Islam, inclusiveness, and the Missouri Synod
I do not go to church in order to associate with people who resemble me in all respects; in fact, one of my fondest memories of confirmation class was our extremely conservative pastor (politically as well as theologically) telling us that the proper state of affairs in a congregation was one in which Republicans and Democrats worshipped together, united by their religious convictions and clearly understanding them to transcend their political differences.
But while that may be the ideal, it's a hard one to maintain. Our politics tend to reflect our backgrounds and values. Diversity is not a strong point of the Missouri Synod and never has been. LCMS folks tend to come from rather similar cultural backgrounds, even though that's changing. Most of us are German in ethnicity, lower middle-class in origin, and if we didn't grow up in small towns or rural areas, we're only a generation or two removed from them. We tend to be remarkably similar in many ways. In fact, it's odd how often in a denomination of over two million people one encounters relatives of people one knows personally. When my generically Protestant family joined the LCMS and I started attending a Missouri Synod parochial school, I quickly became aware that I was an alien in a strange land. I was very much an outsider, and it took a while before I saw myself as really part of the group.
We have become a nation of folks who live in "echo chambers," where we rarely encounter people who differ from us in perspective and attitude. We have lost the ability to engage in friendly dialog with people with whom we disagree. Even those who commendably emphasize "inclusiveness" manage to do it in a way that caricatures, demonizes, and excludes those who differ from them. The LCMS had a head start on the journey to becoming an echo chamber. A denomination which emphasizes theological integrity is going to have a rough go in our traditionally inclusivist American culture in any case, and that's particularly true when, as with the LCMS, it was founded by immigrants seeking religious freedom from a political regime which enforced theological pluralism even at the cost of conscience. Missouri Lutherans have always been "odd ducks" in America, all the more because our traditional emphasis on education and our extensive parochial school system made it so easy to go from kindergarten to Ph.D. without ever attending an educational institution which was not affiliated with the LCMS.
Missourians firmly and very reasonably see private charity and work by the church as preferable to government intervention when it comes to dealing with poverty and other social problems. It's interesting that Martin Luther can, with some justice, be seen as one of the pioneers in the notion of the State having a role in such things, even as he encouraged the church to be involved; the Wittenberg City Chest, to which both the pastor and the mayor had keys both of which had to be used in order to open it, was one of the first organized government social welfare programs. Although this seems to be changing, given the increasing radicalization of the American right (paralleled, of course, by the same phenomenon on the left), I've always gotten the feeling that it wasn't so much that LCMS Lutherans- overwhelmingly conservative and Republican though they were- opposed the notion of the State having some involvement in such things in principle, but rather that they deplored the spiritual cost of having the state do things the church and private individuals should be doing. More power to them! The Parable of the Good Samaritan is far more aimed at the spiritual health of the would-be Samaritan than the physical well-being of those among us who fall victim to thieves, poverty or social injustice.
Since Lutherans tend to come from small towns and rural areas (or from families that do, even if they themselves have migrated to cities), they have fixed in their heads the healthy and humanly rewarding paradigm which existed in such communities in times past. Children simply didn't go hungry there, or without clothing; a family's neighbors wouldn't stand for it. A family facing financial hardship was supported by their friends and neighbors, and above all by the church. That was a given. It was seen as an obligation which went without saying, and one cheerfully and lovingly assumed by everyone in the community.
But Missourians often fail to understand that even in the old days, the problem of poverty was most acute precisely in the places where there was no such community structure to support people. In big cities, there is a dynamic toward isolating oneself not out of unfriendliness or a lack of fellow feeling but as a matter of courtesy and psychological self-preservation. When millions of people live stacked on top of one another, people tend to give themselves- and others- the psychological space they lack physically by walling themselves off from others. Then, too, physical self-preservation demands a certain amount of suspicion toward the total strangers which inhabit large cities both in numbers and in kind that would be unthinkable in the kinds of places where Missouri Lutherans grew up, or where their parents and grandparents did.
