The Ballad of Joking Jesus

Who's zoomin' who in postwar Iraq?

Tim Cavanaugh | May 29, 2003

Of all the legitimate complaints you might make about the Bush Administration's policy in Iraq—the folly of an open-ended nation-building exercise; the no-bid reconstruction contracts; the seeming transformation of L. Paul Bremer III into an Ottoman khedive; the none-too-convincing explaining away of sorry excuses for weapons of mass destruction, and so on—the strangest is this: the fear that Iraq may be entering a period of true religious freedom. This fear has come not just from scandalized schoolmarms getting their first eyeful of the way Shi'a Muslims celebrate Ashura, but from the apparently even more numerous folks who think evangelical Christians are the real threat to Iraq's (if not America's) future.

Certainly you've heard of the evangelical menace:

Born again Christians are "known Islam-baiters" who seek "to canvas their faith in a country that has been ravaged by the US-led war," avers Al Jazeera.

"It can increase the tension level in an already tense environment to have an organization that's headed up by someone [underachieving son of a preacherman Franklin Graham] who's very well-known in the Muslim and Arab world as an anti-Muslim bigot be seen coming in the wake of an invading army," Council on American-Islamic Relations spokesman Hodan Hassan warns Voice of America. "There are many in that part of the world who didn't necessarily view the war in Iraq as a war of liberation, but saw it potentially as another Crusade."

"[B]ypassing the Christians who are suffering elsewhere to go to the Muslim world is, at best, insensitive and, at worst, condescending and spiritually arrogant," Shaker El Sayed, secretary general of the Muslim American Society, says in a Newsday article.

"Strangely enough, [Osama bin Laden's] apocalyptic message—always ending in terrible destruction and the conversion of "the other"—is strikingly similar to the Armageddonite message of many evangelical Christians," writes UPI's Georgie Anne Geyer.

"America's physical intrusion into Muslim countries in the Middle East opens a broad new spectrum in terms of domestic American politics," James Ridgeway ejaculates in the Village Voice. "The vanquished Iraq, with all of its non-Christians, provides an arena in which to reward religious groups with politically motivated aid contracts, and within the U.S., Republicans can try to build nativist support by arguing, for example, that U.S. Muslims don't believe in democracy."

"Verbal attacks from top Christian evangelicals have also contributed to the hostility that many Muslims face," Geneive Abdo reports in the Boston Globe.

The evangelical equivalent of the Swine Flu scare seems to have arrived Tuesday, in the form of a Page One article in The New York Times, titled, "Seeing Islam as 'Evil' Faith, Evangelicals Seek Converts." In that story, reporter Laurie Goodstein sits in a how-to-convert-Muslims seminar from Arab International Ministry that sounds like a hybrid of the Two Minutes' Hate and everybody's worst nightmare of an Amway meeting. "You can tell me Islam is peaceful, but I've done my homework," says AIM's mysterious headmaster.

Now there are many reasons to be concerned about seeing evangelicals unleashed in the Arab world—not least of which is their tendency, noted by Geyer above, to see the Middle East as a playground for enacting millennial fantasies. The most charitable word for the inflammatory comments made by born again chuckleheads like Franklin Graham, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell is silly. And the concern that a full-court press by missionaries could support suspicions that the United States is waging war on Islam is not a trivial matter—which is why the Bush Administration has taken pains to distance itself from the work of missionaries now entering Iraq.

But these alarms over evangelical missions in Iraq overlook two points.

The first has to do with religious freedom. Proselytizing, converting, passing out literature, importuning people with your witnessing, even vituperating rival religious beliefs, may all be fairly irritating in practice, but they are also essential to the very concept of freedom of worship. A countryside dotted with motivated, suspiciously cheerful missionaries is a signal that religious liberty is in good shape. Certainly a faith as total and dynamic as Islam can withstand the relatively feeble attractions of a few born again missionaries.

It may be the case—and even some evangelicals have hinted so—that the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime is already shaping up as a net loss for Iraqi Christians. But blaming evangelicals for Islamic impatience with freedom of religion is precisely backward. If we accept that individual religious rights are essential to liberalizing the Middle East, then the United States should probably be doing more, not less, to encourage missionaries of all stripes.

The second point is less obvious, but will be familiar to anybody who has seen how the evangelization process works in Arab communities: When evangelicals proselytize Arabs, they don't focus on Muslims but on Christians. Specifically, on followers of the traditional eastern churches—Orthodox, Coptic, eastern-rite Catholic, and so on—that occupy small minority positions in the Middle East.

Of the approximately 1 million Christians who make their homes in Iraq, about 75 percent belong to the Chaldean Church, an eastern rite sect that entered into communion with the Roman Catholic Church in the sixteenth century. (Tariq Aziz, Saddam's famous deputy prime minister, is a Chaldean; his real name is Michael Yuhanna.) The Syriac, Assyrian and Armenian Orthodox churches comprise most of the rest.