Should Christians convert Muslims? PART TWO
At its most subtle, tentmaking embodies St. Francis' edict: "Preach the gospel at all times; when necessary, use words." ("Be someone's friend, not an Amway salesman," paraphrases one veteran.) But the sometimes clandestine status can breed bad habits. Visa bans turn many Evangelicals, usually straightforward to a fault, into truth stretchers, if only at the customs desk. They use encrypted e-mail and code words or smuggle Bibles. "Some," says a Christian minister in Morocco, "seem to have been inspired by the book of James, verse 007." It is not really their fault, says the leader of one mission, contending, "It should not be dangerous for a person to move to a different country and, to use the words of the U.N.'s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 'manifest his belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.'" Yet a classroom scene at Columbia International University in South Carolina reported last year by Mother Jones magazine demonstrates an unnerving ethical elasticity. "Did Jesus ever lie?" asks a lecturer. His class replies, "No." "But did Jesus raise his hand and say, 'I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?'" Again, 20 voices call out, "No!" (The instructor confirms the quote but says that it was taken out of context.)
Then there are the apparent attempts by some missionaries to camouflage their faith as a kind of Islam: inviting prospective converts to "Jesus mosques," publicly reciting the Muslim creed, "There is no God but God, and Muhammad is his prophet"; or allowing themselves to be regarded as Muslim mystics, or Sufis. Such techniques are rationalized as part of "contextualization," the necessary presentation of new ideas in a familiar idiom. But Ibrahim Hooper, of the Washington advocacy group Council on American-Islamic Relations, claims, "They know it won't work to just say, 'We want you to become Christian, and here's why.' So they have to pretend to be Muslims." Some Evangelicals are also wary. Jesus mosque "blurs the issue," says a missionary in Jordan. "If Muslims are coming to Christ, they really need to know what they're coming to."
Some of the secrecy may be unnecessary. David English, executive director of a tentmaking assistance agency called Global Opportunities, points out that even in Saudi Arabia, one of the more restrictive Muslim-majority nations, "it has been clarified that if in the normal course of your work people ask about your faith, you're perfectly free to talk about it and explain it. There's a law against conversion?they're still not playing fair?but that much is O.K." Other experts say local leaders will often tolerate informal preaching as the price for Western expertise in other fields. Says Daryl Anderson of the Evangelical Free Church of America, whose missionaries ply primarily the health and information-technology fields: "We're creative in finding where the government itches, so we can scratch it. And depending on the ideological purity of the government agency, we have a certain freedom to be open about our faith."
Such informal understandings, however, can evaporate when a regime cracks down or a missionary becomes more assertive. In August 2001, Afghanistan's Taliban arrested Heather Mercer, 24, and Dayna Curry, 29, who had traveled from a Texas church to work for a group called Shelter Germany in Kabul. During their three-month incarceration, subsequent rescue and visit with President Bush in the Rose Garden, the press referred to them as "Christian aid workers," implying that they were engaged solely in humanitarian ministry and that their jailers' claim that they were proselytizing was false.
In their book Prisoners of Hope, however, Mercer and Curry wrote of initiating Christian prayer with Muslims, urging them to listen to evangelistic broadcasts (in one case providing the radio) and showing at least two families a film on Jesus. "We understood that the Taliban prohibited non-Muslims from sharing their faith with Afghans," the women stated. But they claimed that this violated international norms, and wrote, "We believe the Afghans?like all people?should at least have the opportunity to hear about the teachings of Christ if they choose." To Time, Mercer said, "I look forward to the day when the people of Afghanistan, and those of nations like it, have the freedom to choose whom they follow?the freedom of religion and conscience."
Such sentiments are noble enough. But the women's acts were unpopular with a spectrum of Kabul aid groups running from secular workers to fellow Evangelicals. "They broke every rule in the book," says Seiple, the former State Department religious-freedom ambassador. "They were women in a patriarchal society, didn't know the language (well), didn't know the culture and were counseled against doing this by other Christians." Says "Kay," a 13-year veteran of evangelical missions in another Muslim capital who reports that the incident eventually hampered her own work: "I'm sorry that they suffered, but they just didn't think. They did not project their idealism to its farthest conclusion."
