Islam and Fear in the Veins

From Clooney to U2 to Danish cartoons Mark Greene finds that making a stand about Islam may come at a high price

I never thought I’d be living in a country where I’d be afraid to say in public what I really think. I now do. I never thought I’d be watching a film about the McCarthy communist witch hunts in 1950s US and be thinking to myself that maybe the courage required to make a stand against a popular but damaging ideology would be courage that I might have to find. Or indeed that my children might also have to find such courage. However, on a fairly average February day sitting in our suburban home, talking to my wife, I felt the cold shiver of fear enter my veins. Fear not of being blown up, but fear of being beaten up, fear for my wife, fear for my children, fear for the people I work with, fear that we might have to leave the country – if I were to make a stand. But I shall come to that.

The first place to make a stand is where you are, although from the outside other people’s stands for justice, for family, for others often look rather easier than whatever challenge we might be faced with. Easier for U2, for example, to cancel the last eight dates of their world tour because one of the band members’ kids was ill than for the average factory worker to take a month off work for the same reason. Easier, we think, because U2 are very rich. But then again there is not the insignificant matter of the hundreds of thousands of disappointed fans who U2 have so long treated with great respect. There are the tour organisers and the venue teams, and all the hassle for U2’s management and marketing teams, not to mention the cancellation charges. Furthermore, there is the risk to the band’s cohesion. How you would feel if it were not your child, but someone else’s? Yes, maybe it was easier for U2 than for a factory worker to put family and personal loyalty before their work but they still did it. You can only play the hand you’re dealt.

We can make a difference in our country. Indeed we are. Christians worked hard to battle the proposed new religious incitement legislation and won. Christians, in the particular shape of the Methodists and the Salvation Army, worked hard to change the Government’s proposals to allow the development of regional casinos and won. Similarly, yesterday, I met a Christian bank executive who’d just been on a management training day where the facilitator asked them to do an exercise where they substituted the words ‘left’ and ‘right’ for swear words. The Christian said, “I don’t think so.” And they changed it. For that session at least. He played the hand he’d been dealt with courage and integrity.

And so as the UK Church girds up its loins to make the very most of the Da Vinci Code’s frontal assault on the credibility of the Bible, it’s worth noting that a number of Hollywood stars have in the last year or so made some significant stands. And whilst it’s too early to say that this year’s Oscar nominations reflect any deep sea change in Hollywood output it is surely not insignificant that all the best film nominations were for films of substance dealing with important contemporary issues – Crash on racism, Munich on terrorism, Brokeback Mountain on the reality of homosexual love, Good Night, and Good Luck on media responsibility, Capote on the commitment to justice for all.

Furthermore, some of those films involved significant financial and reputational risk. Many of the actors in Crash agreed to very low fees because they were committed to the film. Similarly, George Clooney wrote and directed Good Night for the princely sum of two dollars. Well, he can afford it, we may say. Still, it’s worth remembering, that it’s rather easier to give away other people’s money than our own and, that as a percentage of income, the rich are usually much less generous than the poor.

Indeed, in an America where President Bush said, “You’re either with us or with the enemy” a dissenting voice can easily be regarded as a traitor to the state. And that was precisely what happened to George Clooney. As he recalls, “They had packs of traitor playing cards going around and I was the Queen of Hearts.” And it is these themes of dissent, patriotism and treason that he explores in Good Night, and Good Luck.

The film takes us back to 1950s America when Senator Joseph McCarthy was pursuing his communist witch hunt with voracious tenacity, seeing red where there was only blue. Enter stage left, the courageous CBS news journalist Edward Murrow who decides at huge risk to himself, to his team and indeed to the network he serves to take on McCarthy and expose his methods as unconstitutional.  As the team prepares the programme they meet to ensure that none of them have any trace of communism in their past that McCarthy might be able to use against them. One of them admits that his ex-wife had been to a communist meeting before they were married and suggests that he should therefore leave the team. He is not a communist, nor his is his ex-wife but just the whiff of suspicion might be enough to jeopardise his career. Murrow’s response is simple, “We’re going to go with this story because the terror is right here in this room.” And so they do.

