from whence comes this fabricated argument of sending missionaries to iraq?
There is something very wrong with you, lady.
Here. Take a look:
'Spiritual warfare' looms
globeandmail.com
By DOUG SAUNDERS
From Wednesday's Globe and Mail
Washington is trying to portray its battle as one of liberation, not conquest, but Iraq is about to be invaded by thousands of U.S. evangelical missionaries who say they are bent on a "spiritual warfare" campaign to convert the country's Muslims to Christianity.
Among the largest aid groups preparing to provide humanitarian assistance to Iraqis ravaged by the war are a number of Christian charities based in the southern United States that make no secret of their desire to spread the gospel of Jesus Christ and win over Muslim souls.
The largest of these is the Southern Baptist Convention, an ardent supporter of the war as an opportunity to bring Christianity to the Middle East. It says it has 25,000 trained evangelists ready to enter Iraq.
"That would [mean] a heart change would go on in that part of the world," Mark Liederbach of the Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary explained in a recent speech to the SBC. "That's what we need to be praying for. That's how a Christian wages spiritual warfare."
Such words have caused deep alarm among military and diplomatic authorities. Although Christian aid organizations have worked comfortably alongside secular groups in other conflicts, Muslims around the world are already suspicious of U.S. motives in Iraq, and the worry is that missionaries could reinforce the widespread popular belief that the war is really a "clash of civilizations" between Christians and Muslims.
Muslim groups say they believe the presence of evangelists is a sign that President George W. Bush is trying to impose his own evangelical Christianity on Muslims. It does not help that Mr. Bush became a born-again Christian in the 1980s with the assistance of Billy Graham, the founder of the SBC.
"This is creating a real serious problem of perception: Here we have an army invading Iraq, followed by a bunch of people who want to convert everyone to Christianity," said Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on Islamic-American Relations. "How's that going to look in the Muslim world? And how's it going to look that this guy says Muslims are evil and he's the guy who works with the President?"
Mr. Hooper was referring to Mr. Graham's son, Franklin, who runs the SBC. The younger Mr. Graham, who delivered the invocation at Mr. Bush's inauguration in 2001, has repeatedly gone on the record describing Islam as "wicked."
Mr. Graham has recently been more tolerant of Islam, but he has made it clear that the conversion of Muslims to Christianity is a goal for his volunteers.
"I believe as we work, God will always give us opportunities to tell others about His Son," he told the religious newsletter BeliefNet last week. "We are there to reach out to love them and to save them, and as a Christian, I do this in the name of Jesus Christ."
In response to criticism, many Christian aid groups, including Mr. Graham's, have toned down the religious messages in their work.
"We want to spread the message of Jesus Christ through outwork, by reaching out to people with humanitarian aid," said Sam Porter, disaster-relief director for the Baptist General Convention of Oklahoma, the largest of the SBC's aid groups. "We are not there to preach; we are on a predominantly humanitarian mission and we want to work as Good Samaritans — we do our work with the love of Jesus Christ in our hearts."
In one major project, Baptist families have been asked to put together "gift of love" food boxes designed to provide a month's worth of basic nourishment to a family of five. "Please do not place any additional items/literature inside the box," the families are told. Mr. Porter, who runs the program, explained that this is to prevent them from being seen as missionary packages.
However, on the outside of each box will be a label bearing an Arabic translation of John 1:17: "For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ."
While many evangelical aid workers are motivated by humanitarian desires, their mission statement makes it clear that they are required to attempt conversions: "It is the duty of every child of God to seek constantly to win the lost to Christ by verbal witness undergirded by a Christian lifestyle, and by other methods in harmony with the gospel of Christ."
Relief plans for Iraq raise questions of hidden motive
Muslim critics say Christian groups should stay out
journalnow.com
By Kevin Begos and John Railey
JOURNAL REPORTERS
In a remote town in northern Afghanistan surrounded by towering mountains and feuding warlords, Ben Cuthbert, an evangelical Christian, says that Muslim residents have been so welcoming that "it's going to make it really hard to leave. I really love the people here."
Cuthbert, 25, works for Samaritan's Purse, the international relief group headed by Franklin Graham, who was heavily criticized for calling Islam "a very evil and wicked religion" in an interview with NBC not long after Sept. 11. Now, Samaritan's Purse is prepared to send a team of workers into Iraq. The Southern Baptist Convention, whose leaders backed the war on Iraq, plans to send in workers as well.
Some Muslim groups say that could do more harm than good.
"I think it would be in the best interest of this country if they don't go in," said Hodan Hassan, a spokeswoman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Washington. "Obviously it would look bad to have Franklin Graham and his group come into Iraq following the American troops. I think it will feed the perception that somehow the invasion is just the first step in a crusade."
But Cuthbert's report suggesting that evangelical Christians can work successfully in the wake of war was echoed by Omar Ghafoorzai, a spokesman for the Afghan Embassy in Washington. Ghafoorzai said that Samaritan's Purse runs "the most well-equipped hospital in all of northern Afghanistan." The hospital, in Kholm, was struggling to offer even basic services before Samaritan's Purse arrived in January 2002, bringing a team that included new medical staff.
"We have not heard any complaints about them," said Ghafoorzai. "From what we hear, they are doing a good job."
Ghafoorzai said that whether a relief worker is Christian, Muslim or non-religious is "not an issue to us." All that matters, he said, is whether a person is truly helping the people of Afghanistan.
Samaritan's Purse says it has a team made up of Americans, Canadians, Iraqis, Jordanians and Lebanese near the border waiting to provide aid to victims "regardless of religion, race or politics."
