Savages

Well said, Timothy+,

I have told Russell Means that my meager holdings in Paha Sapa go to the tribe when I shufle off this mortal coil.  Pe ‘Sla is right up there among the better ideas that have come down the pike.  Near Linda Kramer’s Borderlands Retreat Center, this property is beautiful, as well as culturally significant.  If only the Minconjou people can redeem it by November.

RE:  “May our love for God and neighbor stay warm in this cold hearted, savage world of sin. “

Fr. Tim cuts me to the quick. 

Again.

“But for me, Islam will always be the religion of 9/11.”

I can understand how one can feel that way.  Just as I can understand how one could feel that Christianity will always be the religion of the Spanish Inquisition, or America the country of the Wounded Knee Massacre.

Nevertheless I would still question how seriously you should be taken if you judge any religion, philosophy, ideology, or group by its worst excesses.

I was all the more surprised by the direction taken by the piece because of its beginning with our treatment of our own local “savages.”  Unquestionably there was serious conflict between Native Americans and newcomers of European ancestry.  Incidents of Indian enormities were not uncommon.  But their savagery was not more extreme than ours.  And, indeed, it was our consideration of them as “savages” which was used as the justification of much of our own savagery, from the brutality of massacres to the more refined brutality of making treaties, then tearing them up.

So I don’t see what we gain by proclaiming Moslems savages.  Some undoubtedly are.  Just as some Christians are.  But I think we delude ourselves if we think of savagery as something inherent in somebody else, as if the root of original sin were not as much in ourselves as in others.  We shouldn’t deny the brutality of 9/11.  But we might also consider what it must have felt like to be on the receiving end of the bombing of Baghdad.

#3 Rick - “I would still question how seriously you should be taken if you judge any religion, philosophy, ideology, or group by its worst excesses.”  One shouldn’t be taken seriously for such thinking.  But that is the nature of discourse in our time.  That is the nature of discourse in our institutions of higher learning, at least when it comes to Christianity.  It is the discourse of the “new atheists,” who are considered “intellectuals” and taken quite seriously.  It is the stance for discourse in any liberal Christian “dialogue” with other religions.

The piece is not a manifesto.  There’s little in it of which to be proud, my impression of Islam included.  But Islam’s worst excesses are here and now, not in history books.  Just like the Black Hills are still in the hands of those who stole them today, not just in books and movies.  So I can understand a Lakota telling me to pack my Jesus and leave, painful as that might be.  And in all fairness I understand my gut reaction to Islam: “Take your holy-book-in-a-language-you-can’t-even-read and your constantly provoked victim religion and your primitive fetishes and live someplace where you don’t bother the rest of us.”

I think the Lord’s words at the end are all that stand, and they stand as a warning about how this savage, God-rejecting world can wreck any of us.  People of faith included.  Iraqis in Baghdad, Germans in Dresden, a janitor in the World Trade Center, a baby on the Pine Ridge Reservation - all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, and all have suffered in a world made much harder by sin.

There is no inexorable trajectory of human progress.  There is a constant recycling of sin.  And there is an offer of grace and freedom, found only in Jesus Christ - who must be always an offer, never an order.

Tim, with much that you say, especially your conclusion, I would much agree.

As a Christian I cannot consider Islam as anything but a human creation.  In fact, I think it best understood as a Christian heresy, as our medieval forebears did.

As a human creation I don’t think, then, that Islam has any necessary historical trajectory, other than its disappearance in the eschaton.  It may become more violent or fanatical.  It may become more tolerant.  My only personal experience with Moslems is with American Moslems—not many, but neighbors, engineers, nurses, small businessmen, coaches.  These people, in a democratic republic with freedom of religion, seem to practice their Islam just fine alongside my Christianity.  They may not necessarily be the future.  But surely they constitute a possible future.  And I think that that future becomes somewhat more possible if you and I, and our leaders, consider them, not as members of an irretrievably savage group, but as people whom an innaccurate purported revelation from God need not bar from an ethical life and good citizenship (as I would also say about our Mormon friends).

Rick - yes, I agree that we should hold them in prayer and obey the Scriptures that tell us to do whatever is within our power to live in peace with all around us. 

And I like your thought there in the middle about leaving the possible futures to God - indeed love hopes all things and to keep love from growing cold that possibility must be kept open.

Timothy,
I really wish you would be more clear about your thoughts and feelings in your writings. 