Which brings me to the fear, if not the terror, in my kitchen.

It was about two weeks after the infamous cartoons of Muhammad had been published in Denmark. There had been violent protests in several Muslim countries, an EU mission in Gaza had been stormed, trade embargoes on Danish goods were introduced by some countries and British Muslims were planning a march to show that they could protest without violence. And march, they did, without violence. But still it was a sobering moment. Cartoons are published in Denmark – legally – and thousands in the UK march. Imagine what would happen if someone in the UK had said something in public that Muslims decided that they were offended by.

Interestingly, on the whole, Christian leaders said nothing that I picked up in the major national media. In fact, what I did pick up was a Sunday Times article bewailing the fact that the Archbishop had said nothing. Perhaps, at that inflammatory time, that was wise. After all, the last thing we want to do is to create a public row between the faiths about the cartoons – that might simply fuel the average agnostic’s perception that religion creates conflict.

At the same time, why does no one making a positive Gospel stand on what we as Christians see as the distinctive contributions that only Christianity can make?
Why, as we rightly seek to vigorously protect the legal and social rights of our Muslim neighbours, colleagues and friends are we not saying anything that challenges their imams to protest against the endemic discrimination of Christians in virtually every country in the world with a Muslim majority?

Why are we not vigorously finding ways to distinguish the Christian response to blasphemy from the Muslim response in order to use that as a way to demonstrate not our indifference to the insult against our God but the difference His character makes to the way we respond?

Why do so few senior Christian figures say in public what Christians believe about the Koran? That, yes, it is a holy book to Muslims but that there is no historical or textual evidence to support the veracity of the changes it makes to the New Testament account of Mary, Jesus and Judas.

Christians are not at war with Muslims – any more than we are at war with secularists – but we do believe that there is only one way to the Father, through Jesus. And we do believe that the character of Allah in the Koran is not the same as the character of the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Our God is triune, the Muslim God is single, a monad. Our God is therefore in essence relational. Christians believe that God so loved the world that he sent his only son to die on a cross for us. Muslims believe that God would never have allowed a true prophet to suffer in such a way and therefore deny Jesus’ suffering on the cross and his resurrection. Christians believe that God can live in us and that when we go to heaven we will be in God, just as the Father is in Jesus and Jesus in the Father. Muslims do not posit such a depth of intimate relationship with God. The triune Christian God calls on his followers to love their enemies, even as God loves those opposed to him. There is no such teaching in Islam. Many people feel that we Christians cede too much ground, that we have a case to make and that we ought to be making it.

And so last February in my kitchen I was thinking that, though it isn’t really my field of expertise, or indeed LICC’s, maybe I or the organisation I represent ought to be saying something. Then the possible consequences of that hit me. And I was afraid. As Jasper Gerard put it in The Sunday Times, Muslims have no need of anti-blasphemy legislation in Britain because they already have a very effective deterrent – fear.

Now, as Tony Campolo has pointed out, the test of a democracy is not whether or not there are free elections. There have been free elections in Iraq and Christians are being persecuted and at least 300,000 have fled the country. No, the test of a democracy is when a minority can live without fear. So when one section of a population is afraid to speak what they believe to be the truth, then democracy is under threat.

It is time that we normalised respectful, robust, theological disagreement between Christians and Muslims – in the media, in our schools, in our workplaces. It is time that we expressed our exclusive Gospel truth claims in public – winsomely, humbly, but purposefully. Firstly, because if we believe that the only way to the Father is through Jesus, our Muslim neighbours face an eternity without Christ. Secondly because, if we do not normalise theological disagreement, the kind of forces that have demanded the removal of the red cross from ambulances and vans delivering aid to suffering Muslim children will slowly and surely erode the public expression of Christian belief and the public display of Christian symbols. And the reason why this is the case is because Islam is in its very essence intended to be a state religion.

This may or may not be the stand I have, or you, have to take, but it will perhaps not be as long before a Christian or indeed a non-Christian says something about Islam that causes offence and brings Muslims on to our streets in protest. How then will we play the hand that is dealt to us? As well as Clooney?

This article was first published in Christianity magazine and is reproduced by kind permission