As our current debate about the problem of Islam continues to percolate, foam and froth (though precious few have woken up to smell the coffee, no matter how raucously the terrorist barristas spew forth their scalding meccaccinos—okay, I’ve gone too far with my metaphor here), I have noticed one common canard bubble up to the surface too often: the equivalency between Christians and Muslims, and between Christianity and Islam.
In further analyzing this canard, I have noticed a bifurcation between, one the one hand,
a) two types of equivalency
and, on the other hand,
b) a false contrast.
The perpetrators of (a) are either PC Multiculturalists out of naive ignorance and/or anti-Western animus, or sly Muslims doing their tap-dancing maneuver of forestalling an honest dialogue (the sly dancing is also stylized by a select few of the most egregious Leftists in the West, such as a Noam Chomsky).
The perpetrators of (b) are mostly right-wing American Protestants.
While examining Christianity in the context of any analytical discussion of the problem of Islam, the intention is to prepare apple sauce over here and orange marmelade over there—not an indiscriminate jumble of fruit salad. I will now argue that on two grounds (each broken down into three points), the putative equivalency between Christianity and Islam is flawed. We shall also see that the forced contrast put forth (mostly) by right-wing American Protestants is, in fact, based upon one of the flawed modes of equivalency.
The first ground for equivalency is that, when it is put crudely, “Christianity is just as bad as Islam.” If the utterer of this crudity is slightly refined, he might at least take the effort to tweak the assertion into “Christianity was just as bad as Islam.” However, most of the time, he will want to quickly regroup from his faltering misstep, by fumbling for a semi-coherent attempt to reestablish the equivalency he was asserting—by claiming that Christians continue to be potential fascists (just as bad as Muslims), or that they are in fact exerting their fascist power upon the West (and/or upon America). Frequently, this fumbling reassertion of the equivalency becomes mired in self-contradiction, when the PC Multiculturalist will be reminded suddenly (perhaps a chip had been momentary loose in their brain but now became activated again with one of their vehement movements of their head) of Islam’s “Golden Age”—making Islam no longer the equivalent of Christianity, but now essentially superior.
On this first ground, the data is clear, throughout history, and in the present, that Christianity is not, in fact, as bad as Islam:
a) While both Christians and Muslims have, in various times in history, done bad things, only in Islam are the bad things lauded and directly commanded by God (through his ‘Messenger’, Mohammed), to be received in a mental attitude of literalistic inerrancy and utter submissiveness. In Christianity, there is not one major bad thing—on the scale of the things commanded and lauded by God in Islam—commanded or lauded by Jesus. There are a couple of minor, peripheral and indirect things—such as the remark by Jesus that (to paraphrase) “it would be better if a man plucked out his own eye that offends him than that he leave it intact”, but needless to say, we do not see an epidemic of Christians lining up in ERs around the world with a bloody hole in their face where their eyes used to be. Muslims and Leftists alike like to cite various passages of the Old Testament that depict Israelites waging wars under God’s inspiration, or that describe regressive laws (such as in Deuteronomy and Leviticus), but these have not directly informed the mores of Western Christians for at least two or three centuries. To a significant degree, then, it can be said that when Christians do bad things (and yes, they have done plenty in history), they do them in spite of what their paramount Teacher, Jesus, commanded them; but when Muslims do bad things to Infidels, they do them in perfect harmony with what their paramount Guide, Mohammed, commanded and advised them to do.
b) The historical record arguably shows that Christians have been less egregiously violent and cruel than Muslims—though, admittedly, one must venture into such quantifications with some gingerly care, since it involves questions such as, “Is it worse to kill ten people than one person?” Nevertheless, when one surveys not only the quantity of Muslim violence but also the quality over its 1,350-year career (irrespective of the very relevant point that such violence is continuing to this very day while that of Christian qua Christian violence has virtually disappeared from the face of the globe, with only tiny fractions of exceptions which prove the rule), it seems to exceed Christian violence in quantity as well as in sheer savagery and cruelty. At any rate, as my parenthetical point just made clear, the overarching significant factor is that for at least the past 50 years, Muslim violence around the globe has stupendously outstripped Christian violence. Particularly in the last couple of decades, since an Islam Redivivus began to coalesce after a relatively more fallow (though by no means inactive) period in the shadow of Western global superiority—accelerated even more hectically in the post-911 period—, Muslim violence has become the #1 expression of geopolitical violence in the world, with all other cultures falling far, far behind. (And if one were to point to the outbreak of Western violence in Nazi Germany, another would do well to point out the Armenian genocide—not to mention the massacres of Assyrian and Greek populations—by Turkish Muslims only decades before.)
c) Not only is Christianity less negative than Islam, it is also far, far more positive. Notwithstanding the failings and sins of many Christians throughout history, Christianity has done immeasurable good throughout the world while there was a Christendom proper. Furthermore, Christianity has suffered the dismantling of its theocratic powers and, after a few significant hurdles of contention, strife and violence, has come to accept—with remarkable grace, maturity and flexibility—the new power structure of a dominant Western secularism. And that brings us to our refutation of the second ground for the supposed equivalency of Christianity and Islam.
The second ground that is adduced to prove an equivalency falls flat on its face, because it rests on the assumption that both Christianity and Islam are the same animal (or, in the parlance of our title, the same ‘fruit’). But the two systems are very different from each other, in three closely related ways:
1. Separation of Church and State
The first difference involves the idea of the separation of Church and State: put simply, Christianity from the beginning had at least the germ of the idea of such a separation (see the Gospel of Matthew 22:21; as well as Titus 3:1 and 1 Peter 2:13-14).
