George:

Henry Weinschenk's letter is a pretty appalling example of an unfair, and untrue, stereotype. It is so unfair, and so untrue, that it is almost hard to know where to begin.

Virtually everything that Henry says about Islam could be said, or could in the past have been said, about Christianity.

First, Henry's complaint about Islamic expansionism could just as well be leveled at Christianity. Let us not forget that it was the Christians who invaded the Holy Land repeatedly in the Crusades. We have tended to write the history books that we read, so we leave out of those narratives the Inquisition and the pogroms of Central Europe that sought to blame the spread of the Black Plague on Jews. According to Wikipedia, "In 1348, Jews were massacred in Chillon, Basle, Stuttgart, Ulm, Speyer, Dresden, Stgrasbourg and Mainz. By 1351, 60 major and 150 smaller Jewish communities had been destroyed."

And if you want to extrapolate from the religious teachings of some of the leaders of Christianity, in 1543, Martin Luther wrote On the Jews and Their Lies, a treatise in which he advocated harsh persecution of the Jewish people--burning their synagogues and schools be set on fire, destroying their prayer books, forbidding their rabbis to preach, confiscating their property, etc. Sounds kind of like the anti-Jewish rantings of the Islamic extremists.

Over the years leaders of Christian nations have used bits and pieces of Scripture to argue that they had a God-given responsibility (not a mere right) to spread the faith, by the sword if necessary. Jesus didn't specifically say, "Go kill the non-believers," but he did say that non-believers would be better off dead, which gave Holy Warriors all they needed to justify their conquests in the name of Jesus. One need look no further than the rantings of Hitler and Goebbels in the last century, or the "white man's burden" of Kipling and Imperial Britain, or the overtly Christian motivations of advocates of Maifest Destiny in our own country in the 1800's. Whether we were seeking to bring the light of Jesus to nonbelievers in Central Europe, or in India, or in New Mexico, we Christians did some pretty awful things in the name of the Prince of Peace.

The fact is that there are about 1.5 billion Muslims in the world, most of whom live in countries that have no interest in terrorism or world conquest. When a few radical Islamists in Indonesia form a rebel group that wants to kill Westerners, they represent a miniscule fraction of the 232 million Indonesians (who are 90%+ Muslim). One crazy young Nigerian is hardly representative of the roughly 75 million Nigerian Muslims. My understanding from those who know the situation far better than I is that in Iran, the great majority of the 70 million people there want no part of Ahmedinejad and his rantings. In Egypt, most of the 77 million people there want economic opportunity rather than war. In Morocco and Dubai and Abu Dhabi, it is economic growth that is the most important priority--not Muslim expansionism.

I should add that if you want to look at the state of reigions 1,400 years after their founding, look to the state of Christianity in 1435 C.E. The Christians of Northern France had fought a war against the heretic Christians of Southern France in the 1200's, slaughtering those who didn't flee. The Roman Catholic Church had just reconciled after a 75-year schism during which a second papacy was set up in Avignon. In 75 years, Martin Luther would found Protestantism, which would in turn lead to international conflict between Catholic states and Protestant states (the Thirty Years' War), civil war in England (from Henry VIII through Cromwell to William and Mary). In short, the record of Christian states is little better than the record of Muslim states when it comes to war and conquest, either in the name of or in spite of the faith.

If you want to draw any conclusions at all, I would suggest three:

1. That anyone can use religious differences as a scapegoat for economic distress. What we are seeing now across the Muslim world is that Muslim extremists are picking up on economic distress of the large numbers of unemployed young Muslims, and are coopting them into terrorist organizations. Muslim scholars can argue that Osams bin Laden's view of Islam is not a true version of the faith, but their arguments have no force against the anger and despair fueled by of economic hopelessness. We saw this in Northern Ireland, for example--"the Troubles," which started in Belfast in 1969, did not end until the economy picked up in the 1980's; when there were jobs for everyone, religious strife faded into the background.

2. That every religious faith has had, and will have, crazies and demagogues who will seek to turn evangelism for the faith into an excuse for war and conquest.

3. That anyone--Christian, Muslim, Jew, Hindu, or anyone else--who attempts to establish a religion as the basis for government, or who asks government to coerce a belief or an expression of a belief, is engaging in a fool's errand that can only end badly for all concerned. But that is really the premise of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, and the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Lloyd Snook (Electronic mail, January 3, 2010)