Friday, August 8, 2014

Christians Stranded on a Mountain Top

Two days after the Feast of the Transfiguration comes news of Christians and other minorities stranded on a mountain top in northern Iraq.  If they had stayed in their homes, they would have surely been slaughtered by ISIS.  If they leave the mountain to head to safety, again, they are likely to die.  If they stay, they will perhaps die too, of starvation and thirst.

During my youth in the '70's and early '80's, people in my church groups often talked about what we'd do if we were asked to deny our faith.  But we didn't envision a conversion scenario; we were likely thinking about Communists.  We also thought about populations of Jews through the centuries who passed as Christians.  We admired the bravery of those who continued to practice their Jewish faith in secret.

If a militant Muslim group took over my hometown, would I convert or die?  The very question boggles the imagination.

Yet history shows us over and over again the presence of populations who think they're safe until the day when they're not.  Again my thoughts return to Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, a book which shows how quickly a country can be taken over by militants and fundamentalists and how grim life would become for so many.  When Atwood wrote it in the mid-80's, she said that she didn't include any details that weren't actually happening to women somewhere in the world.  I can't imagine that the situation for women has improved worldwide since the time of the book's publication.
I believe that if I renounced my faith, God would forgive me.  But knowing about the lives of women under fundamentalist Islamic regimes, I might rather go ahead and be killed.

However, the human brain is a tricky thing.  I also know that I would want to believe that the situation would change, that the militant Muslim group would not prevail for long.  I would be tempted to hang on, to say that I would convert and then live subversively.

I treasure many freedoms that our country protects for its citizens, and I always have difficulty choosing the one that's most important to me.  I often say freedom of speech.  But the news from northern Iraq shows how vital our freedom of religion is too--and how rare.

2 comments:

John Joseph Flanagan said...

Many people in America, primarily deep liberal thinkers and idealists, educated but ignorant about the history of Islam, want coexistence so desperately that the truth escapes them. Muslim fundamentalists and communist fanatics simply have no compassion or love for peaceful Christians, and will require you give up your faith, or they will kill you, or reeducate you in a gulag in a remote and hostile setting. As a Christian, it is not sinful to wage a just war of resistance, because evil must be opposed and destroyed. When Jesus spoke of passively allowing yourself to be persecuted for the faith, He was referring to your own government being upon your shoulders. Killing and torture by psychopaths for political reasons can be resisted, as Christians have done for ages.

Shrdlu42 said...

      Many people in America, primarily deep “conservative” thinkers and “reactionaries”, educated but ignorant about the history of Christianity, want a “Christian Nation” so desperately that the truth escapes them. Throughout history, Catholic fundamentalists and Protestant fanatics simply have no compassion or love for peaceful non-Christians, and will require you give up your faith, or they will kill you, or reeducate you in a gulag in a remote and hostile setting. They claim that, as a Christian, it is not sinful to wage a just war of resistance, because evil must be opposed and destroyed. But the “evil” they oppose is anyone who dares to belong to a different faith, or who has different beliefs. Killing and torture by psychopaths for political reasons (as Christians have done for ages) should be resisted.

      See, I can engage in sweeping generalizations and half-truths as well. The only real truth is that Church and State, Religion and Government, must be kept separate. And attempts at theocracy must be defied, no matter the theology in question.