A New Chick Tract – “Things To Come?”
I haven't written about Jack Chick and his religious tracts before. Joshua Zelinsky has reviewed a few of them on occasion (such as the two he talks about here), but the urge to do so has never really hit me until recently.
Chick tracts, for those who don't know, are the little comic-book-like religious pamphlets that you sometimes find left in public places.1
His work is notable for its total lack of nuance or subtlety. Chick's theology is based on the notion that anyone who doesn't believe precisely as he does (including his KJV-only stance on the Bible, which is just weird) is going straight to hell. I think he has a real hell fetish, since in many of his tracts the most detailed artwork is in the panels showing people getting tossed off a cliff into the flames. He also has it in for Catholics, Muslims, Jews,2 non-whites, women, gays, straights who don't hate gays, and pretty much anyone who isn't Jack Chick.
His latest is a little number called Things to Come? What struck me about this one is it's subtle3 juxtaposition of anti-Catholic sentiment4 with Rapture theology.5
The main narrative of this tract is that a (Catholic) fortune-teller (Delores) isn't being very successful telling fortunes (I'll throw Chick a bone here and grant that he got this part right...), and is confronted by her housemate (I think we're supposed to infer that the two women are lesbians, but it's somewhat ambiguous) about the failures. The housemate, Maria, mentions a Mr. Rogers who tells the future from "an ancient black book." Maria mentions that their priest, Father Dowling, doesn't want people going to Mr. Rogers. (Message for Mr. Chick - Catholics know full well what the Bible is, and have produced some fairly highly regarded scholarship about it, such as the work of the late Raymond E. Brown.)
Dolores goes to see Mr. Rogers, who tells her about Jesus and the rapture. We get a typical Chick-scene of people getting burned:
Chick loves burning people, and apparently fails to see the inherent contradictions between the concept of an all-loving, merciful God and a God who gleefully tosses large numbers of people into the fire. Conversion by coercion. Gotta love it.
Anyhow, the tract moves on to some of the most egregious anti-Catholic bile that I've ever seen in comic form:
Chick seems to have formed his opinions of Catholics without ever having bothered to, I don't know, learn anything about Catholic doctrine, or attend a Catholic Mass, or even talk to a real live Catholic.
So the "fake" Jesus sets himself up as Pope, but is actually the Antichrist, and Russia and the Muslims (neither of which even existed when the Biblical books were written) are going to attack modern Israel, which is rather different from Biblical Israel.
Now, after Mr. Rogers regales Delores with his scare stories and bizarre vitriolic propaganda, he poofs away, leaving a very shocked Delores sitting opposite a chair full of seedy clothes:
Goodness.
The basic premise at work here (besides "Catholics are evil") is that if you believe the way Jack Chick thinks you should, you'll be rewarded, and if you believe anything else at all, God is going to pitch you into the flames forever.
It's worth looking at this another way: God, according to Jack Chick Theology, is really vindictive and petty - he's just itching to toss people into the fire for just about anything. This stands at odds with any notion of a kind and merciful God, unless you perform some serious verbal and logical contortions. Chick also can't decide whether accepting Jesus is sufficient or whether one has to do good works (contrast his use of Acts 16:31 and his use of 1 Corinthians 3:11-15), so it's really not clear what one would have to do to be saved, other than spend most of one's time cowering in fear and not asking too many questions. And let's not forget the hate speech.
I'd be tempted to write Jack Chick off as just another kook on the fringes of ultra-conservative Christianity, except for the fact that his tracts turn up frequently enough that he must have a fairly significant following. I've personally found them in hospitals (see footnote 1, below), on the table at McDonald's, in hotel rooms, in airplane seatbacks, and in public restrooms at colleges, airports, sporting venues, and highway rest areas. His ubiquity makes him dangerous - his simplistic us vs. them theology is distressingly easy to understand, and his manipulative scare tactics can be very effective on people who haven't developed critical thinking skills.
My questions to the folks who are out distributing these things, or who might be inclined to use them are simple:
- Do Chick's portrayals of Catholics, Jews, Muslims, gays, and so on match anyone you actually know?
- Is Chick's characterization of God as a sadistic tyrant who relishes pitching people into the flames one that you agree with?