Intra-Christian recrimination also arose around the shocking death last November of Bonnie Witherall, 31, a nurse's assistant at the Christian and Missionary Alliance pre-natal clinic in Sidon, Lebanon, a facility funded partly by Franklin Graham's Samaritan's Purse organization. One morning as she arrived to open the clinic, an unknown assailant shot her three times in the head. Her murder may have been simple anti-Americanism, since it followed one of Osama bin Laden's bellicose edicts. But the New York Times reported that members of the Alliance?which flew a banner emblazoned with the Arabic for "And Jesus said to them: I am the bread of life, and who accepts me will never go hungry"?had received threats after local imams denounced them for allegedly handing out Christian literature and evangelizing to Muslim youth.
Such overtures are legal in Lebanon but are regarded by both Muslims and some Christian leaders as threats to the fragile peace among the country's sects. Thus the local Catholic Archbishop, while condemning the crime, felt it necessary to announce, "We don't accept this kind of preaching. We reject it totally."
"Sam," 46, recalls the day Israeli soldiers spotted his white Citroen van on the shoulder of a back road outside the West Bank town of Nablus and, hearing the murmuring behind its closed curtains, concluded they had stumbled on a nest of suicide bombers. At gunpoint, the American exited his vehicle and explained that the six Palestinians with him were a clandestine Christian Bible-study group avoiding the prying eyes of their neighbors. "They are in danger," he told the baffled soldiers?"in danger of being killed." Sam claims to have led more than 100 Palestinians to Christ but says that it is they who are heroic, not he. Some of the converts, say their co-believers and local diplomats, paid for their faith with arrests, beatings and torture at the hands of Palestinian forces. The same sources report that one man was then turned over to Fatah militiamen, who killed him.
Paul Marshall, of the human-rights group Freedom House, says that although conversion is a crime in some Muslim-majority countries, "the biggest problem is that somebody else, a family member or local vigilante, will kill you, and the state will not intervene." A 2001 study prepared for the Southern Baptist Convention's International Mission Board by a strategy coordinator for "unreached people groups" in Africa's Horn describes his experience in a country where, he claims, "the majority of believers in Jesus Christ were systematically hunted down and martyred." Such perils support the missionary argument that some Muslims remain in the fold less out of faith than out of fear. But the persecution poses for evangelists an additional and potentially embarrassing problem of relative risk, given that (notwithstanding the four recent deaths) converts are in far greater jeopardy than those who brought them to Christ.
Conversion is an act of free will, and the Muslims know the risks. But one must share the faith of Wally Rieke, candidate coordinator for the agency Serving in Mission, to accept his observation that converts' "security and their care is dependent on the Lord, and not on us. If it was dependent on us, we would have a lot of people in trouble." Similarly, the Baptist report's "finding" says that "missionaries need spiritual toughness so that when the fruits of their witness are required to walk through the fire, the missionary does not automatically attempt to rescue them." It continues: "To avoid persecution is to hamper the growth of the kingdom of God." Missionaries also face charges of neglectful carelessness regarding reprisals they sometimes bring down on pre-existing Christian churches and nonevangelistic aid groups. Says Lamin Sanneh, a Muslim convert to Catholicism who teaches the history of world Christianity at Yale: "They come in, don't report to the local churches, stir up a hornet's nest and then quit town when the going gets tough. Why start a controversy if you're not there to face the brunt of it?" Seiple notes that after Curry's and Mercer's arrest in Afghanistan, "all of the other Christian organizations were expelled until the Taliban fell."
For "Robert," the days of waiting appeared to be over. For months the globetrotting evangelist had kept a low profile, waiting for his latest chosen mission field, Iraq, to open up. He had lived quietly in a nearby capital, referring to Iraq by a code name. But after Baghdad's liberation, Robert was ready to roll. He planned to enter Iraq with a secular humanitarian team?a kind of traveling tentmaker?but assumed that his workers could come in later on their own, printing up Arabic-language tracts in anticipation. Not all missionaries supported the Iraq war, but Robert identified personally with George W. Bush. "Something you must understand," Robert e-mailed, "is that diplomacy does not work with Satan." He realizes that interjecting an uncompromising gospel at so sensitive a time and place may provoke hostility. But he sees that as an inevitable consequence. "If Satan's armor is pierced," he wrote, "that fissure will be violently contested at every point and turn." When Christ is proclaimed in Iraq, he predicted, there would be "riots." But after all, he explained, his mandate "is to turn the world upside down."
It seems worth asking, however, whether that is a mandate with which Americans in general care to be identified. Missionaries often complain of suffering from an overall Muslim perception of Americans as purveyors of trash culture and libertinism. But with the newly aggressive wave of Evangelicals and the newly sensitive situation in the Middle East, the shoe may be on the other foot: the missionaries may actually affect the way the Muslim world understands America.