But seriously, I was surprised by the turn in the essay from Vine Deloria to bin Laden.  It begs for all kinds of clarifications—is this the same, or what about that?  The interaction of Christians and Indians was, for a long time, an obsession of mine. 

I believe, frankly, we should be absolutely horrified at the spread of Islam.  But there is a little bit of a silver lining in having Muslims from closed, hostile nations here.  We can befriend them and evangelize them, and they can spread the gospel in places no American can go. 

We Americans have some serious thinking to do about relating to the Islamic world.  Clearly, the State Department is operating out of a fiction about Islam and democracy. At the same time, I’m not very excited about using our armed forces to change the culture of Islamic nations.  How long will we have to occupy Iraq or Afghanistan until their culture changes fundamentally?  Shall we now add Libya or Egypt to the list?  Iran?  Both approaches are pouring out the lives of our soldiers and their families, not to mention trillions that America doesn’t have.

TW+ The policy dimension of this is above my pay grade.  I can spout my opinions, but I don’t see government as any more than what scripture says - a sword that can at best frighten off some (but not all) bad actors and spare some folks from the evil that bad actors do.

There are so many questions.  Is Islam empowered by God to punish our decadent culture, in the way that Assyria was empowered to punish Israel as the “rod of God’s anger?”  Could be.  Is Islam just a spasm of evil from a flawed culture?  Could be.

I like what you say in your third paragraph, which is what Rick gets at in #5.  Our human contact as Christ’s people is the best thing we have to offer.  And even with that we can’t see all the outcomes - those are in God’s hands.

fwiw I can see a Muslim being enraged by media spillover of our porn, our irreverence, our materialism and any number of other idols spewing out of our “Judaeo-Christian” culture.

But I think that our Western ideas of free expression, such as what we’ve embodied in our First Amendment, are the most “Christian” political answer, as they eschew coercion in favor of persuasion.  This was the way of the King of kings.  We don’t need the force of law against blasphemy, which is Islam’s approach today.  As I wrote, they seem willing to ignore history and try to impose a solution that has never, ever worked in the long term. 

We need the force of law against those who deprive blasphemers of life, liberty and/or property.  Anything beyond that should be beyond the scope of human government.

The problem with the comparison is that, as described, the taking of the Hills came from greed.  This is not part of essential Christian teaching.  Arguably, the jihadi killings do come from Islam’s foundational teachings, their holy book and holy traditions.  There are Muslims who are trying to reinterpret their traditions in the light of modern thinking, emphasizing some of the earlier Qur’anic verses over the later ones, but these Muslims are not in the majority.

“...after watching the repeated paroxysms of rage resulting from any critical speech about Islam over the last several years, it’s difficult to dispute the central thesis that at some level this is a conflict between civilization and its opposite.”

Katherine #10 - “For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it.” (James 2:10 ESV)

I don’t know that it is relevant to point out a difference between Christians ignoring/departing from Scripture and Muslims obeying toxic teachings in their book.

The problem is sin and the savagery it enables.

Well said, Mr. Fountain.  I think the intellectual effete snobs that wag on about how wonderful Islam is are, at root, mere anti-Christian bigots.  “If we have a common enemy, we must be friends….”  Islam, at its foundation, is blood thirsty, blood lustful, and vengeful.  As an ancient churchmen said, “... mere monotheistic headonism.”

“My only personal experience with Moslems is with American Moslems—not many, but neighbors, engineers, nurses, small businessmen, coaches.  These people, in a democratic republic with freedom of religion, seem to practice their Islam just fine alongside my Christianity.  They may not necessarily be the future.  But surely they constitute a possible future.  And I think that that future becomes somewhat more possible if you and I, and our leaders, consider them, not as members of an irretrievably savage group, but as people whom an innaccurate purported revelation from God need not bar from an ethical life and good citizenship (as I would also say about our Mormon friends).”

Well said Rick.

“irretrievably savage” is not the same as “Manifestly unschooled by history, Islam rises up as today’s global savage.”  It might well moderate based on interaction with some Western nations, although that does not seem to be happening in Europe.  Like some of you who’ve commented, I’ve met some fine people who identify as Muslim, although in all honesty most of them have become rather nominal and secular.

But I have a very negative perception of Islam as a global movement today, in the same way a Lakota might react to even the gentlest, most well intentioned presentation of Jesus from a White man.  I’m not happy with the emotion behind my perception.  But Islam works hard to create it.

What is stuck in my head is the TV pictures of the Iranian students celebrating in the streets after the capture of all the American Embassy personell in the ‘70s.

