As a Brit, I don’t understand a great deal about the subtleties of Political-Religious discourse in North America. However, one man with a clearer grasp of the issue than I is my friend Joe Boot of the Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity and Christian Concern. He’s written an interesting response to President Barack Obama’s recent visit to a Mosque in Baltimore, which you can read online here.
I’m particularly struck by the following words, quoted by Joe from Sidney H. Griffith, which resonates strongly with my own experience of interacting with Muslims here in the UK:
“All of the Christian communities who lived within the world of Islam in the early Islamic period strove to cultivate good relations with Muslims at the same time that both in Arabic and in their own languages they clearly marked the difference between the two creeds.”
In other words, the best way to relate to people of other faiths is to welcome them warmly, while at the same time having a robust and clear-headed debate about the differences between us. This, it seems to me, is far more respectful and productive than to adopt the increasingly popular secular liberal pretence of blurring the very real differences between (for example) Christianity and Islam, since such fuzzy thinking simply serves to marginalise the substantive claims of both religions, subsuming them under a suffocating blanket of political correctness with which neither Muslims nor Christians agree, and thus subjecting both religions equally to the same high-handed contempt.
Naturally, I don’t think Islam is right, but neither do I think secular liberalism has much going for it. But while I have great respect for my Muslim friends (including a number of people who have been visiting Emmanuel both in recent weeks and also in the more distant past) who are willing to talk frankly about what they believe, I have very little time for the folly, ignorance or downright dishonesty of those who typically profess neither faith with any seriousness but try to pretend that Islam and Christianity are really just the same.
Different religions are, well, just different. And we need to learn peaceably, lovingly, and clear-headedly, to deal with it.
