*Sightings* 10/25/2010

*Christian Violence
*- Martin E. Marty

 ¢â‚¬Å“Christians kill too! ¢â‚¬  is the topic this week as frightened and angry
Americans keep raising the temperature of Islam-versus-Everyone-Else
controversies. In his new book *Christianity and Genocide in Rwanda, *Timothy
Longman writes that in three months in 1994 more than one-tenth of the
population of Rwanda was killed. Longman notes,  ¢â‚¬Å“Rwanda is an overwhelmingly
Christian Country, with just under 90 percent of the population in a 1991
census claiming membership in a Catholic, Protestant, or Seventh-Day
Adventist Church. ¢â‚¬  Killers from these churches engaged in ecumenical
savagery, their mass-murdering sanctioned by the church and, as is
well-known, often occurred in church sanctuaries turned slaughter houses.
 ¢â‚¬Å“Muslims [1.2 percent of the population] are also said to have participated
much less willingly in the genocide and in particular to have resisted
killing fellow Muslims, ¢â‚¬  according to Longman.

Another book much discussed this week is Eliza Griswold ¢â‚¬â„¢s *The Tenth
Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line between Christianity and
Islam.*Ms. Griswold spoke at the church where she was confirmed; her
father was the
Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church in the U.S. Hers is a ground-level
report along the tenth parallel in Africa and Asia, an area in which half of
the world ¢â‚¬â„¢s 1.57 billion Muslims and 60 percent of the world ¢â‚¬â„¢s two billion
Christians live, die, hope, and kill. One can know those statistics, but it
is hard to absorb them. Griswold spent much time with Franklin Graham, who
serves people in need and provocatively tries to convert Muslims in
dangerous zones. His dismissal of Islam as a wicked and evil religion is
well-reported on in the United States ¢â‚¬”and in Islamic spheres!

Abdullahi Abdullahi, a Muslim lawyer told Griswold of an outbreak of
violence:  ¢â‚¬Å“That was the day ethnicity disappeared entirely and the conflict
became just about religion. ¢â‚¬  One suffering pastor, while citing the Bible,
told her of the killing,  ¢â‚¬Å“This is about religious intolerance; Our God is
different than the Muslim God. ¢â‚¬  At Yelwa in Nigeria Griswold visited killing
fields where 660 Muslims were massacred in two days alone; twelve mosques
were burned. Archbishop Peter Akinola, well known in the United States, head
of the Anglican Church of Nigeria, told her,  ¢â‚¬Å“No Christian would pray for
violence, but it would be utterly na ƒ ¯ve to sweep this issue of Islam under
the carpet. I ¢â‚¬â„¢m not out to combat anybody. I am only doing what the Holy
Spirit tells me to do. . . Let no Muslim think they have the monopoly on
violence. ¢â‚¬  They don ¢â‚¬â„¢t. Western encouragers of hatred against Muslims or, if
Muslims, against Christians, play with fire–and death.

Disclaimers: First, the Christian apologist in me relishes chances to report
on Christian peace-making. Second, there is no interest here in
 ¢â‚¬Å“equivalency ¢â‚¬  in reporting body-counts when reporting on, say, Africa: Who
started each killing, and who killed most settles little. Third, there is no
Western (or Christian) self-hate operating here. Finally, reporting on
Christian-Muslim killing is not an advertisement for the claims of the Four
Horsemen of the current Atheist Front, who argue that if we got rid of
religion all would be well.

Following up on the fourth, I look at *Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and
Stalin,* a new giant of a book which reports on when, as the
*Economist*report  ¢â‚¬Å“two totalitarian empires, Nazi Germany and Stalin ¢â‚¬â„¢s
Soviet Union,
killed 14 million non-combatants, in peacetime and in war. ¢â‚¬  The latter was
officially atheist, and the former bizarrely disdainful of the faiths. Where
did their abolition of religion get us?

Finally, the current *Christian Century* includes an article by Eliza
Griswold, “On the Fault Line,” which features Pastor James Wuye and Imam
Nuryan Ashaffa who are working with some success to find ways for people in
Kaduna to coexist peacefully and creatively across the boundaries of their
two faiths.

*References*

 ¢â‚¬Å“History and Its Woes: How Stalin and Hitler Enabled Each Other’s
Crimes, ¢â‚¬ 
*The Economist, *October 14, 2010.

Eliza Griswold, *The Tenth Parallel:Dispatches from the Fault Line Between
Christianity and Islam* (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010).

—.  ¢â‚¬Å“On the Fault Line, ¢â‚¬  *Christian Century,* November 2, 2010.

Timothy Longman, *Christianity and Genocide in Rwanda* (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010).

Timothy Snyder, *Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin *(New York: Basic
Books, 2010).

Martin E. Marty’s biography, current projects, publications, and contact
information can be found at www.illuminos.com.

———-

*Sightings* comes from the Martin Marty
Centerat the University of
Chicago Divinity School.

Attribution

Columns may be quoted or republished in full, with attribution to the author
of the column, *Sightings*, and the Martin Marty Center at the University of
Chicago Divinity School.