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07/17/2004: "Kristof opts out of rapture"
Nicholas Kristof, columnist for the New York Times demonstrates the problems of writing about religion when you don't know quite enough about it to understand what you're dealing with. Entitled "Jesus and Jihad," it uses the Left Behind series, and particularly the latest installment, Glorious Appearing as a jumping off point to equate American fundamentalist dispensationalism (though he doesn't use the latter word, I suspect because he's unfamiliar with it and doesn't know how it differs from other conservative forms of Christianity) and Islamist terrorism:
These are the best-selling novels for adults in the United States, and they have sold more than 60 million copies worldwide. The latest is "Glorious Appearing," which has Jesus returning to Earth to wipe all non-Christians from the planet. It's disconcerting to find ethnic cleansing celebrated as the height of piety.
If a Muslim were to write an Islamic version of "Glorious Appearing" and publish it in Saudi Arabia, jubilantly describing a massacre of millions of non-Muslims by God, we would have a fit. We have quite properly linked the fundamentalist religious tracts of Islam with the intolerance they nurture, and it's time to remove the motes from our own eyes.
Let me first say that I haven't read the Left Behind books, in part because I have no truck with their theology. I think dispensationalism is a serious misreading of Scripture, perhaps even heretical. But Kristof grossly misrepresents the books when he compares them to hypothetical Islamic versions. Two problems: first, I'm sure that at no point does author Tim LaHaye suggest that Christians are going to help with this supposed slaughter of the ungodly (if he had, Kristof would certainly have quoted it, and anyway dispensationalism doesn't teach this), so there really isn't any likelihood that dispensationalists are going to start chopping off Muslim heads in order to bring about or help with the Second Coming. Second, jihadists in the Muslim world have called upon Muslims to rise up and start killing off the infidels. They haven't written fictional accounts of some divine massacre–they've advocated the faithful doing it to their opponents in the here-and-now.
As my Times colleague David Kirkpatrick noted in an article, this portrayal of a bloody Second Coming reflects a shift in American portrayals of Jesus, from a gentle Mister Rogers figure to a martial messiah presiding over a sea of blood. Militant Christianity rises to confront Militant Islam.
This is the sort of thing only a reporter (as opposed to a scholar) could say. To put things in these kind of cartoonish, all-or-nothing terms is so disconnected to historical and present reality as to be laughable.
This matters in the real world, in the same way that fundamentalist Islamic tracts in Saudi Arabia do. Each form of fundamentalism creates a stark moral division between decent, pious types like oneself—and infidels headed for hell.
Time for a bit of elementary logic here, Nick. Just because dispensationalists and Islamists each view people in terms of "stark moral division" between the just and the unjust doesn't say anything about the behavior either will use. In fact, the vast majority of the people reading the Left Behind books are just like the vast majority of the people reading Islamist tracts: non-violent believers who may think ill of those of other faiths, but who aren't about to go out killing them. Though there is one significant difference, now that I think of it–dispensationalists don't generally try to deny freedom of religion to those with whom they diagree. Wahhabists, on the other hand...
No, I don't think the readers of "Glorious Appearing" will ram planes into buildings. But we did imprison thousands of Muslims here and abroad after 9/11, and ordinary Americans joined in the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in part because of a lack of empathy for the prisoners. It's harder to feel empathy for such people if we regard them as infidels and expect Jesus to dissolve their tongues and eyes any day now.
Nice segue, Nick. Without any evidence whatsoever, you equate the abusers at Abu Ghraib with readers of the Left Behind books. We don't even know if any of those soldiers claimed to be Christians, much less Tim LaHaye fans. You also manage to equate those who made men wear women's panties on their heads with people who crashed airplanes into office buildings. And you managed to suggest that being a Left Behind reader makes one incapable of empathy for Muslims. That makes about as much sense as saying that being a reader of the New York Times makes one think that all conservatives are idiotic racists and homophobes, since the editors and writers do.
Listen, Nick, you know what Fats Waller said about jazz, right? Just keep in mind that the idea applies to other stuff, too.