Even where the urban church was a thriving institution, where poverty was a problem it was, after all, itself poor. Its ministers might not even have been formally trained and in some cases were not even paid. Certainly, churches which did have the resources to help did, and religious charities have always abounded in the cities. But even in the days when our Missouri forebears did such a commendable job of taking care of one another in small towns and rural areas, the resources of urban churches and even national denominations were insufficient to even make much of a beginning of addressing the problem of urban poverty and the others which attend it. This, of course, didn't stop either from doing what little they could, but it was barely a beginning.
Today, we are a far more urban nation than we were back then. The sense of community isn't nearly as strong even in small towns and rural areas as it once was. I have always admired the sense of personal obligation toward the poor which the Missouri ethos involved, at least in theory. But combined with their innate conservatism, most Missouri Lutherans seem blind to the fact that what worked in the small towns and rural areas they or their parents or grandparents grew up in no longer works today, and hasn't for a very long time. Tax dollars are needed to address poverty and attendant social problems, and plenty of them. The alternative is not for private individuals or the church to assume the burden of helping the unfortunate, but for the unfortunate to simply go without food and housing and clothes and health care because the resources of the churches, private charities, and willing individuals are a mere drop in the bucket of what is needed. As wonderful as it would be if private charity and the involvement of the church really could provide an alternative to government programs, many Lutherans- still stuck in the mentality of days gone by- fail to factor in the problem of original sin, and the unwillingness of even church members to voluntarily give in the amounts that would be necessary to match the support given by government programs today even if they had them to give. After all, even Christians have bills to pay and families of their own to support. The problem is not a lack of compassion, but the sheer immensity of the problem.
And in my experience, Missouri Lutherans tend to be clueless about that immensity. Their opposition to government programs as a solution to social problems seems to me to be rooted in what in the abstract is a healthy sense of personal responsibility to one's neighbor. Its dark side is a failure- and in some cases, an outright refusal- to recognize that in many cases the only real alternatives are people being helped by government programs, or their not being helped at all.
Few LCMS Lutherans are willing to see others go hungry or homeless or unclothed or to lack adequate health care. But unfortunately, many- maybe most- are deeply naive about what the realistic alternatives are. One can only applaud their commitment to the concept of individual responsibility for the welfare of one's neighbor. But their isolation from the realities of urban life in many cases blinds them to the real options.
And we are, sad to say, no more immune to racial and religious and other forms of social prejudice than anyone else.. Traditional insulation from the larger community due to the strong ethnic and religious ties which have always existed in the LCMS, even down to having its own school system, has doubtless exacerbated the problem. Several times in this blog I've written about the traumatic integration of my own congregation's parochial school back in the '60s, something which happened only because a faithful and heroic pastor literally excommunicated the entire congregation after its refusal to admit an African-American child from a neighboring LCMS congregation because of the color of her skin.
Prejudice among members of the LCMS is more widespread and far more malignant than most of us would like to admit. No honest Missouri Lutheran whose head is not completely in the sand will deny that, nor miss the point that it is a major spiritual problem in our circles. And it's not simply a matter of racial prejudice. I've read that anti-Semitism is the least prevalent of the forms of bigotry which manifest themselves in our Synod, but I wish I hadn't encountered as many regular communicants at Missouri altars who are anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers as I have. And even among those free of such prejudices, Missouri's innate conservatism and history of insularity tend, as such environments often do, to create extreme and idiosyncratic political attitudes and philosophies which make it hard to dialog with them on matters relating to what Lutheran theology would call "the Kingdom of the Left Hand."
I am not a patient man. That is probably the greatest of my many personal failings. I have gotten into political discussions far more heated than were proper or necessary with my fellow Missourians- often especially with those I particularly respect- who were rigidly committed to political ideologies which seem to me to get in the way of a realistic discussion of various matters. I don't think that a lack of charity on either side is the most basic issue, though. The biggest problem is difficulty in seeing the other guy's perspective.