- Do you think that attempting to convert people by terrifying them is a good thing?
My hope is that people who actually give the matter some thought will reject Chick's extreme views as the poisonous concepts they are.
-Jay
1Personal digression: last fall when my dad went in for open-heart surgery, one of my brothers found a stack of Chick's Heart Trouble? screed that some assclown had left sitting in the open-heart waiting room. Heart Trouble? is a more heavy-handed version of Ray Comfort's Are You a Good Person? schtick, framed as a conversation between a physician and a heart patient. I'm of the opinion that attempting to win converts by trying to scare people into accepting Jesus (or any other belief system, for that matter) by insinuating that they and/or their sick loved ones are going to burn for eternity if they don't follow a specific subset of beliefs is nothing short of emotional battery, and shouldn't be tolerated. We binned the tracts.
2He's kinda schizophrenic about Jews. On the one hand, Chick's eschatology requires that Israel play a big role, but in the end the only Jews that are worth talking about are the ones who become Christians.
3In the same way that getting hit in the head with an anvil is subtle...
4I'll go ahead and point out that the Catholic Church has a lot of grave institutional problems - most notably its atrocious handling (at all levels, all the way up to the top) of child rape by members of the clergy. That said, Chick's anti-Catholic vitriol doesn't have anything to do with real flaws and problems in the Church, and instead grows out of his distorted and hate-filled theology.
5Nutshell history of Rapture theology: John Nelson Darby basically made it up in the 1830s, Cyrus Scofield popularized it in his 1909 version of the Bible, and Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins spun it into the dreadful Left Behind books starting in 1995. As well-known as it is, Rapture theology is flat-out rejected by much of mainline Christianity, including the Catholic church. At it's heart, it contends that the Book of Revelation really was written as a prediction of events far in the future, rather than the obvious and much more well-supported interpretation that it was written to a contemporary audience about events that were occurring then, and that when predicted events didn't come to pass, it simply meant that the author was wrong, not that he was writing about things thousands of years in the future. As long as something hasn't happened, you can claim it will, but that's a pretty thin argument to build a worldview around. An interesting survey of end-of-the-world beliefs down through history can be found in Sharan Newman's The Real History of the End of the World: Apocalyptic Predictions from Revelation and Nostradamus to Y2K and 2012.
The Vileness That is Westboro
Do you know this man?
Fred Phelps
This is Fred Phelps. There's a special little corner of hell reserved for him.
Fred is the leader of a vile, hate-based organization known as Westboro Baptist Church. Westboro has made a name for itself by staging protests at things like the funerals of soldiers, the funerals of hate-crime victims, other Christian groups that they don't like, and, recently, the San Diego Comic-Con.
Fred, and his congregants (which are mostly members of his extended family) hate pretty much anyone that isn't them - gays, Catholics, most mainline Protestants, Jews, Muslims, Hindus - and aren't afraid to say so.
The Westboro theology (one can almost freely interchange Westboro the organization and Phelps the person) is built on the premise that they're right and everyone else is wrong, and woe be unto those who might question anything that the church teaches.
This is brought out in stark clarity in this video of an ABC news segment about a young woman named Lauren Drain. Ms. Drain is the daughter of two Westboro members who was thrown out of the church for having the temerity to raise questions about hypocrisies that she saw within the group. (From Yes But However, via Skippy.)
Ms. Drain has found herself completely cut off from her parents and younger siblings over her criticisms of Westboro. Her young sister has rejected her, and her parents speak of her expulsion in much the same way as you might talk about throwing a spider out of the house. "That's the Lord" is how Ms. Drain's mother responds when the question is raised about kicking out other children questioning Westboro. No remorse. No hesitation. No thought.
One might be tempted to dismiss Westboro as an irrelevant fringe group, and indeed mainline Christian groups generally distance themselves from WBC. I think that's a mistake. The ease with which parents can cut themselves off from their children and siblings can disengage from siblings is chilling. The degree of venomous, hateful indoctrination received by the children within the group is alarming. No preschooler should ever be singing "God hates the world". That's sick. That's evil.
Westboro is a shining example of what unquestioning faith and obeisance to an ideology can lead to. The way to combat such an ideology is to drag it into the harsh light of day and confront it.
