of God go I” and “Jesus died a bloody death out of absolute love for that person”.

As a Christian – I would say, as a rational person – I must reject Islam. But as a Christian, I must love, accept, and will the good of Muslims and all others. Do I have my moments of “Nuke ’em back to the Stone Age”? Absolutely. Is that the counsel of the Holy Spirit. Um…no.

I’m back after a much-relished, dare I say much-deserved family vacation in the Rockies. The world is indeed charged with the glory of God! In the meantime, the violence, darkness, and fear engendered by “radical” Islam continues to grow apace. As awful as the violence itself, however, is the deep lack of reality surrounding the violence.

First of all, I put “radical” in quotes as applied to Islam because the phrase “radical Islam” obscures the fact that orthodox, mainstream Islam is inherently radical. As noted in Robert Spencer’s chilling review of orthodox Islam, Not Peace, But a Sword, Islam at its very roots is hostile to Christianity and Judaism, not to mention secular non-Muslim culture; and violence, hatred, and unforgiveness – at least toward non-Muslims – are core to it. I took the trouble to read the Koran myself, cover to cover, so disturbed was I by Spencer’s account: could it really be that bad? Yes. Is he exaggerating? Unfortunately, no.

Please understand that I’m not leaping from “Islam is inherently DEEPLY flawed, and if practiced fully, is evil” to “and therefore there are no good Muslims”. It’s similar to atheism: atheism, if practiced fully, is completely amoral and is not geared to producing virtuous, joyful, loving people. Thank God, most atheists don’t fully live out their atheism and can have all of those qualities; the same goes for Muslims. But living out Islam in its fullness? That is a serious problem.

For example, the popular media account is that Islam respects Christians and Jews as fellow “People of the Book”. But the Koran and orthodox Muslim interpretation clearly proclaim that the only good Christian or Jew is, in fact, Muslim. To explain: the Koran asserts that the Old and New Testaments in their present form are highly distorted versions of the “original” Old and New Testaments. In the “original” versions, Noah, Moses, and Jesus himself profess Allah as God and deny that God has a son. Jesus describes himself only as a prophet. Per Islam, then, orthodox Jews and Christians are stubbornly holding on to a distorted version of their respective faiths: the “true” Jewish and Christian faith, remarkably, corresponds with Islam exactly.

Regarding “stubbornly”,  orthodox, “mainstream” Islam makes no allowance for exercise of freedom of religious conscience: those who reject Islam do so, not out of a genuine difficulty believing its teachings, or out of a need to think about it further. They do so out of sheer sinfulness and perversity. Christians and Jews are allowed to practice their religion under sharia law, yes: but they must wear special garb (think of Jews and homosexuals under the Nazi regime) and must pay fines for not embracing Islam. They are forbidden to proselytize or any public practice of their religion – including wearing religious symbols. Orthodox Jewish expressions of faith – e.g., that Mohammed is not God’s prophet; or orthodox Christian expressions of faith – e.g., that Jesus is God – in any public forum are treated as blasphemy and punishable by death.

Except for Egypt and Turkey, every country with a Muslim majority has in fact imposed sharia law. And at least in Egypt, persecution of Coptic Christians is rampants, with rapes and enslavement of Christian women, murders of Christians during their worship services, and burning of Christian churches – while the Muslim authorities turn a blind eye. Even before the “Arab Spring”, all Egyptians had to have their religious affiliation on their citizenship I.D. cards: the I.D. cards would be changed to reflect conversion from Christianity to Islam – but not vice versa.

The “radical” difference between the Christian God and Allah is far starker than the popular media depicts. As Hillaire Belloc noted, Allah is pure Will, to the point that saying Allah cannot or will not do evil is seen as a restriction on Allah’s freedom. Allah is a very far cry from “God is love”, a passionately good and loving Father. The supreme emphasis on Allah as pure Will is a rejection of human free will: hence, the acceptability of “convert to Islam or die” (or, if you practice Judaism or Christianity, “convert or pay a fine and become a persecuted, second-class citizen”).

Islam’s vision of humanity is also radically different from Christianity’s: Allah is an Oriental monarch demanding complete submission. He is completely alien from humanity: to say we are made “in the divine image” is pure blasphemy. The Christian teaching that women are fellow heirs of salvation with men and to be loved “as Christ loved the Church” is wholly alien to women’s firmly second-class, property-of-the-husband status in Islam.

The relationship between Christians and non-Christians, according to Christ’s teaching, is best summarized as loving service and compassion: “Whatsoever you do for one of these least ones, you do for Me”. The obligation to love and serve, in Islam, is reserved strictly to other Muslims. For example, Muslims are allowed to deceive non-Muslims: if the former are a minority, they can pretend to be friendly and pleasant to their non-Muslim neighbors. But the mask may be dropped once Muslims gain the majority. And to use non-Muslim women – literally – as sex slaves, when captured in war, is fully accepted Muslim practice.

