Aljazeera was yesterday interviewing a security export from London, who said the terrorist atrocities in Norway were almost certainly the work of Islamists. He claimed they had targeted Norway partly because security there was comparatively lax. It has since emerged that the bombing in Oslo and the mass shooting on the island of Utoeya were the work of a 32 year old far right Christian fundamentalist Anders Behring Breivik. We do not know at the moment whose his accomplices were.
Today Professor Paul Rogers (Peace Studies, Bradford University) on the BBC was claiming that Breivik was a political freak with no popular support. Later it emerged that Breivik had posted many comments of forums praising Geert Wilders. I hope Professor Rogers intention was to calm public fear, as he is wrong.
Geert Wilders ironically named Dutch "Party For Freedom" won 15.5% in parliamentary elections in 2010. The equally right wing Islamophobic "Freedom Party of Austria" won 17.5% of the vote in 2008 parliamentary elections. In Sweden the far right wing and certainly Islamophobic "Swedish Democrats" have broken into national politics with 5.7% of the votes in 2010. Rather than Breivik being an isolated incident he is on the rising edge of a dark political tide, which is set to expand rapidly as economic stagnation grips Europe.
Breivik’s Christian fundamentalism is also far from unique. How can a grown man walk around an island shooting unarmed teenagers and not feel deep shame? How can he believe that Jesus Christ could possibly approve of car bombs on crowded city streets?
A sarcastic joke defines a Christian fundamentalist as an evangelical who is angry. There is some truth to this. Evangelicals believe in the absolute truth of every word of the Bible (inerrancy in the jargon). This standpoint allows the human inspired content of the Bible to dilute the content inspired by God. In order to claim to be taking every word literally an artificial balancing act of interpretation is required, which has the result of allowing the human content of the Bible to diminish the divine view of God it contains. Normally enough of the good content survives to temper the temptation to go too far with the bad. Except in anger, hence the barb in the joke. How many evangelicals are there? Therefore how many people have been converted to Breivik's extreme religious views?
If you think I am being unfair to evangelicals, then I should also say that liberal Christianity seems to lack positive strong beliefs. As if they are following the obsession with "good character" that evangelicals promote, but simply reacting to the right wing version with a left wing version. It should also be said that the same criticism could be made of Islamic and Jewish fundamentalism.
Go beyond character, we are out to change the world with prayer and action. We are certain to fail, but we are going to try, because God belongs to all and everything.
Let us pray for Anders Breivik to see the absolutely terrible mistake he has made, and put all his energy for the rest of his life into trying to refute what he did yesterday and the false ideas that lead him there.
No comments:
Post a Comment