NYTimes Reveals Truth About Missionaries

[Guest guest]

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/27/national/27ISLA.html

INDIA REVEALS MANY PARADOXES. TO THE WEST, TERRORISM IS NOT TERORISM

WHEN TARGETTED AGAINST INDIA. NOW CONVERSIONS ARE FINE EXCEPT WHEN IT

SEEKS ISLAMIC CONVERSION TO CHRISTIANITY.

ONCE AGAIN WE SEE A PARADOX. WHEN THESE SAME CHRISTIAN MISSIONARY

ACTIVITIES ARE TARGETTED AGAINST INDIA'S DEMOCRACY AND INDIA'S

PEOPLE, THEY ARE PRESENTED AS LIBERATORS.

ANY HINDUS THAT TRY TO EXPOSE THEIR CULTURALLY GENOCIDAL ACTS ARE

PRESENTED AS HATE FILLED FASCISTS.

YET HERE THE NEW YORK TIMES HAS NO QUALMS ABOUT REVEALING THE

CHRISTIAN EVANGELICAL ASSAULT ON ISLAM.

IT SEEMS THAT THE WESTERN WORLD HAS NO PROBLEM WITH TARGETTING HINDUS

FOR CONVERSION BUT IS ONLY CONCERNED ABOUT THIS ISSUE WHEN THEY ARE

ATTACKING THE WEST'S LATEST SACRED COW, THE MUSLIMS.

VRN PARKER

 

Seeing Islam as 'Evil' Faith, Evangelicals Seek Converts

By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

 

 

ROVE CITY, Ohio — On a recent Saturday in a church fellowship hall

here, evangelical Christians from several states gathered for an all-

day seminar on how to woo Muslims away from Islam.

 

The teacher urged a kindly approach: always show Muslims love,

charity and hospitality, he said, and carry copies of the New

Testament to give as gifts. The students, scribbling notes, included

two pastors, a school secretary and college students who said they

hoped to convert Muslims in the United States, or on mission trips

abroad.

 

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But although the teacher, an evangelical preacher from Beirut,

stressed the need to avoid offending Muslims, he projected a snappy

PowerPoint presentation showing passages from the Koran that he said

proved Islam was regressive, fraudulent and violent.

 

"Here in the Koran, it says slay them, slay the infidels!" said the

teacher, who said he did not want to be identified because being a

missionary to Muslims put his life at risk. "In the Bible there are

no words from Jesus saying we should kill innocent people."

 

At the grass roots of evangelical Christianity, many are now

absorbing the antipathy for Islam that emerged last year with the

incendiary comments of ministers. The sharp language, from religious

leaders like Franklin Graham, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and Jerry

Vines, the former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, has

drawn rebukes from Muslims and Christian groups alike. Mr. Graham

called Islam "a very evil and wicked religion, and Mr. Vines called

Muhammad, Islam's founder and prophet, a "demon-possessed pedophile."

 

In evangelical churches and seminaries across the country, lectures

and books criticizing Islam and promoting strategies for Muslim

conversions are gaining currency. More than a dozen recently

published critiques of Islam are now available in Christian

bookstores.

 

Arab International Ministry, the Indianapolis group that led the

crash course on Islam here, claims to have trained 4,500 American

Christians to proselytize Muslims in the last six years, many of

those since the 2001 terrorist attacks.

 

The oratorical tone of these authors and lecturers varies, but they

share the basic presumption that the world's two largest religions

are headed for a confrontation, with Christianity representing what

is good, true and peaceful, and Islam what is evil, false and violent.

 

The criticism is coming predominantly from evangelicals, who belong

to many independent churches and Christian denominations, including

the Southern Baptist Convention.

 

Evangelicals have always believed that all other religions are wrong,

but what is notable now is the vituperation.

 

"The Koran's good verses are like the food an assassin adds to poison

to disguise a deadly taste," writes Don Richardson, a well-known

missionary who worked in Muslim countries, in "Secrets of the Koran"

(Regal Books, 2003). "Better to find the same food, sans poison, in

the Bible." This month, he is scheduled to speak on Islam at churches

in five American cities.

 

Most of the authors and teachers preach a corollary of the Christian

dictum to "love the sinner and hate the sin." They assert that while

the vast majority of Muslims are not evil, they have been deceived by

a diabolical religion based on a flawed scripture that can never

bring them salvation.

 

Akbar Ahmed, chairman of the Islamic studies department at American

University, said he grew up attending Catholic and Protestant

missionary schools in Pakistan, but never heard a negative word about

Islam from the missionaries. Now, he said, the new hostility to Islam

and, in particular, the insults to the prophet Muhammad have outraged

the Muslim world.

 

"The whole range of Muslims, from orthodox to liberal secularists,

are all lined up against these attacks coming from the American

evangelists," said Mr. Ahmed, the author of a new book "Islam Under

Siege: Living Dangerously in a Post-Honor World" (Polity

Press). "Unwittingly, these evangelists have unleashed a

consolidation of sentiments for Islam. Even the most moderate Muslims

have been upset by this."

 

The push for conversions may backfire for the evangelists, he said,

since Muslims who may have been open to the missionaries' presence

feel their honor has been insulted.

 

In interviews, evangelical authors and lecturers said their work did

not denigrate Islam as much as share the truth about Christianity.