Much was made of Franklin Graham's strange triple role as Islam basher ("a very evil and wicked religion"), Bush Administration favorite (he preached a Good Friday service at the Pentagon) and would-be provisioner of aid and the Gospel to the newly liberated nation. But Graham is just part of the Iraqi missionary wave, made up not only of nonproselytizing mainline charities but also of evangelical groups like his. Some offer only material aid; others aid plus the Good News. Others such as the International Bible Society and Discipling a Whole Nation (dawn) will concentrate solely on spreading God's word. Not for decades has Evangelicalism enjoyed such an Iraqi beachhead. dawn's Rich Haynie says that to the extent that the Allied bombardment induced Muslims to question their god, "we could say that the war was a ripeness moment."
This sort of language perturbs Wake Forest's Kimball, who recently wrote the book When Religion Becomes Evil. "This is an area that lives with a history of crusades and in the shadow of colonialism," he says. "The image of an overwhelming military power coming in already provokes major questions about deeper U.S. intentions. If you add an aggressive missionary presence, it will be easy to see this as a kind of American Christian triumphalism." Says Azzam Tamimi, director of the London-based Institute of Islamic Political Thought: "Wherever I go, people say, 'Haven't you heard about American missionaries in Jordan waiting to go into Iraq?' These are educated people; under normal circumstances, the missionaries would not be a big deal, but now people find it very difficult to believe this is not a crusade against Islam on the part of the Bush Administration."
Evangelicals assert again and again that their message is based in love. They are far better informed and more actively concerned than the average American citizen about the Islamic world's material needs, and their desire to share Christ springs in the main from a similarly generous impulse. Claims that Christian aid groups engage in charity as a "cover" for proselytizing do a disservice to the sometimes heroic humanitarian efforts by workers who believe that Christians should heed not just Jesus' message of salvation but also his example as a feeder and a healer. Yet there should be no question that while most evangelical missionaries love Muslims, they hope to replace Islam. Some cringed at Graham's "evil and wicked" description, but their critique was more about tone than substance. A few would suggest that only parts of Islam, and not its whole, are misguided. But most would subscribe to Luis Bush's generalization about Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism: "Satan wants to keep people as miserable as possible for as long as possible."
Clearly, this ideology is at odds with President Bush's statements that Islam is a religion of peace, his visit to a Washington, D.C., mosque and his invitation to prominent Muslims to break their Ramadan fast at the White House. Sufficiently amplified, it could also presumably complicate American efforts to bolster moderate Islam in the Middle East. The Administration, however, does not see it that way. Government officials admit the existence of a few "cowboys," but by and large, says one, missionaries "are often helping people, and not simply because they want to convert them," and Muslims are happy for the aid. During discussion of Graham's role in Iraq, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Agency for International Development noted to a reporter for the Beliefnet website that the government could not in any case control private charitable organizations. And a senior Administration official told Time that given the President's close ties to the Christian right and his support of faith-based charity work, there was little chance the White House would discourage Christian aid organizations from going to Iraq.
The national debate over missionaries in Iraq has provoked a parallel discourse in the evangelical community, or rather, a new chapter in the ongoing dialogue about how best to deliver God's word. At a gathering called last month by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a Washington think tank, fervor and self-criticism mixed with a sense that Christianity's overtures to Muslims might be entering a critical stage. "If we don't get this right this time, we could become irrelevant," worried one participant. Another, Serge Duss of the Christian charity World Vision International, asserted that the current controversy is "merely a blip on the screen." The value of Christian missions would not be judged on the past few months but on the past half-century, during which, "because we love God and love our neighbor," they have been "in the forefront of providing not only humanitarian aid but development, child health care, sanitation and communications." At times, Duss said, "we have been able to be more overt about our Christian faith and at times not. And this," he added, "is where we need to be very wise."
And wisdom, in the end, comes from above. The muezzin has called two more times, and Josh, the first-time missionary, looks out his window at a stooped old woman in a billowing cloak, picking her way up a neighboring hill. The sight fires some kind of synapse in the place of convergence among his youthful eagerness, the desire to share, the impulse to meddle and the conviction that God's providence will sort them out. "I see people like her, and I wonder, what's her story?" he says. "What can I do to help her? When I feel the calling on my heart, I don't see how it is possible to be here and not want to be able to speak to people, to love them, to get to know them. Every day I say to God: use me. Tell me what to do. Tell me what to say."
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