While it is true that in the long career of Christendom there were many periods of theocracy, there was at the same time a lively ongoing conversation about a tension between the two realms (and the fact that a ‘Caesaropapism’ was even an issue that raised controversy and debates at all indicates a healthy tension) which helped to inform the epochal movement of the decline of Christendom and the rise of modern Western secularism.
Islam, on the other hand, from the beginning up to the present demands a fusion of ‘Mosque and State’. Indeed, Islam is a fusion of all realms of existence which we in the West take for granted as being more compartmentalized: the religious, the philosophical, the political, the legal, the military, the social, the cultural, the tribal, the familial, the hygienic, and down to all the mundane minutiae of a person’s life—as well as the interior spaces of his psyche. Islam is supremely totalitarian. While Christianity evolved internally—with ‘birthing pains’ to be sure—toward an acceptance of the transformation of its civilization into secularism, Islam, by contrast, has become partially secularized only by an external imposition of secularism, imposed by a globally superior West over the past 200-odd years (or, as in the case of Turkey, a Western-inspired secularism imposed by a secularized Turkish leader, Ataturk). And this degree of secularism is only partial, and varies greatly from one Muslim country to another. The part of the Muslim world that embarked upon the highest degree of secularization was the former center of the Ottoman Caliphate (formerly the ruling geopolitical body of all Islam), which became the nation-state of Turkey. This secularization was imposed by a dictator, Kemal Ataturk, who was directly and mostly inspired by Western ideas; and furthermore, his imposition and his legacy survives intact only by a continuing military dictatorship that has to keep Islam out of Turkey with an iron fist, yet has to permit certain degrees of it because of the widespread grassroots desire among its Muslims for that most perfect way of total life, Islam. And the fact that probably most Muslims of the world consider Ataturk a ‘traitor’ is a telling, though not surprising, indication of their mindset on this issue.
2. Secularism as an Overarching Civilizational Domain
With the epochal change in the West noted above, Christianity has become a smaller domain within the larger domain of secularism. While individual Christians in the West, and groups and associations (including of course ‘churches’), try to integrate Christian ideals into as many realms of existence as they can, they do so mostly apart from the dominant secularist sociopolitical regime, and Christians have, for the most part, long accepted that regime’s dominance in the main realms of politics, laws and culture; with the continuing efforts of some of them to inject "Christian values" into the political realm conducted for the most part maturely and decently. Christians have also learned to accept, more or less (of course with a little grumbling and complaining now and then, nearly always expressed maturely and non-violently), the de facto triumph of secularism in the broader realms of society and culture. The dominant secularist regime, in turn, has been quite respectful and accommodating to Christians (with a few glitches here and there), giving them ample space to carve out their subcommunities and subcultures—and this goes for all non-violent faiths and lifestyles under the purview of secularism. The mostly right-wing American Protestants I referred to above, as wishing to promote a contrast between Christianity and Islam, actually err in construing the modern West as Christian, and they largely ignore the obvious dominance of the secular domain—either out of wishful thinking or out of poor education.
Again, as noted in our point #1 above, Islam is structured ideologically in such a way that its followers cannot comprehend—let alone tolerate—a wider secularist domain within which a smaller Islam must fit. Of course, this situation which Muslims cannot mentally tolerate is, nevertheless, a brute fact for Muslims all over the world, and it has been so for the past 200-odd years: the West has come to rule the world, and this Western global hegemony has become that wider secular domain within which Islam must be a humiliating component part, not the supreme and triumphalist dominator of the world which the Qur’an commands it to be.
3. Immanentized Eschatology vs. ‘Konsequent’ Eschatology
Prior to the fall of the Ottoman Caliphate, prior to the trillions of dollars of oil money that fell into the laps of certain Muslim tyrants, and prior to the advent of certain technologies which have helped empower jihadist commandos and activists (tape cassettes, explosives, small arms, airplanes, and now television and the Internet), the Muslim world was in a semi-comatose state, hunkering down within its own world (although it continued to actively pursue its ancient campaigns of jihad on its direct borders, not impinging on the West sufficiently to trigger our radar in any comprehensive manner). The 20th century, and now the 911 kinesis, have accelerated an Islam Redivivus, which is a Gnostic dream of an immanentized eschaton or an eschatologized immanence—a desire to concretely transform, through direct political, ideological and military action, the structures of this imperfect world into the perfect Paradise of eternity, or at least into a mytho-apocalyptic anticipation and reception of that Paradise.
Christianity, on the other hand, has for the most part learned to abide in the internal spiritual virtues of faith, hope and love by which each Christian attunes himself to the ongoing mystery of history as it continues to go on and on, wending its mysterious way into the future toward that eschaton whose coming end “no one, not even the Son knows but only the Father knows” (Gospel of Mark, 13:32). This existential posture of the Christian is understood in terms of a paradigm which German theologians called a ‘konsequent’ eschatology: a future-oriented eschatology, yet not one that has some definite timetable which humans can know. This existential posture of patiently waiting for a future that is out of our hands is, in the Christian psyche, balanced with humble, humane and peaceful cultivations of a foretaste of the fullness of that eschaton, Christ’s Second Coming, in the indwelling immanence of the here and now. Where certain Christians have expanded beyond this difficult spiritual posture and have tried to inject activism into their eschatology, they have usually been marginalized, if not ostracized by the mainstream Christians, and most have been flagrantly heretical cults. And we are not even counting the millions of Christians of the modern era whose faith in this eschaton has been eroded to one degree or another, as they become disoriented and challenged by the implications of meaning—and meaninglessness—which the dominant secularist domain, contiguous with the Cosmos itself (yet transparent for the awefully infinite Universe beyond it), that great cradle of our reality, exerts upon them.
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