Ergun M. Caner, raised a Muslim by his Turkish family, converted to

Christianity as a teenager and wrote, with his brother

Emir, "Unveiling Islam: An Insider Look at Muslim Life and Beliefs"

(Kregel Publications), which has sold more than 100,000 copies.

 

"I am more interested in apologetics than polemics," said Mr. Caner,

now a professor of theology and church history at The Criswell

College. "Apologetics is defending your faith, and polemics is

critiquing others. A Muslim has the right to to worship Allah, and I

have a right to stand in front of that mosque and tell them that

Jesus saves. That's the hope for Iraq, the hope for Afghanistan."

 

Evangelical scholars and leaders cite several reasons for their

quickening interest in Islam: the American defeat of a major Muslim

nation, Iraq, which may open it to Christian missionaries, while

other Muslim nations remain closed; the 2001 terrorist attacks, which

led many Americans to see Islam as a global threat; the greater

numbers and visibility of Muslims in the United States, and the

demise of Communism, once public enemy No. 1 for many evangelical

organizations.

 

"Evangelicals have substituted Islam for the Soviet Union," said the

Rev. Richard Cizik, vice president for governmental affairs of the

National Association of Evangelicals, which represents 43,000

congregations. "The Muslims have become the modern-day equivalent of

the Evil Empire."

 

The National Association of Evangelicals called on Christian leaders

this month to temper their anti-Islam oratory, saying it had been

unhelpful to interfaith relations, and dangerous to Christians

spreading the gospel to Muslims. While some evangelical leaders

welcomed the criticism, others bristled and said that it was not the

Christians but the Muslims who must stop the hate-speech.

 

Historians note that enmity between Christianity and Islam dates as

far back as the Crusades, the fall of Byzantium and the reconquest of

Spain.

 

"Keep in mind that Islam is the only religious tradition that has

ever threatened the existence of Christianity," said Charles Kimball,

chairman of the religion department at Wake Forest University in

Winston-Salem, N.C., and author of the book "When Religion Becomes

Evil" (Harper San Francisco, 2002). "That's deeply woven into our

subconscious, into Western literature and culture, and so this image

of an Islamic threat taps into a notion that's there already."

 

The conservative evangelical approach to Islam is in stark contrast

with the "interfaith understanding" approach of many Orthodox, Roman

Catholic and mainline Protestant churches like the Methodists,

Episcopalians and Lutherans. Since 9/11, local churches in these

denominations began inviting Muslims to explain their faith at a

flurry of interfaith events and dialogue sessions.

 

"God calls all of us to have an open mind and an open heart," said

the Rev. Robert Edgar, general secretary of the National Council of

Churches, which represents many Protestant and Orthodox

denominations. "And many of the people who are part of the National

Council of Churches believe that if judgment is to be made it needs

to be made by God and not by those of us who have divided ourselves

up around a particular ideology."

 

These churches acknowledge theological differences between

Christianity and Islam, but stress the common roots and essential

compatibility. They teach that Muslims are monotheists, "Allah" is

simply Arabic for God, and both faiths share Abraham as patriarch.

 

But for many of the evangelical experts on Islam, these notions are

simplistic whitewash to paint over a real theological divide.

 

At the daylong seminar in the fellowship hall of Southwest Grace

Brethren Church, just outside Columbus, the teacher drew on his own

life experience as evidence of Islam's evils. While President Bush

and others have depicted Islam as a peaceful religion that has

been "hijacked" by extremists, the teacher said he knew better than

to believe that.

 

He spoke of a childhood friend in Beirut who joined the Hezbollah

terrorist network and showed off his victims' severed ears. Another

friend, he said, was threatened with death by his father when he

converted to Christianity. (The teacher did not mention the

Phalangist Christian militias that helped stoke Lebanon's civil war.)

 

He did not tell the class who he was, and his mysteriousness

reinforced his message that Christian missionaries face danger in

Muslim nations. At least six have been killed since Sept. 11, 2001.

 

"You can tell me Islam is peaceful, but I've done my homework," he

said, reeling off a list of Koranic citations. "From the beginning of

Islam, the sword brought results faster than words."

 

Some of what he taught would be accepted by most theologians: Muslims

reject the Christian concept of a Trinitarian God — the Father, the

Son and the Holy Ghost. Muslims respect Jesus as a prophet, but do

not accept the Christian belief that he is the son of God.

 

But he intermingled accepted facts with negative accounts of Islamic

teaching, history and traditions. The pilgrimage to Mecca, he said,

is a dangerous event at which people are killed every year. Communal

prayers each Friday are "a day of rage," he said.

 

And Muslims even pray differently than Christians, he said. "Muslims

pray to get points," he said, "not to communicate with God." Group

prayer on Fridays is for "extra points," he said.

 

Pat McEvoy, a secretary at a high school in Columbus, said she had

known very little about Islam before the seminar. Her school has an

influx of students from Somalia, and as she walked through the

hallways she regarded these immigrants as "a virtual mission field."

 

She said she felt an obligation to save them from an eternity in Hell.

 

"If I had the answer for cancer, what sort of a human would I be not

to share it?" Ms. McEvoy said.

 

The teacher concluded by giving the students tips on what to do and

not to do to reach Muslims: Don't approach them in groups. Don't

bring them to your church, because they will misunderstand the

singing and clapping as a party. Do invite them home for a meal. Do

bring them chocolate chip cookies. Do talk about how, in order to get

saved, they must accept Jesus.

 

"Our job," he said, "is not to make the Muslim a Christian. Our job

is to show them the love of Christ."