Help Unwanted - What's wrong with Christian groups helping Iraqis?
BY VINCENT CARROLL - WSJ.com
Friday, May 16, 2003 12:01 a.m.
Hey, Steve. Here is the Evangelical's version of what they are up to. Sounds like they have not had a good conversion rate among the Muslims. As a matter of fact, I think the Muslims have done much better here among the Blacks.
When an outfit that has successfully disbursed humanitarian aid world-wide for 30 years announces that it intends to expand its efforts to postwar Iraq, you'd think the news would be met with enthusiasm. Yet reaction to just such an announcement by Samaritan's Purse, headed by the Rev. Franklin Graham, has been anything but positive, revealing much about the cultural divide in America over Christian evangelism.
Maureen Dowd, the New York Times' faithful barometer of liberal intolerance, mocked Samaritan's Purse for "waiting to inveigle Iraqi infidels with a blend of kitchen pantry and Elmer Gantry." Others simply wrung their hands over the possibility that relief workers might push their religion on resentful Muslims and evoke ugly images of a colonial past or--in all seriousness--the Crusades.
To be sure, Samaritan's Purse is something of a special case because of Mr. Graham's over-the-top charge after the Sept. 11 attacks that Islam is a "very evil and wicked religion"--a remark widely deplored in evangelical circles, too. But critics have also been hard on other evangelical groups that have expressed interest in Iraqi relief work. What really bothers them is not so much Mr. Graham's view of Islam but their own view of Christianity--or at least any version of it that actively seeks to spread the faith. Such a goal is simply incomprehensible to those imbued with the modern gospel of militant pluralism, which equates religious certitude with jackboots and cudgels.
What else but such incomprehension would motivate Terry Gross, on National Public Radio's "Fresh Air," to ask R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, whether he was a closet theocrat because he favors missionary efforts in Iraq? "Does religious liberty mean to you the right to practice any religion--Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Christianity," intoned Ms. Gross on a recent broadcast, "or does religious liberty mean to you the right to practice Christianity?" A few days later on CNN, anchor Fredricka Whitfield wanted to know why Dr. Mohler was suggesting to Muslim people "that their religion is not good enough."
It so happens that evangelical Christians have been combining religious certitude with a commitment to religious liberty for over 200 years--at least since Baptists from New England to North Carolina lobbied for minority rights in the 1770s; meanwhile, groups such as Samaritan's Purse and the Southern Baptist Convention, which also hopes to send aid to Iraq, have developed more than a smattering of experience in how to live and work among non-Christians abroad without turning them into adversaries.
Samaritan's Purse runs projects in more than 100 countries, including Pakistan and Afghanistan. It builds hospitals, clinics and schools, ministers to the sick and starving, trains local nurses, and distributes millions of gifts under Operation Christmas Child--all without inciting the backlash its detractors evidently expect. Perhaps that is because its workers understand, as Mr. Graham explained in a recent Los Angeles Times op-ed, that they "don't have to preach in order to be a Christian relief organization. Sometimes the best preaching we can do is simply being there with a cup of cold water, exhibiting Christ's spirit of serving others."
If Samaritan's Purse volunteers are allowed into Iraq, Mr. Graham predicted, "they will be able to quickly provide clean drinking water to 20,000 people, temporary shelters for 4,000 families and medical supplies for 100,000 Iraqis"--with "no strings attached."
As for converts, who knows? As Stephen Neill recounts in "A History of Christian Missions," Muslim societies have been notoriously difficult targets ever since the great expansion of Christian missionary activity in the 19th century. After spending many years in the Punjab and Iran, for example, one Anglican missionary offered this sobering admission: "I am not reaping the harvest; I scarcely claim to be sowing the seed; I am hardly plowing the soil; but I am gathering the stones. That, too, is missionary work; let it be supported by loving sympathy and fervent prayer."
Progress was even more glacial in the Arabian peninsula. At a missionary conference in 1938, Mr. Neill writes, "the most moving of all the speeches was that of the veteran Dr. Paul Harrison, who, having told the story of the five converts that the mission had won in 50 years, sat down with the quiet words, 'The Church in Arabia salutes you.' "
One can well imagine how the Maureen Dowds of Harrison's day must have scorned such patient selflessness.
Mr. Carroll is editor of the editorial pages at Denver's Rocky Mountain News.
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