Why the disconnect between the reality of Islam and its media portrayal? And how are Christians to respond? Stay tuned.

There is a real suffering in seeing the gap between what the Bride of Christ – the Church – could be, and what it is. This suffering is like the Lord’s suffering throughout the Old Testament. The prophets cried out at the gulf between the vision the Lord had for Israel, and the desperate state Israel was actually in. They pulled no punches: their words were like hammers, like fire; upsetting enough to get Isaiah sawn in half and Jeremiah thrown into a well for daring to challenge the priests and rulers who had abandoned their covenant with the Lord in their zeal to become just like the pagans. Sounds frighteningly familiar.

Often over the years, as Western civilization stands on the brink of – I believe, if nothing halts the trajectory – the worst persecution of the Church in history, I have sat in the pew, listening to another deadly dull or at best nice-but-shallow sermon with a sense of frustration that has had me climbing out of my skin. Thank God, my current parish has some good preaching. But the more common experience has been “My gosh! He’s got a captive audience. The readings are so rich. There’s a feast to be had, and he’s feeding us stale porridge! We don’t need platitudes: we need power! We don’t need soothing: we need waking up!”

One reading it seemed the Lord gave me years ago was from Jeremiah 19:9 – “I say to myself, I will not mention him, I will speak in his name no more. But then it becomes like fire burning in my heart, imprisoned in my bones. I grow weary holding it in, I cannot endure it.” Not to speak became so very difficult. But speak to whom? Where? On the street corner? Stand up in church and shout? Who would listen? Who do I think I am, anyway?

My wife Mary and I attended Catholic charismatic prayer meetings for years. We were distressed by the fact that virtually all of our peers, after having experienced a relationship with Jesus and the reality of the Holy Spirit, ended up leaving the Catholic Church for nondenominational or Pentecostal churches. The reasons were always the same: “I’m not getting fed by the sermons at St. such-and-such’s; this new church has in-depth Bible studies/wonderful worship/real fellowship/scads of young people/a dynamic pastor who preaches with power. They are giving me the tools to grow in holiness and with my walk with the Lord.” Some missed the Eucharist – but not enough to give up the rest.

 A sense of “That’s IT! I can’t take it any more!” hit me several years ago when a lifelong, prayerful Catholic told me he had switched to a Protestant church in the area. The same, predictable reasons: not fed by the preaching, not inspired by the services, excruciating music – and finding a delightful contrast at the other church. We all know these people – there are a lot of them; maybe some of you have been these people for a period; maybe some of you are toying with the idea right now. And it’s rarely the blasé or the unenthused who do so: it’s some of “the best and the brightest”, the people who are starving for a feast that they’re not finding in the Catholic Church as experienced on Sunday mornings, or through the week for that matter.

My wife Mary experienced the following, which is scandalous if you think about it: during her years teaching high school theology, she brought a number of students to know the Lord. And then she didn’t know where to send them. To the prayer meeting we attended? But they’d likely end up using it as a doorway out of the Catholic Church, like our friends. To the local parish? The preaching was excruciatingly dull and the median age was decades older than they. Do you set teenagers on fire only to send them back where their enthusiasm will be at best looked upon as unusual and at worst actively discouraged? Or even if they’re welcomed, where they have no one anywhere near their age for support?

I am very pleased that there are signs of the “new springtime of evangelization” St. John Paul II prophesied. There are some young people, including young priests, whose zeal puts us older Catholics to shame. There are points of renewal like “That Man Is You” for men, Fr. Bob Barron’s “Catholicism” series, and Jeff Cavins’ “Bible Timeline”, around which parish faith sharing groups have formed.

Nevertheless, the Catholic Church in the U.S. is in crisis. Not the sexual abuse scandal, although that’s a very alarming symptom of a much deeper disease in the Body. The elements of the crisis are not generally spoken out loud – rather, there’s a vague or strong uneasiness regarding the unfilled pews; the Protestant church up the road that’s bursting at the seams with young people, great worship, “solid preaching”, comprehensive and broad ministries with dedicated, well-paid ministers; the lack of young priests on the altar and of young people in the pews; the steadily more anxiety-provoking question, “Who will be in the pews after the 40+ generation dies? Am I one of the rats on a sinking ship?”

This last point is the most telling: I may feel strong in my faith, but how confident am I that my children’s children will also be committed, lively Catholics? How many in my immediate or extended family, and their peers, have dropped nearly all church involvement?

To be continued…