-Jay
Letters To The Editor
The written word is a wonderful thing. It serves as a transmission vector for knowledge and culture, and allows us to express ourselves in ways that the spoken word can't. Anyone who has ever gotten caught up in a good book and suddenly realized that it's 3:00 AM knows what I'm talking about.
The written word can also be dangerous. When used as a tool of propaganda, it can serve to control and subjugate. It can challenge authority and can lead to wars.
The written word can be many things, including strange and vaguely frightening.
And the written word can be used to make points quite the opposite of what it looks like at first glance.
The following letter to the editor appeared in the 2 July 2010 Louisville Courier-Journal. (I'm reproducing it because the CJ eventually archives such things and they become difficult to ferret out. The letter in question is on page 3.)
Going Gaga
Lady Gaga is a repulsive image that all people of goodwill should strive to avoid. Her most recent pornographic music video, which features highly sexualized images coupled with Catholic religious symbols, betrays her as nothing more than a mediocre Madonna-wannabe. In the video, she squirms around half-naked with half-naked guys while abusing Catholic symbols. It is clear the singer has now become the new poster girl for American decadence and Catholic bashing, which she perversely fobs off to the world as "creative art."
When asked in a recent interview by Larry King if she was considering having children some day, she answered "not right now because it would destroy my creativeness." She seems oblivious to the fact that there is nothing more creative for a woman than to have a child. Sadly, fame, fortune and false idolatry have become the heartbeat of American culture. These things seem more important to the masses than life itself. But in the end, they are all only illusions that will wither and fade. In the end, "the first will be last and the last will be first."
Now, the video in question (here, in case anyone cares to look) is pretty damn tacky - it plays out like some sort of weird sexual nightmare. Is it offensive? Probably to many - although I would describe it more as stupid and pretentious more than I would offensive.1
Good Lord! What is That Thing Eating Her Head!?!
It isn't clear why the letter writer chooses interpret Lady Gaga's video as being anything other than a ploy to generate attention (much like her propensity for ghastly and outrageous outfits). I can envision a conversation between Lady Gaga and her production designers:
Designers: But Gaga, this video is really pushing the boundaries of good taste. People are going to go ballistic over the content!
Gaga: Yes, and for every blog or article criticizing me, a bunch of people will find the video and watch it, and some of those will buy my albums. I can't lose!
Designers: But that's just callous manipulation of people's prejudices and sensitivities for personal profit!
Gaga: And you have a problem with that? I'm an entertainer. That's what I do. It doesn't matter whether people listen to me because they're inspired by my music, or impressed by my dance moves, or want to see me on stage with machine guns attached to my bra.
Designer: Sooooo. Any ideas for your next video?
The bottom line is that controversy = publicity, and if you're a singer, publicity = revenue.2
The second part of the letter is more touchy. The letter writer, who was female, appears dangerously close to defining women in terms of the productiveness of their uteri, and her comment is a direct affront to women who cannot or chose not to have children. Moreover, it's not clear how Lady Gaga's expressed choice to not have children in any way impacts anyone else's choice. Gaga has every right to make that choice. It's also true that the letter writer has a right to her opinion, and a right to express it. And I have a right to say that I think the letter writer's opinion is just plain wrong and myopic because it makes the presupposition that women are no more than baby factories.3
The bottom line is that the letter writer finds Lady Gaga to be a poor role model. Fine. Don't listen to her music or watch her videos or read articles about her. But don't expect everyone else to follow your lead.
We get to go down a different path entirely with the 11 July 2010 response to the original letter (The letter in question is on page 2.):
Double-barreled irony
In regard to a letter printed in last Friday's Courier-Journal , I, too, would like to lend my voice to those offended by Lady Gaga's outrageous behavior. While I haven't seen the video in question, I have seen her scantily clad image on the cover of the current issue of Rolling Stone. It is shocking enough that this so-called "Lady" is wearing next to nothing. But the fact she sports a bra bearing two assault weapons is a double-barreled attack against basic American values. More than our flag, the cross or holy scripture, the gun is unquestionably the greatest object of reverence in this great land of ours. Would Ms. Gaga's brazen behavior be tolerated if Dubya and "Dead Eye" Dick Cheney still called the shots? I think not. Thank God and baby Jesus we still have strong conservative role models like Sarah Palin, a lifelong member of the NRA. We can rest assured that her values are just as conservative as her undergarments.