Members of that group say that, as in Afghanistan, they expect things will work out at the local level.
But with anti-American feelings surging across the Middle East, the ties between the religious right and the Bush administration don't sit well with many Muslims.
Sam Atassi, the president of the Muslim Association of the Triad, says that Graham and other evangelical Christians "are spreading hatred, not love."
"To say they're going to go and help the Iraqi people now, that's ridiculous. (Some Christians have been) going to kill them and then they're going to help them - it's ridiculous," said Atassi, a native of Syria.
Onward Christian Soldiers?
"The question we all have to ask is how do people understand Christianity as it comes along behind an army?" said Bill Leonard, the dean of the Wake Forest University Divinity School.
"From a humanitarian aspect, it has merit, of course, but the question is what it creates in the minds of people who are very vulnerable right now in terms of their religion," he said.
"It could be a symbol that has as much negative religious impact as it has positive humanitarian impact," Leonard said of Samaritan's Purse and the Southern Baptist Convention plan to go into Iraq.
Representatives for Samaritan's Purse and other Christian groups reject critics who suggest that the complex and costly humanitarian missions they carry out are simply a cover for preaching and handing out Bibles.
"There's an old stereotype of fundamentalist Christians, I suppose you'd say, as hard-sale Christians and that just doesn't describe who evangelicals are and hasn't for decades," said Mark Kelly, a spokesman for the International Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention. The group has been getting churches to assemble boxes of food to distribute in Iraq, with the hope of delivering them by June.
Leonard said that Christian missionaries have struggled with this issue since their start. "I think it's very tricky, because all religions ... are compelled to care for the hurting and the helpless, but we're constantly called to examine how we do that."
But in Iraq, the mission workers "have to be prepared for being misperceived," Leonard said. "It's how it looks ... that's just the tension."
Under a Microscope
Cuthbert said he's aware of the tension, but that openness is a solution.
"Because of the fact that you are under a microscope, you aren't able to be as spontaneous in the sharing of your faith," he said. "People are listening. There's always a chance you could be setup. An opposing party could be out to ruin you."
In an op-ed piece that appeared in the Los Angeles Times last week, Franklin Graham wrote that "In Iraq, as is the case wherever we work, Samaritan's Purse will offer physical assistance to those who need it, with no strings attached."
"We don't have to preach to be a Christian organization," he said. Graham declined to comment for this story.
Cuthbert, working in a country that has been battered by war, famine and drought for more than 20 years, said that having a hidden agenda simply wouldn't work among Afghans who have learned the hard way to be wary of outsiders and extremists in their own country.
"We meet openly with community leaders and talk about the underlying motivations of Samaritan's Purse," he said. "There's a sincere sense of curiosity, of our motivations. They know who we are, and I believe if they had a problem with who we are they would have let me know about it."
Cuthbert said he's comfortable with measuring his success in terms other than conversion. "If we walk away from this project and there are no lasting spiritual impacts - we still have no idea what groundwork or foundation we may have broken, or the sterotypes we have broken being a Christian organization in a Muslim nation," he said.
Breaking down stereotypes "might be the only role we have here in this point in history," he said, adding that "the people of Afghanistan are hungry for anything outside of the very closed world view they had after decades of war and Taliban, where freedom was absolutely impossible. They're hungry to know anything about the outside world - Western civilization, religious beliefs, just out of a very sincere sense of curiosity."
Many humanitarian organizations are trying to distance themselves from any affiliation with the U.S. military in post-war Iraq, but the Rev. Kevin Kilbreth of Oaklawn Baptist Church in Winston-Salem sees a link.
"I think it (the missions effort) certainly goes hand in hand, although it might not seem so, with what our military is doing," Kilbreth said. Part of the money from collection plates at his church - just as at many other Southern Baptist churches - will go to the effort in Iraq.
"I'm not preoccupied with trying to address the wide range of varying perceptions," Kilbreth said. "The truth is, no matter what you do or don't do, somebody's going to attribute a motive to it that's just not accurate."
Kilbreth said that it would be "a stretch" for anyone to think that President Bush's strategy has been to conquer Iraq and bring Christianity to the country.
"But on the other hand, I'm part of a denomination that is interested in taking the message of Jesus Christ to every continent, to every nation, to every tribe and tongue. If what is taking place geopolitically in Iraq opens an opportunity, Southern Baptists have been historically alert to seize those opportunities," he said.
Kelly said he hasn't heard any talk of partnering with Samartian's Purse in Iraq. He declined to say how many missionaries the SBC is sending. But he did say that it would be a few experienced missionaries - the "vast majority" of those short-term volunteers - in the country for a week or two.
Words and Deeds
Hassan, of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said she hadn't heard of any problems with the Samaritan's Purse operations in Afghanistan either, but that the impact of Graham's words from more than a year ago still resonates in the Muslim community.
"Nothing he could say (now) could allay the concerns. He hasn't apologized for those remarks," she said, adding that her group has no problem with many other Christian relief organizations.
With Arab TV filled with images of dead Iraqi women and children, she said it would be "way too inflammatory" for Samaritan's Purse to work in Iraq in the near future.
Graham did later qualify his remarks, saying he did not believe Muslims "are evil people because of their faith. But I decry the evil that has been done in the name of Islam, or any other faith - including Christianity."
In last week's opinion-page article, he wrote, "When we have been blessed with countless resources and have an opportunity to make a difference in people's lives, should we withhold that aid just because we are people of faith?"
Mudafar Altawash, a manager for Islamic Relief in Berkeley, Calif., said that Graham still isn't saying the one most important thing.
"If he made an apology, it would help," Altawash said. |