One of those issues is Islam. I raise it because it combines overtly religious matters with social and political ones, and forms an example of how these factors tend to influence one another.
I am not a Muslim. To say that I regard Islam as a false religion is oddly not quite self-evident from that fact; the mealy-mouthed mindset of traditional American culture includes the bizarre notion that it's somehow intolerant to see religious ideas from which one dissents as "false." Logic, of course, would dictate that we by definition regard anything inconsistent with what we believe to be true as false, but Americans are often bigger on sentimentality than on logic. In some circles, of course, an exception has developed in recent years: the teachings of historical, biblical Christianity, which seem to be fair game these days for any biblically, theologically, and church-historically illiterate with an agenda to pursue.
But one of the blessings of being a Missouri Lutheran is a culturally unfashionable commitment, at least in principle, to intellectual honesty. So I will not hesitate to say that precisely because I am a Christian, not to say a confessional Lutheran, I regard Islam as a false religion. If I didn't, I would be a Muslim. Or in any case, I couldn't logically be a Christian. This is a point which some who consider themselves Christians don't accept, and there are groups which claim an identity as Christian simply by virtue of an intention to follow Jesus in some sense, but historically, Christianity has defined itself by certain beliefs which a Muslim simply cannot affirm, like the deity of Christ and the doctrine of the Trinity. To confess either of these as true is, by definition, to reject their denial and to regard any religion which denies them to be, to that extent, false. That's a matter of simple logic.
There. That's said.
But I lost a Facebook friend once- a Missouri pastor, whom I had always enjoyed visiting with- over his insistence that the building of a mosque in the general vicinity of Ground Zero in New York- not even in close proximity, mind you- was somehow an insult to the victims of 9/11. It's certainly true that Osama bin Laden and the hijackers of those three airplanes derived their twisted and murderous ideas from the Koran, a book which contains a great deal that is problematic not only on religious but purely on humane grounds. But Islam did not fly those planes into the Pentagon and the Twin Towers. Crazy, murderous Islamic extremists did.
I don't know many Muslims, but those I do know are loyal to America and were if anything even more grieved by the crimes of 9/11 than the rest of us precisely because those who perpetrated them shared their religion, and used it as an excuse to something which to American Muslims was utterly incompatible with Islam as they understood it..
I decline to argue with self-appointed LCMS exegetes of the Koran who blame the book itself for Islamic terrorism or for Islamic extremism in general. The Koran is not my book, and exegeting is neither something I have experience in or in which I am particularly interested in gaining experience.
But I do know this: to blame Islam as such for 9/11 or for Islamic extremism, in general, is to say more than that a particular interpretation of the Koran, or even the Koran itself, is finally to blame for them.
It is to blame my Shi'ite friend Reza, with whom I attended Concordia University Chicago. It's to blame Shah, the al-Quaeda and ISIS-hating Pakistani Sunni who owns the convenience store where I often shop and where I buy the money orders I use to pay my rent. It's to blame the friendly young lady from Kosovo, unspeakably grateful to America for giving her a home and freedom, with whom I once worked at a call center. It's to blame the imam of the local mosque here in Des Moines, who made it a point to join our city's Jews at Congregation Tifereth Israel to publicly mourn the victims of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting and to wish his Jewish neighbors salaam.
To blame Islam as such is to blame Islam in all its manifestations, including the most benign. It is to blame all of the many Islams- and although many Muslims would deny it, there are indeed many, mutually exclusive and contradictory, however much they may also, in a sense, be one. The same thing can be said, in a sense, about Christianity; despite our mystical oneness as the Body of Christ even in our brokenness and diversity and doctrinal commonalities, we are indeed broken and divided.
To blame Islam as such for 9/11, or for the other barbaric acts of Muslim extremists, it's to blame all the Islams, and therefore all Muslims. And that is an egregious violation of the Eighth Commandment. It would be like blaming the Presbyterians for the Inquisition, or the Mennonites for Luther's infamous and uncharacteristic slandering of the Jews and endorsement of violence against him in the closing years of his life.