On first glance, this letter (submitted by a male) seems to be the product of a somewhat disturbed individual. One can almost imagine him muttering out loud to himself as he composed his missive.
But I don't think the letter is the product of a disturbed individual. I think it's the product of someone who read the first letter and thought "It's pretty silly to get spun up over a music video and a throwaway comment on Larry King, and it's pretty silly for the newspaper to give a letter about those things any column space. I wonder if I can get something even more over-the-top published..."
This, I believe, is a classic example of what has become known in internet circles as Poe's Law. To wit:
Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humour, it is impossible to create a parody of fundamentalism that someone won't mistake for the real thing.
Nathan Poe, circa 2005
(In point of fact, I think that Poe's Law generalizes well beyond religion and can be applied to parodies of any extreme position. Politics is an obvious example, as suggested by the Sarah Palin reference,4 and extreme positions on climate change and anti-vaccination come to mind as other applicable subjects.5)
In other words, the letter writer has successfully foisted himself off as an outlandishly conservative Christian when, in fact, he probably isn't, but you certainly can't tell that from the writing.
Why might he have wanted to do this? To me, the most obvious reason is to make the point that there are more important issues to worry about than the crass behavior of a pop singer.
Maybe the writer really was put off by a gun-festooned sports bra. Maybe he really does think that Sarah Palin is a superb conservative role model and not merely a publicity hungry twit. It's possible, but I don't think so.
-Jay
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1"Offensive" is a very ambiguous term, anyway. I find it interesting that when people talk about how a music video, or a movie, or a book is offensive, they're often very detailed in talking about precisely which aspects of the material are offensive. This suggests that they watched or read it very closely. And some people seem to be offended a lot. It's not like anyone is forcing someone to watch Lady Gaga videos against their will. Personally, on the few occasions I find something to be that offensive, I just find something different to watch or read.
2Personally, I kinda like some of her songs, but her bizarre costumes and such don't really do much for me.
3In the last few years, it's somehow come to be fashionable to claim that everyone's opinions are equally valid. Perhaps nowhere is this so prevalent as in the evolution/creationism debates in school systems around the country where "teach the controversy" or "teach the alternatives" are rallying cries. The problem is that all opinions aren't equally valid - many are just flat wrong, sometimes dangerously so.
4It is very difficult to separate Sarah Palin's political views from her religious views. Talk to Action has a number of articles analyzing Palin's religious views and their implications on her politics, if anyone is interested.
5I have an issue with the use of the term fundamentalist. It tends to be used pejoratively, and it isn't as well-defined as many might think. The term evangelical is somewhat less pejorative but is also poorly defined - an acquaintance of mine self-describes as evangelical, but falls towards the extremely liberal end of the Christian spectrum, and has been accused by some of not being Christian enough, whatever that actually means. Even terms like extremely conservative Christian are imprecise enough to be confusing. Nevertheless, given the lack of better, succinct terminology, I'll use these those terms with the caveat that they are broader than I would prefer and inevitably sweep people in which they shouldn't.
Cults
A couple of weeks ago I picked up a copy of the weekly newspaper of the local MegaChurch. One of the articles featured on the cover was the account of a woman named Jennifer Heck and her involvement with a "cult". The article states that it is excerpted from her booklet What You Don't Know Can Hurt & Destroy!, although I've been unable to locate any other references to that booklet. (I was unable to find the original article online. There is a follow-up of sorts here that doesn't really add much except a few more Bible verses apparently intended to scare any would-be "false teachers".)
According to the article, she's been a Christian for 23 years1 and is a graduate of "Bible college".2
The story told in the article is about how she became involved in a Bible study group led by someone identified as Damien (a pseudonym).3 Apparently "Damien" led some sort of Bible study group that the author got involved in, and over time began to introduce some unusual interpretations to the study.4
These interpretations set off our author's warning bells:
After several months, I began to see that Damien's entire belief system centered on pride and power. He had two underlying themes. First, we all are "little gods" with power to speak anything into existence just like the big God. Second, Jesus saves everyone's spirit, but we must save our own soul through good works and unconditional love for everyone.
