By Pastor Marcia Sietstra

Sept. 21, 2003

If you were here last week, you know that I began a two-part sermon that I will finish today. Although historically religion has been the source of tremendous good in the world, religion has also been a source of violence and destruction. Today religiously motivated conflict is taking place in Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Israel, Indonesia, the Sudan, even here as is evidenced in the 9/11 attack, and I could go on at length naming other countries were religion feeds war. One or more of five warning signs nearly always precede religiously sanctioned violence, according to Dr. CharlesKimball, Chair of the Religion Dept. at Wake Forest University, and expert on comparative religions and the Middle East. I heard Dr. Kimball lecture daily while I was at Chautauqua Institute this summer and recommend his new book, When Religion Becomes Evil.

If you missed last week, that sermon and today’s will be posted on our website sometime in the next few weeks at www.crestwooducc.org. [By the way, you may not be able to access our website this week due to a problem with our host server. So don’t be alarmed, just check back in a week or two and it will be back up.]

Today I will continue describing the 5 warning signs of religion that has become destructive, and offer some safeguards that help avoid these dangers. The first warning sign I described last week is absolute truth claims, typically based on rigid literalism and selective use of Bible texts. The second warning sign is blind obedience, usually to one charismatic leader, but sometimes to one very narrow interpretation of scripture.

Today I begin with the 3rd warning sign, and that is the attempt to establish the ideal time. There are those within many religions who anticipate an approaching day when the faithful of their religion will enjoy a golden age. Some very fundamentalist Jews see this golden era as the time when the Temple will be rebuilt in Jerusalem and Israel’s borders will match those of ancient scripture. On the other hand, some fundamentalist Muslims expect an ideal time when religious government will replace secular government under ancient Islamic Shiite laws. It is not just a group of Jewish believers and a group of Muslim believers who have this idea of an ideal time. Many fundamentalist Christians also do. They anticipate a thousand year period related to the second coming of Christ, and ushered in by a series of events they believe is predicted in the book of Revelation. Some see it as a golden age after the second coming; others see it as a time of terrible tribulation before Christ’s second coming.

This thinking accounts for the widespread popularity of a fictional series of books known as the Left Behind series. Unfortunately, the worldview in these books is that at some future moment there will be golden age for a select few, but this will be a horrific time for all the rest of the world. In the Left Behind books there is what is called the Rapture, in which the faithful Christians are instantaneously taken up into the clouds, leaving empty cars on the freeways, airplanes without pilots, and so on. All those not ‘saved’ are left to suffer catastrophic events.

These books seem to encourage readers who see themselves as ‘saved,’ though they present a troubling fear-based motivation for faith, as well as a lopsided image of a wrathful, punishing God. The books reflect one of many different interpretations of the book of Revelation, a book that says at its very outset that it is only a dream. Martin Marty says, Try interpreting your dreams and you’ll see why people expound so many weird ideas based on this book. Revelation was written to encourage early Christians to be hopeful’in our time, it’s used to scare the daylights out of people. By the way, Revelation barely made it into the scriptures because the bishops who chose what went into the New Testament argued vehemently about whether to include it, probably foreseeing the potential for misreading it.

So what’s the harm in believing in a cataclysmic time when God’s people will be vindicated on earth? There are several tendencies that present danger: 1) the tendency for people (who see themselves as one of the chosen few) to see themselves as righteous and anyone who disagrees with them as ‘evil’; 2) the tendency to openly discourage active peacemaking since they believe catastrophic battles are God’s intention, and part of a divine plan to usher in your golden age, and 3) the tendency to think that the ‘true believers’ are God’s army on earth, who must help to usher in God’s coming reign. Now most Christians who believe in an ideal time don’t advocate violence. I have relatives who believe this stuff. But there are many who come dangerously close to advocating violence, and others who have crossed that line, convinced that the end result justifies violence to achieve it.

This leads me to the 4th warning sign that religion has become destructive: when the end justifies any means. Recently on MPR, I heard an interview with a Muslim man who had once been part of a group called the Wahabees, which is a very powerful, radical Islamic group, especially in Saudi Arabia today. The Taliban and the 9/11 terrorists came out of the Wahabees, an extremist, minority Islamic group that has existed on the fringe of Islam since the 1700’s. Their goal is an ideal Muslim state in which there is a return to strict religious laws, as interpreted by the group’s founder. To create such a ‘holy state’, they believe, warrants the use of violence, if necessary. Unlike the Wahabees, the majority of Muslims believe the Qur’an requires them to seek peace and establish a social order based on justice. Many Muslims today are working to foster secular government that can exist separate from and alongside religion.