Hey Father Timothy, cheer up!  The good news (or is it deflating?) is that a mosque or Islamic Center isn’t much like a crack house or strip club.  I’ve never been in one, but I’d be very surprised if the sort of forbidden pleasure one seeks in a crack house or strip club is present in an Islamic Center.  My guess is that there are probably a lot of kids dragged there by their parents, nervous single dudes looking for chicks, overweight parents, and all the other fears, insecurities, hopes, dreams, etc that you’d find at most churches or YMCA’s.  Flesh and blood Muslims haven’t corned some sort of hideous yet strangely liberating or beautiful savagery.  If anything they’re not some scary/cool fortress holdout against civilization, multiculturalism, and global capitalism that also gets to enjoy Hillary Clinton and Katherine Jefferts Schori’s full blessing (even if they get it, it doesn’t mean the same to them as it would to us).  Like us are caught up in the annoying, inconsistent demands of civilization AND they have to deal with even more of a hassle at airport security.  Their fantasies do have a different accent, but Christendom and Sioux Falls were conflicted before they came along.

I think you already know this on some level, and you want readers to know that you know it.

#17 That’s well said.  Matthew 5:43-48 comes to mind, insofar as God’s sun and rain are upon us all.

My experiences with American Muslims parallel those of some of the other commenters.  Many of the Muslims here appear to be immigrants from difficult parts of the world, seeking a better life, and will probably secularize to achieve it here.  Unlikely that a Sioux Falls Islamic center will be a hotbed of craziness.

I thought about deleting some of the outburst, but then it wouldn’t be much of an honest confession.  Not gonna pull a Ragsdale. 

But I do hold to the point that Islam is the reigning global savagery.  Doesn’t mean it will always be.  It is today.

There’s encouraging news out of Libya this morning:

BENGHAZI, Libya (Reuters) - A Libyan Islamist militia was swept out of the eastern city of Benghazi in a popular protest against the armed groups that ran into the early hours of Saturday morning, Reuters witnesses said.

At least one person was killed and 20 wounded, a hospital source said, as militias tried to fight the demonstrators from a heavily fortified base. Gunfire could be heard in the area before the fighters were forced out.

Looters carried weapons out of the vacated Ansar al-Sharia military base compound as men clapped and chanted: “Say to Ansar al-Sharia, Benghazi will be your inferno.”

Ansar al-Sharia has been linked to the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi last week in which the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other Americans died. It denies involvement.

The action against the group appeared to be part of a coordinated sweep of militia headquarters buildings by police, government troops and activists following a mass public demonstration against militia units on Friday.

- - -

Thousands of Libyans had marched in Benghazi on Friday in support of democracy and against the Islamist militias that Washington blames for the assault on its consulate. Hundreds of Ansar al-Sharia supporters held their own protest.

Friday’s “Rescue Benghazi day” demonstration called for the government to disband armed groups that have refused to give up their weapons since the NATO-backed revolution last year.

“It’s obvious that this protest is against the militias. All of them should join the army or security forces as individuals, not as groups,” student Ahmed Sanallah said. “Without that there will be no prosperity and no success for the new Libya.”

Although the main demands of the marchers did not mention the attack on the U.S. consulate, it seems to have provided a strong impetus for the authorities to rally support behind the country’s weak government.

U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens was well liked, and many Libyans condemned the attack on the consulate despite being angered by the anti-Islamic U.S.-made film that triggered it.

“many Libyans condemned the attack on the consulate despite being angered by the anti-Islamic U.S.-made film that triggered it.”

Repeating that story line…the narrative Clinton and Obama want us to believe.  Remarkable.

#18.  Thanks, Father Tim.

Indians past and present are super cool, and it’s terrible what happened to them, so it’s easy for empathetic people to identify with them especially in the presence of illuminating analogies.  But we’re not innocent Indians.  We’re not 19th century wicked white people (good band name?). And we’re not saintly 19th century white people either.  We’re not responsible for what we can’t change.  We can’t change the past.  But we can try to heal its present wounds!

I bring these connections up only to sever them because I just realized that the “you” in Paul’s quote from Colossians calls out to modern Indians just as much as it’s addressed to contemporary whites (although you’re right that Indians may have some additional hurdles).  If D.H. Lawrence is right, Puritans got into big trouble because they confused their fallen “earthliness” with the Indians’ natural earthiness .  But we all stand before God some admixture of orderly civilization, corrupt civilization, noble savage, and ignoble savage.  Brokenness is one deep common connection.