The first "theme" reminds me a little of what $cientologist$ seem to think happens at some of the higher levels,5 but the second "theme", at least the way Ms. Heck puts it, doesn't seem to be much more than this Damien character rejecting sola fide, which isn't terribly uncommon among modern liberal Christianity.
She goes on to say:
Damien not only mixed truth with error; but his teaching also mingled the Bible with material from other books and with other people's experiences that claimed divine revelation. He supported everything he taught with Bible passages, but I soon discovered that when a person takes the "text" out of context, the only thing left is a "con"
While she doesn't specify which other books or experiences "Damien" used, I find it somewhat disturbing that she gets twitchy about these things.
To the first issue:
In the broad sense, any topic one studies benefits from different viewpoints. It's reasonable to assume that in her time at "Bible college", she might have encountered a textbook. Even if the text is nothing more than an annotated translation of the Bible, there is some interpretation going on. Unless Ms. Heck is fluent in the original languages of the Biblical text (as opposed to just being able to pronounce, for example, New Testament Greek), she's ultimately relying on "material from other books" to provide her with what she has been taught to consider the correct interpretation of the Bible. Unless "Damien" was using Dianetics or something like that, it sounds like Ms. Heck could have been overreacting to the fact that he was presenting material that wasn't necessarily wrong, but was simply different than that which she believed.
To the second issue:
I've seen many, many instances where someone has taken the microphone and proceeded to talk for 20 or 30 minutes about their religious awakenings. These often include accounts of conversations with God, or of God nudging them down a path or whatever. These witnesses or testimonies seem to be a really big deal to the point where if you don't have such a story, you might feel inferior. What are these stories if not "other people's experiences that claimed divine revelation"?
All of that said, I don't disagree in principle with her last statement about taking the "text" out of "context". However I strongly disagree with her implication that the Bible provides its own context. It categorically doesn't. But you'd never know that if you haven't developed some independent background in relevant areas of study.
Apparently after a few months with "Damien's" group, Ms. Heck confronted him with her concerns, at which point he admitted that he had been using her. After this, she experienced the not-unexpected emotional turmoil of having been betrayed and lied to.
There are hints in her story that her relationship with "Damien" may have been more than "spiritual". In any case, if her story is true, she's had to deal with some pretty bad times and she has my sympathy. "Damien" sounds like he needs to be locked up somewhere and left to rot.
The rest of Ms. Heck's article deals with how to identify cults and avoid them. I've got a number of issues with her advice here, and most of those issues stem from the fact that she conflates a narrow theological definition of "cult" with the more familiar secular definition. This leads to the suggestion that pretty much any religious belief other than strict, fundamentalist Christianity is a cult.
She defines cults almost entirely in terms of her own brand of Christianity. I think I can understand why she might do that, but in doing so, she implicitly sweeps in pretty much every non-Christian religion as well as more liberal branches of Christianity. Some characteristics of cults (or "false teachers" - she uses the terms almost interchangeably) are:
- They focus on human tradition and principles of the world, appealing to human desires such as pleasure, comfort, power, success, financial prosperity, controlling the timing of events, and absence of disease and suffering.
- They purposely avoid telling people about consequences of sinning and rebelling against God.6
- They create false hopes within the minds of their unsuspecting followers.
- They hide aspects of their personal lives from the public and their followers. Although masquerading with exemplary faith, evil behavior eventually surfaces. These individuals' true character reveals itself through their lifestyles, characterized by sin rather than righteous transformation that comes through a genuine relationship with God.
These traits gather in many of the more prominent religious figures - Ted Haggard comes to mind - and quite honestly I think one could make the argument that just about every religious denomination or group exhibits a number of these qualities to varying degrees.
Now, Ms. Heck cites several works as references for information on cults:
- Fast Facts on False Teachings by Ron Carlson and Ed Decker
- Unmasking the Cults by Alan Gomes
- The Kingdom of the Cults by Walter Ralston Martin and Ravi Zacharias
- Correcting the Cults: Expert Responses to Their Scripture Twisting by Ron Rhodes and Norman Geisler
- Handbook of Today's Religions by Josh McDowell and Don Stewart.
