Bush’s fundamentalist friends have their eyes on Iraq
Many thanks to Carpetbagger’s friend, let’s call her Buffy, for giving him a heads up on a great article in today’s Salon. (Thanks, Buff)
As the Salon article explains, the “spoils of war” are being divvied up by powerful American interest groups. While you’d expect that to include competing contractors vying for lucrative military contracts, it also includes fundamentalist Christian groups anxious to move in and try and convert Iraqis to Christianity.
Notably, Charles Stanley, a Bush friend as well as the former head of the Southern Baptist Convention, is anxious to share his message with a Muslim audience in Iraq. Stanley heads an Atlanta-based enterprise called In Touch ministries, which allows Stanley to broadcast sermons in 14 languages around the world.
Unlike Franklin Graham, who apparently wants to use his relief agency to try and convert Iraqis to Christianity on a face-to-face level while delivering relief assistance, Stanley is among several evangelists with his eyes on a different prize: broadcast rights.
Don Black, vice president of communications at In Touch, told Salon that the opportunity for broadcast expansion in postwar Iraq is “phenomenal.” “It would be one of our goals to be able to have a platform to tell the truth as we understand it, as any communicator should have the right to do,” Black said.
Like the Rev. Josh Llano, these preachers see Iraq as a fertile mission field. But whereas Llano tried to coerce our troops, these evangelists have 23 million Iraqis in mind.
As I’ve mentioned before, proselytizing is legal, at least in this country. Fundamentalist Christians in the U.S., whether it’s Franklin Graham and Charles Stanley, or Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, have a right under the First Amendment to try and persuade others to convert to Christianity.
The problem, of course, is that Iraq is not the United States. Theirs has been a closed society for a generation. Hordes of Christian missionaries storming into the country on a crusade to “save” Muslim souls “may provoke a deep, damaging backlash there and throughout the Muslim world,” as the Salon article notes.
Salon spoke with Chris Kimball, a Baptist minister and director of religious studies at Wake Forest University (what a coincidence, right Buff?). Kimball explained that these evangelists, all of whom are political allies of the president, are “whipping up a kind of Christian nationalism,” which in turn could make the military’s job of establishing stability in Iraq even more difficult.
“Anything that prominent Christian leaders do and say that gets a lot of press attention and says ‘America’s right’ and ‘God is on our side’ or ‘Islam is evil’ is not lost on the world,” Kimball said. “All of these folks (on the religious right) in their certainty and arrogance are doing considerable harm by what they are preaching. They have to realize that these words reverberate around the world and are being used by Muslim extremists to whip up a frenzy.”
The very last thing we need in the Middle East right now is “a frenzy” whipped up by angry Middle Eastern Muslims who are convinced that American fundamentalists are on a religious crusade against Islam. The White House would be wise to use some of the political capital the president’s built up and urge Bush’s religio-political allies in the religious right to show some restraint. Then again, I’m not optimistic.