Jesus
And Jihad
By Nicholas D.
Kristof
19 July, 2004
New York Times
If
the latest in the "Left Behind" series of evangelical thrillers
is to be believed, Jesus will return to Earth, gather non-Christians
to his left and toss them into everlasting fire:
"Jesus merely
raised one hand a few inches and a yawning chasm opened in the earth,
stretching far and wide enough to swallow all of them. They tumbled
in, howling and screeching, but their wailing was soon quashed and all
was silent when the earth closed itself again."
These are the best-selling
novels for adults in the United States, and they have sold more than
60 million copies worldwide. The latest is "Glorious Appearing,"
which has Jesus returning to Earth to wipe all non-Christians from the
planet. It's disconcerting to find ethnic cleansing celebrated as the
height of piety.
If a Muslim were
to write an Islamic version of "Glorious Appearing" and publish
it in Saudi Arabia, jubilantly describing a massacre of millions of
non-Muslims by God, we would have a fit. We have quite properly linked
the fundamentalist religious tracts of Islam with the intolerance they
nurture, and it's time to remove the motes from our own eyes.
In "Glorious
Appearing," Jesus merely speaks and the bodies of the enemy are
ripped open. Christians have to drive carefully to avoid "hitting
splayed and filleted bodies of men and women and horses."
"The riders
not thrown," the novel continues, "leaped from their horses
and tried to control them with the reins, but even as they struggled,
their own flesh dissolved, their eyes melted and their tongues disintegrated.
. . . Seconds later the same plague afflicted the horses, their flesh
and eyes and tongues melting away, leaving grotesque skeletons standing,
before they, too, rattled to the pavement."
One might have thought
that Jesus would be more of an animal lover.
These scenes also
raise an eschatological problem: Could devout fundamentalists really
enjoy paradise as their friends, relatives and neighbors were heaved
into hell?
As my Times colleague
David Kirkpatrick noted in an article, this portrayal of a bloody Second
Coming reflects a shift in American portrayals of Jesus, from a gentle
Mister Rogers figure to a martial messiah presiding over a sea of blood.
Militant Christianity rises to confront Militant Islam.
This matters in
the real world, in the same way that fundamentalist Islamic tracts in
Saudi Arabia do. Each form of fundamentalism creates a stark moral division
between decent, pious types like oneself and infidels headed
for hell.
No, I don't think
the readers of "Glorious Appearing" will ram planes into buildings.
But we did imprison thousands of Muslims here and abroad after 9/11,
and ordinary Americans joined in the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib
in part because of a lack of empathy for the prisoners. It's harder
to feel empathy for such people if we regard them as infidels and expect
Jesus to dissolve their tongues and eyes any day now.
I had reservations
about writing this column because I don't want to mock anyone's religious
beliefs, and millions of Americans think "Glorious Appearing"
describes God's will. Yet ultimately I think it's a mistake to treat
religion as a taboo, either in this country or in Saudi Arabia.
I often write about
religion precisely because faith has a vast impact on society. Since
I've praised the work that evangelicals do in the third world (Christian
aid groups are being particularly helpful in Sudan, at a time when most
of the world has done nothing about the genocide there), I also feel
a responsibility to protest intolerance at home.
Should we really
give intolerance a pass if it is rooted in religious faith?
Many American Christians
once read the Bible to mean that African-Americans were cursed as descendants
of Noah's son Ham, and were intended by God to be enslaved. In the 19th
century, millions of Americans sincerely accepted this Biblical justification
for slavery as God's word but surely it would have been wrong
to defer to such racist nonsense simply because speaking out could have
been perceived as denigrating some people's religious faith.
People have the
right to believe in a racist God, or a God who throws millions of nonevangelicals
into hell. I don't think we should ban books that say that. But we should
be embarrassed when our best-selling books gleefully celebrate religious
intolerance and violence against infidels.
That's not what
America stands for, and I doubt that it's what God stands for.
Copyright 2004 The
New York Times Company