These books all, curiously, seem to be out of print. I'm not familiar with the books themselves, but some of the authors (Zacharias, Geisler, and McDowell) are familiar to me as well-known Christian apologists. Ms. Heck quotes McDowell and Stewart:
Cults offer certainty and easy answers to those who are unsatisfied with the present state of their lives. Individuals who experience and identity crisis or have emotional problems are particularly susceptible to cults.
There is a certain irony to that statement, perhaps best exemplified by the following elements of the "What We Believe" page of the above mentioned MegaChurch (which is fairly typical):
I believe in the Bible and God's Holy Word, Scripture. I believe God inspired the autographs (original writings) of the Scripture and those autographs were consequently without error.
(Mark 12:36; John 14:26; 16:12-15; Acts 1:16; 1 Corinthians 2:12-13; 2 Timothy 3:14-16; 2 Peter 1:20-21)
I accept the Bible as the final authority for all matters of faith and practice.
(Isaiah 40:8; Matthew 5:18; 24:35; Romans 15:4; Hebrews 4:12)
It doesn't really get much more certain than that.
She also cites FACTnet, which was one of the key informational websites in the early 1990's when the Church of Scientology was waging war against internet critics.7
The most directly relevant page on FACTnet is the list of characteristics of destructive cults. This list pretty cleanly pegs the group Ms. Heck found herself caught up in, but pegs it based on the manipulative and domineering behavior of "Damien" rather than on the extremely subjective criteria of "false teachings" that Ms. Heck focuses on.
There are some good points to take away from Ms. Heck's experiences - be mindful of what you're getting into, be aware of changes in the character of groups you belong to, realize that some people have motivations that are not in your best interests - but by casting the subject of cults entirely in conservative/fundamentalist Christian terms, she's managed to include several Christian denominations that aren't normally considered cultish, and she's under-emphasized groups that typically are. Perhaps more significantly, she's managed to define the issue as a matter of avoiding anything that might make you question your existing beliefs, which I personally consider an intellectually suspect thing to do.8
I've had some interest in cults and various fringe religious groups for a long time, basically since Jim Jones and the business in Guyana in 1978. There are some extremely dangerous authoritarian sects out there, and some of them are very adept at identifying potential members and recruiting them. Young people going away to college or individuals living in new areas can be vulnerable if they don't have a good support system in place. It's not a bad idea for people in such situations to be aware of techniques used by such groups to draw people in, but they should realize that not every group with different beliefs is out to indoctrinate them.
-Jay
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1I find it interesting and a little puzzling that articles like this often mention how many years someone has "been a Christian". The implication seems to be that having been a Christian for a while gives one some sort of intrinsic credibility.
2There's no mention of which "Bible college", which would seem to be a relevant nugget of information. I'm fairly confident in concluding that the reference is to any one of the network of Bible colleges under the general umbrella of the Independent Christian Churches/Churches of Christ. This lets us draw some general conclusions about what she would have been taught - it's likely to have been a conservative course of study that doesn't include the more critical modern developments in Biblical studies. I will continue to refer to "Bible college" with quotation marks because for all the information provided in the article, she could have been doing a self-study course from a diploma mill. Ms. Heck's lack of specificity undercuts her position, in my opinion.
3I doubt that it's a coincidence that Damien is also the name of the antichrist child in the Omen films...
4"Unusual interpretations" is on of those phrases that means something different to everyone that sees it.
5If the antics of one of their most prominent adherents are any indication, other super powers include the ability to jump on couches on daytime talk shows, the ability to stare at people for long periods of time without blinking, and the ability to believe in huge amounts of incoherent bullshit.
6Growing up Catholic, I was always taught that one's actions spoke loudly. In other words, doing good works was at least as important as declaring your faith in Jesus. The sola fide thing always seemed wrong to me. It seems almost like a "get out of jail free" card. I can't help but think of the occasional stories of death-row conversions where someone facing execution finds Jesus at the 11th hour. The notion that some calculating serial killer might get into Heaven based on a choice made on his way to visit Old Sparky while his victims might not seems seriously screwed up to my way of thinking. But, at the same time, if you pick your Bible verses the right way, that's exactly what you get. In fact, if you use the right proof-texts, you can make a case that once you accept Jesus, you can get away with pretty much anything. I don't know anyone who actually takes it to that extreme, but the fact of the matter is that you could.
