Islamic terrorists in France and Austria have recently killed their neighbors who had different views on religion. While prior incidents have provoked some negative reactions, it appears that European governments may finally publicly own up to what everyone knows but has been too afraid to say out loud – the problem of religious intolerance and violence today is mostly a problem in Islam, and needs to be dealt with head on with an official response that’s tailored to the problem with Islam.
Many have noted that “moderate” Islam struggles to deal with suppressing the Islamic terrorists, without repudiating the core concepts of Islam. Islam speaks with many different voices, of course, and many of them emphasize that Christians have oppressed Muslims though that is far from the whole story. In any event, from the Taliban, to ISIS, to various other local Islamic terrorist groups, the moderate segment of Islam has not been successful at suppressing the extremist, terrorist part of political Islam.
Of course, many on the Left don’t understand why religion hasn’t just died off. To many elites, all religion is just hokum. They might express admiration for certain primitive sects in a patronizing way, or find sympathetic themes in anti-industrial, New Age stuff, but mostly they reserve their venom and contempt for anything Christian. And, given the chance, their theme is frequently that Muslims are bad, but Christians are just as bad, or maybe worse.
But official France is rigorously secular and previously took the view that it needed to treat Islamic immigrants and citizens the same as Christians. That may change.
That’s not to say that we as Christians ought to abandon civility or our respect for Muslims and their dignity as persons. They are, of course, created in the image of God, fallen and sinful like us, and in need of the good news of the Gospel, just like us.
The larger problem with the approach taken by the French is that their emphasis on secularism, which was historically directed at reducing the power and influence of the Catholic church, seems to require that they regulate all religions in the same manner. Some will say that its not “fair” to treat Muslims better or worse than Catholics in France. The French government now says that the teaching of the religion – in this case, Islam – must bow to the “French” way of looking at the world. It claims that this is how it has treated Catholics since the revolution. I suspect that, even though this is the public claim of the government, that it – supported by French public opinion – will suppress Islam more than it has suppressed Catholicism. This is partly because Catholic terrorism is not currently a problem, but also because, at its heart, Islam teaches that the government should be Islamic, and not something separate from religion. Of course, this version of “political Islam” is inconsistent with the French approach and also is fundamentally at odds with the American system.
Note that the French effort at forced adaptation of a religion to the government’s policy is, in fact, precisely what the Chinese government is now doing with Christians, Muslims and other religious groups in China. In that case, we can clearly see the problems with government forcing religions and religious people to conform to the government’s view of what that religion should teach. We’re more sympathetic to the French effort because we can see the objective difference between modern Islam and modern Christianity, but the oppression of religion by government is generally going to be a problem and the particular target or justification can be (and in China, is) broader than just the threat of terrorism. In China, there’s little or no effort to characterize Christians as terrorist threats – rather, the core message of God’s sovereignty in the Bible threatens the power of the Communist party and its pervasive control over government and individuals. By some accounts, there are at least 60 million and as many as 100 million Christians in China vs about 90 million members of the Communist party.
True freedom of religion is a very rare thing outside of USA. Certainly, Islam does not teach this, nor does Islam tolerate it in practice, historically or even today in most majority-Muslim countries around the world. In majority-Muslim countries, the government is expected to be Islamic and to suppress other religions. Of course, the religion of Islam is corrupted and co-opted and used in a cynical way by Islamic governments. Marxist based governments have universally sought to suppress, subordinate or eliminate religion. And among non-Islamic countries, in fact, France and China are just two more recent and prominent examples of a long tradition of governments and rulers wanting to use and manipulate religion for their benefit. Americans should be grateful that our constitutional order minimizes this problem and leaves us more free than most places in the world.
What Are We To Make of This? 