It has been a little over a week since the shooting in Christchurch New Zealand. In that time there has been a huge outpouring of support for our Muslim sisters and brothers around the world. There has also been swift public policy decisions including banning semi-automatic weapons and large capacity clips to covering funeral costs and long term benefits. That is what decisive public leadership looks like, yet as families gather to bury their massacred loved ones, deep theological questions remain.
One of these questions focuses around the role of the Christian Church is supporting, even encouraging, the white supremacist ideology that fuels a hate crime like these shootings. The sin I believe the Church is guilty of is not so much outright support of islamophobia, although in certain fundamentalist Christian churches you will hear anti-Muslim rhetoric from the pulpit, it is the soft ways, the seemingly insignificant ways, in which Christian doctrine and theology has been subverted to espouse a white is right and deserving of privilege attitude.
Too easily Christians can forget that Jesus was a Palestinian Jew. He lived in an occupied land. He wasn't white. He loved the Torah. He worshiped Yahweh. He followed the teachings of the prophets. He was brown. When asked what is the greatest commandment his response was: to love God with all your heart, mind, and ability; and to love your neighbour as yourself.
For Christ-followers these two statements are foundational and you can't have one without the other. In his epistles, Paul expands on this notion of loving neighbour as self when he states that, in Christ, we are neither slave nor free, Jew nor Gentile, male nor female.
The killings in Christchurch have cast a spotlight on the ways in which a gospel of love, mutuality, and tolerance have been co-opted by fundamentalist factions to spread a gospel of hate, intolerance and superiority. That gospel is not Christian and it isn't the teaching of Jesus that I follow.
The challenge is that it is rarely that blatant, instead it manifests itself in the prosperity gospel movement. It's preached as God's plan and judgment. It's embodied in the horror experienced by otherwise faithful people at the notion that Jesus was not a white, blond haired, European looking person. It is taught when the other is radicalized and depersonalized, even animalized to the point where our common humanness is not recognizable anymore and that is one of our biggest problems because hate is taught and learnt.
I have never met a child who was born racist or a bigot, a homophobe or an Islamophobe. Nelson Mandela wrote, "no one is born hating another person because of the colour of their skin, or their background, or their religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart that its opposite."
These attitudes of hate that are taught are often rooted in fear and ignorance. Nathan Rutstein once observed that, "prejudice is an emotional commitment to ignorance." I believe that to be true. You cannot love your neighbour as yourself and claim that you are part of God's wondrous creation and then say the people who were murdered in the mosques of Christchurch deserved it. You can if you are ignorant. You can if you have been taught that Christianity is superior. You can if you believe that the mystery of God is only revealed in the teaching of Jesus. You can if you think that somehow being white makes you morally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually better than everyone who is not white.
At the halfway point of the Lenten season, it would seem appropriate to spend some time examining the role we all play in the quiet acts of racism and Islamophobia that can, when stoked, encourage, and supported, lead to acts like the shooting in Christchurch. Maybe the Lenten season gives us permission to ask questions of our leaders and demand a better community. Maybe the Lenten season affords us the opportunity to distance ourselves from some of our most treasured beliefs so that we can examine them and prayerfully discern if they are really serving the Gospel of Christ or the gospel of people. Maybe we can distance ourselves from the nice Canada, the land of "I'm sorry" and "excuse me" and come to terms with the reality that the seeds of white supremacy have already been planted here.
With crimes against Muslims in Canada up 151 per cent in 2017 and crimes against black and Jewish communities increased by 50 per cent and 63 per cent, the lie that white supremacy is not a Canadian issue cannot be supported anymore.
The time to resist fear, isolationism, populism and nationalism is now. Otherwise we risk enshrining our ignorance of one another in an experience that will cause irreparable harm and is the furthest from Christ's Gospel we can possible go.
I am still processing how this massacre could happen in a Christian country. I am still wrestling with how I can help change the narrative. I am still deep in the journey of Lent and maybe that is a good thing, because without this journey the wonder of Easter and the power of Christ loses their awesomeness and brilliance. Without the Lenten journey, I might not otherwise take the time to ask the deep hard questions and prayerfully discern a different path forward.
The one thing I am certain of if that Islamophobia is not Christian.
