WEEKLY LETTER #48
MORAL EQUIVALENCY:RIGHT OR WRONG?

We all have heard about the English schoolteacher who was incarcerated in the Sudan because she allowed the students to name a teddy bear Mohammad. Who’ll forget the scenes of violent mobs in Khartoum wielding their machetes and shouting “kill her, kill her.”

When it comes to Islam and Christianity, those here in the West who bring out the argument of moral equivalency, I wonder what they say about this incident? How many demonstrations have we seen in the West because of the defamation of Christ or the name of Jesus? Often the only time the name of Christ is used is when it is a ‘swear word’.

Often we hear supporters of moral equivalency saying that "yes the Muslims want to impose sharia law upon their own societies, but, they say, are the Christians any different?" Some would even go as far to say that when the Taliban advocate stoning and beheadings the Christians would do the same if they had the opportunity. The moral equivalency supporters would say that the Jihadist, or the Taliban, and the fundamentalist Christians are two sides of the same coin. How ingenious!

Chris Hedges declared “the Christian right and radical Islamist, although locked in a holy war, increasingly mirror each other. They share the same obsessions. They do not tolerate other forms of belief or disbelief. They are at war with artistic and cultural expression. They seek to silence the media. They call for the subjugation of women. They promote severe sexual repression, and they seek to express themselves through violence.”

As Robert Spencer brings out in his book 'Religion of Peace': As television personality Rosie O’Donnell put it in September 2006: “radical Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam in a country like America.” To this the British columnist David Thompson – no fundamentalist Christian – replied acidly: “but while red-faced evangelist may say, for instance, that gay people are wicked, damned to Hell fire, etc., I do not know of any internationally renowned Christian leaders who are calling for the imprisonment and killing of gay people. Unlike the supposedly moderate grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who insist that gay men and lesbians should be killed in the worst manner possible. Not condemned, corrected, prayed for, or pitied, or any of the usual nonsense spouted by Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson etc.; but murdered – as brutally as possible.”

The idea that Christianity has as much to apologize for as the Muslim extremists is not true. No matter how hard the supporters of moral equivalency try to bring up the idea that there is no difference, we find that the facts speak and tell a different story. We, as God’s people, need to be able to defend what Christianity is all about and so defeat the arguments of moral equivalency.

In true Christianity we do not show hate, but love. We are to love our Muslim friends. My wife is constantly making contact with the Muslim women in our area and seeing how she can help them cope with the difficulties and problems of living here in the West and not really understanding the language or our laws. We need to reach out to them in love where-ever they are.

We read in Acts 17:2 “as his custom was, Paul went into the synagogue, and on three Sabbath days he reasoned with them from the Scriptures explaining and proving that the Christ had to suffer and rise from the dead.”

So, we (the church) must be able to explain and reason with our Muslim friends who Christ really is. With the supporters of the moral equivalency here in the West we need to be able to explain and prove that Christianity and Islam are not at all the same.