Onward Christian Soldiers
While I am not a fan of the word “Christianists” as a parallel for Islamists it does serve a purpose as Andrew Sullivan points out:
In all of this, the Christianists do not represent most Christians, although they have made great strides in the Vatican and in the fundamentalist leadership. I should stress: these people have every right to their views. They certainly have developed an arsenal of arguments and a body of thought to back them up. But this agenda, whatever else it is, cannot be described as mainstream Christianity. Its extremism, its enmeshment with partisan political power, its contempt for individual liberty, its certainty and arrogance and intolerance, demand that some other name be given to it. They have gotten away with too much for too long. It’s time for mainstream Christians, in both parties, to fight back. And we are.
andrew sullivan
It is critically important that we distinguish between the fundamentalists within the Chrisitan world and the rest of that world.
I’ve written previously about how annoying it is to have fundamentalist Christians suggest that their particular brand of often hateful and almost always ignorant Christianity trumps mine. The happy clapping, gay hating, “family friendly” fundies are willing to use the State to enforce their moral vision. I am not. But I am willing to use the State to seek create as broad a secular space in human affairs as possible.
For the Islamists the Koran cannot be interpreted as leaving room for expressly non-religious conduct. It is an essentially totalitarian document and, within its terms, it makes perfectly good sense to have, to take V.S. Naipaul’s example, a Ministry for Islamic Urban Design. Unreformed and unenlighted, Islam can continue to support the idea that it is wrong, un-Islamic, to have a seperation between Church and State.
Chrsitianity, from the moment Jesus proclaimed, “Render unto. Caesar that which is Caesar’s, and unto God that which is God’s ”(Luke 20:19-26) has been able to recognize the critical distinction between religion and the state. It has not always done so; but the capacity has been there.
Attempts to use the State to further explicitly religious moral agendas need to be fought by secularists and Christians alike. It does not matter if the issue is the impostion of shira law or the demand that selected portions of the Old Testament be embodied in the law, the push to use the state to further religious causes must be rigorously opposed.
Written by jay on May 11th, 2006 with
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