WHEN RELIGION GOES WRONG

Recently the CBS program Sixty Minutes ran a segment on the plight of Iraqi Christians still living in Iraq.  Since our invasion of Iraq the minority Christian community has been subjected to increasing persecution, murder, kidnapping of their children and bombing of their churches. They now have to hold services in secret, led by an Anglican priest that is suffering from MS.  Many Iraqi Christians have left the country, but those that remain either cannot or will not leave.

The interview with the Anglican priest was very interesting.  In response to a question from the Sixty Minutes interviewer he stated that before the invasion there was no persecution of Christians and that people of all faiths lived together peacefully in integrated neighborhoods.  In fact, Saadam?s Foreign Minister and later Deputy Prime Minister, Tariq Aziz, was a Chaldean Catholic. Saadam was a mass murderer, torturer and generally a terrible human being, but his secular government apparently did know how to maintain peace and respect between different religions.

The Anglican priest said the persecution of Christians in Iraq occurred because ?Islam has gone wrong?, but he was quick to add that in the past Christianity has also ?gone wrong?.  We are all shocked and upset when we see video of Sudanese marching in the street demanding the death of a British schoolteacher working in their country for allowing her seven-year olds to name a teddy bear after their Prophet, but we forget the mass killings and persecutions that have occurred in the name of religion, and as the result of simple prejudice and greed, throughout history. 

The centuries-long persecution of Jews by European Christians that culminated in the Holocaust of WWII, the treatment of indigenous peoples by Islam and Christianity during the age of world exploration and conquest and the murderous treatment of people of different religions and nationalities by the Empire of Japan prior and during WWII are all examples.

If religious and political leaders fail to condemn these types of violent behaviors we can only assume they tacitly approve of them.  In our country the lynching of thousands of African-Americans did not provoke any national outcry for justice until after the Civil Rights laws were passed. 

I believe the persecution of Iraqi Christians is directly related to our invasion because Iraqi Muslims see the invasion not just as an invasion from the United States and England, but as an invasion of Christians, invoking the centuries old conflict between Christianity and Islam.  The Iraqi Christians are now bearing the brunt of the conflicts that began in the Middle Ages and are still, unfortunately, alive and well in the minds of supposedly modern human beings.