Some Christians have also fallen into the trap of thinking the end justifies any means. Remember hearing about the Christian Crusades in history class in school? In the 11th century armies of ‘true believers’, sponsored by the Catholic church, swept from Europe through Turkey and into the Middle East. What we didn’t hear much about growing up is that these Christian armies massacred Muslim and Jewish men, women and children. There are accounts of Crusaders carrying the heads of Muslims on spears and burning alive townspeople who gathered in synagogues and mosques for safety. When the crusading Christians destroyed Jerusalem, the written accounts describe blood flowing in the streets up to the knees of the Crusaders’ horses. The crime of these civilians was simply that they were not Christian.

This is why knowledgeable religious leaders and historians were aghast when President Bush, in the first few days after 9/11, said we were going to launch a crusade against evil-doers. Phone calls and emails flooded the White House, and his use of the term ‘crusade’ ended almost immediately. Yet there are Christian leaders in this country who regularly insist that we are engaged in spiritual warfare, and would like for our government to enforce their narrow view of Christianity. These fundamentalist Christians who call for a holy war are one step removed from their counterparts in Islam who call for a holy war and an Islamic state. Kimball writes: Those who narrowly define ideal structures of the state and determine that they are God’s agents to establish it are dangerous. Beware of people and groups whose political blueprint is based on a mandate from heaven that depends on human beings to implement.

This brings me to the 5th and last warning sign that is present when religion becomes destructive, and that is the declaring of holy war. When religious people lose sight of the fundamental truths at the core of all the great, enduring religions, they lose the guiding force of compassion and love for one’s neighbor. There are those who see life as a cosmic battle between good and evil, and all those with whom they disagree are termed evil. It is not so strange that they begin to see themselves as warriors in a holy war against Satan and those who are deemed to be on Satan’s side. In this mindset, there are no shades of gray. One is either engaged in godly politics (which match theirs) or is called anti-God. There are American Christian leaders who regularly espouse this view.

While there are legitimate reasons to go to war, particularly when a group of nations agrees on the need for military action, an appeal to religion is not one of them. Religion is not a legitimate reason to go to war. Moreover, in a world with a growing number of weapons of mass destruction, declaring a holy war is not only a corruption of religion; it is also potentially suicidal. Muslims constitute the majority in more than 57 countries today. Most are as frightened of Christians as Christians are of them.

However, it should comfort you to know that the majority of Muslims have traditionally accepted restrictions on war, very similar to the Christian Just War Theory. They have similar guidelines about what is not unacceptable in combat. The safety of women, children, and noncombatants, for example is of paramount importance. They have parallel rules about a war having to be fought only as a last resort, for a just cause. To the majority of Muslims, a jihad means a deep personal struggle within oneself to be faithful. It is only a minority of extremists who misuse scripture to justify a holy war.

Well, you have heard some difficult things in this two-part sermon last week and today. Now I want to take just a few moments to remind you that there are things we can do to guard against religion becoming destructive, here are some of them.

1) Last week I suggested that we ask critical questions about religion. Teach your children not to follow anyone or any theology with blind obedience.

2) Be suspicious of religious teachings that denigrate whole groups of people, or seem to be contrary to the core values of Christianity—that is, love for one’s neighbor, compassion, and justice. People in every one of the major enduring religions can practice these guidelines because those same core values are at the center of Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism..

3) Practice humility. We guard against religion becoming destructive when we have a proper degree of humility about the limits of human knowledge to know the mind of God.

4) Learn about other religions and one’s own. Education is often what gets people out of extremist religious groups, as they are exposed to more mainstream thinking and realize there are other interpretations of their scripture.

5) Insist that our leaders stop using holy war language that labels entire countries as evil. An entire nation of people cannot be evil.

6) Pray for peace for the whole world, and by that I mean ALL of it.

And finally, I suggest we can help safeguard against religion becoming destructive by living our religion as a positive force for good. When we care about human rights and religious liberty and justice for the world’s poor, when we stop looking only after our own interests, and truly do unto others as we would have them do unto us, then we will have shown how religion can make the world a better place. May it be so. Amen.