7I highly recommend spending some time on FACTnet. I would suggest avoiding the Cult Awareness Network (CAN). CAN was another site critical of Scientology, but had legal and financial troubles. The organization was bought out by a Scientology lawyer in 1996, and is now an arm of that organization.
8The short explanation of why I consider it intellectually suspect is that if your beliefs are worth having, they're worth subjecting to some critical scrutiny. It's far easier not to do this, because if you do, odds are that you'll find that some of your beliefs don't have much support behind them, and some of them may be clearly wrong. It's uncomfortable to have to deal with realizations like that, but that doesn't mean you should go out of your way to avoid the situation.
U.S.-born Muslim Cleric: Kill U.S. Civilians
Go read this.
Allow it to sink in.
Anwar Al-Awlaki, a Muslim cleric born in New Mexico to Yemeni parents, is encouraging the killing of U.S. civilians because “the American people, in general, are taking part in this and they elected this administration and they are financing the war.”
It's pretty clear where Al-Awlaki stands on things.
In my opinion, one of the biggest problems that plagues the whole "war on terror"1 business is that it puts the focus on the effect, not the cause.
Acts that we refer to as terrorism aren't simply the impulsive acts of lunatics or psychopaths, though many people may find it comforting to believe that they are. They're more complicated than that because of the ideologies at work behind them. Within the logic of those ideologies, acts of terrorism make sense, and within the context of those ideologies, what we think of as acts of terrorism may well be thought of as acts of heroism.2
Since September 11, 2001, we Americans have been presented with a fairly consistent black-and-white message: The Bad Guys (the terrorists and anyone who supports them) are out to get the Good Guys (the Americans and our allies). The reason that the Bad Guys want to get the Good Guys is, for the most part, presented as jealousy of all the great stuff we have. It's all very movie-plot, but I don't think it's very accurate.
Reading between the lines of Al-Awlaki's comments, it seems to me that the reason that the Bad Guys want to get the Good Guys is not much more mysterious than "the Americans aren't Muslims." And if you look at that from the perspective of a certain stripe of very devout Muslim, that's a perfectly reasonable justification, and furthermore, from a certain very devout Muslim perspective, we're the Bad Guys.
I need to be very clear that I don't believe for a moment that every, or even most individual Muslims are looking for an opportunity to kill an American. I rather suspect that most would just prefer that everyone stop shooting at each other.
I also need to be very clear that just because I say that from a particular perspective a certain action seems reasonable3, I'm not saying that such an action is right. Try as I might, I can think of no realistic situation in which hijacking airplanes full of passengers and deliberately crashing them into occupied buildings is right. It's horrific by any standard, and the fact that such an act might be religiously motivated does not change the horrific nature of the act in the least.
If Al-Awlaki's comments are reflective of widespread sentiment, and it's not unreasonable to expect that they are, they suggest a mindset that is unlikely to be overcome using military techniques.4 In fact, I'm not convinced that such a mindset can be overcome.
But I'm certain it won't be if we don't make the effort to understand it.
-Jay
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1I don't like that term, by the way. Terror isn't something concrete that we can "defeat" in any useful sense of the term. It might be more meaningful to call it a "war on terrorists".
2I used to wonder if Darth Vader knew that he was evil. Given the rather cut-out characterization he had in the films, I suspect that we are to believe that he did. However, I would speculate that a Darth Vader, were he to exist in real life, would probably be as completely convinced that he was doing the right thing as anyone else. I don't think he would wake up in the morning and think to himself "What evil acts do I have on the calendar today?"
3Being able to understand other perspectives is a useful skill to have. It can be difficult to do, though, particularly if the other perspective is the polar opposite of your own. Always keep in mind that understanding does not imply agreement.
4Attempting to have soldiers pass out Bibles in Iraq and using rifle sights inscribed with Bible references don't help matters at all.
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