And yet...
One of my closest friends is a fellow Missourian refugee from the ministerium of the ELCA who served for a time as a pastor in Germany and has horror stories about his experiences with men in Europe whose attitudes toward women were formed by Islamic cultures. Once he was physically assaulted for simply objecting to a Muslim man's disrespectful treatment of a German woman.
The New Year's Eve debacle in Germany a few years ago, in which women were groped and in some cases raped by Muslim immigrants (German law, oddly, does not forbid even explicitly sexual and non-consensual contact with women until they verbally object; as a result, few prosecutions could be brought against the gropers) is only one of many examples of the ongoing problems formerly Christian Europe is having with integrating immigrants from Islamic cultures into society. There is much to deplore in the Koran. There is much to deplore in Islam, in the broad sense of the word. There is a great deal to deplore in the attitudes traditional Islamic societies tend to encourage men to adopt toward women, and it cannot be denied that these attitudes are Islamic attitudes even if they do not characterize all Muslims.
It isn't simply our right to criticize them;, it's our duty to deplore them. In Bangladesh, protests were held yesterday in the outrageous case of an 18-year-old woman who declined to drop sexual harassment charges against the principal of her school- and who, in retaliation, was lured to the school, doused in kerosene, and burned to death. The way rape and abuse victims- and especially those who use lethal force to defend themselves- are treated in Iran is an international scandal of the first magnitude. The obscenity of "honor killings" in traditional Muslim families both in Europe and even in America is well-known.
Justice demands that we speak out against not only Islamic terrorism on Western soil but against injustices committed in the name of Islam on foreign soil as well- including those committed in countries with Muslim majorities. But the woman who was burned to death in Bangladesh was a Muslim. The rape victims who have been hanged in Iran were Muslims. Far more Muslims are victims of the injustices inherent in traditional Muslim cultures than anyone else.
Fellow Missouri Synod Lutherans- fellow Americans, fellow Westerners, fellow Christians- deplore the deplorable things in the Koran, by all means. Do not remain silent for an instant in protesting the outrageous treatment of women in Muslim countries or in the West as a result of men being raised in traditionally Muslim cultures. And it should go without saying, stand united in opposition to mass violence committed by fanatics in the name of Islam. But don't agree with them when they try to justify their acts by appealing to a religion held by decent people, too.
Blame the Koran, if you must. There is plenty in it that is worthy of blame. Blame traditional Islam. Blame Islamic culture. But consider what you do in indiscriminately blaming Islam as such. Consider the innocent people you are blaming by implication. Consider the scandal you are creating among people who need to hear the Gospel, and who someday may, and whose receptiveness to it may well be influenced by the eagerness of Christians to blame them for crimes which they deplore as much as we do.
Consider what you're saying before you actually endorse Luther's infamous pamphlet On the Jews and Their Lies, as a former Facebook friend of mine actually did in a conversation which included a Jew a while back. Consider that being a Good Samaritan, while it certainly involves taking personal responsibility for the well-being of one's neighbor, includes first and foremost that our concern for his welfare exceeds our rigid loyalty to a point of political ideology.
Better the government should use our tax money to give the poor the help they need than that they should not get it.
Consider that one sins against the body of Christ at least as severely when one discriminates against a brother or sister of another race, or even adopts an attitude toward their race as a group based on disdain and contempt, as when one partakes of the Lord's body and blood with an unrepentant heart.
Or rather, with an otherwise unrepentant heart. As my pastor from long ago insisted so courageously and so rightly, to receive the Lord's body and blood while looking down upon others as somehow inferior or unworthy of kneeling there beside you and receiving it with you with one is the very sin which St. Paul warns in I Corinthians 11 calls down God's judgment upon oneself.
One cannot, as Jesus expressed it in the parable, assume the posture of the publican- the posture of personal unworthiness and need that is required for a salutary reception of the Sacrament- while maintaining the attitude of the Pharisee and avoid having God notice it.
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