By Joseph Perdue
“Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away at its vital unity. Hate destroys a man’s sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true.” So wrote the famous Baptist martyr Martin Luther King Jr.
This is a truth that those of us in the Baptist tradition know very well. After all, we trace our spiritual heritage to men and women who were flogged, imprisoned and exiled for advocating the radical and offensive idea of being faithful to the Scriptures. In light of this, I propose another idea that many will find both radical and offensive: We should love our neighbors.
At first, the reader may not find such a statement to be out of the ordinary. After all, this commandment is second only to the command to love God. There’s nothing controversial about love in theory, but the application can be rather difficult. This is especially true when our neighbors are a hated minority like Baptists once were, and like Muslims are today.
Most people don’t realize how outrageous the parable of the Good Samaritan was in Jesus’ context. Jesus told his listeners that he expected them to love a group of people with whom no patriotic Jew would ever associate. Now, imagine the shock and outrage if Jesus were preaching in the Deep South today and told his listeners a story about a man who was mugged and left for dead, and whose bleeding body was ignored by a pastor and Sunday school teacher before a Shiite Muslim drove him to the hospital and paid for his treatment.
Muslims are our neighbors, and anyone who takes Jesus seriously will love them. But loving Muslims involves neither slandering them nor holding a grudge toward them.
Saying that Islam is an inherently violent religion is like saying the Baptist faith naturally produces someone like Fred Phelps; it simply isn’t true. St. Augustine wrote of how disastrous it is for Christians to talk about things of which they are ignorant because the lost may be inclined to think that the Scriptures hold opinions as ridiculous as the ones they hear from ignorant Christians. If you are a Christian making false or unsupported remarks about Islam, please stop. Some of us are trying to spread the gospel.
And Christians need to abandon the quid-pro-quo mindset we have toward forgiveness. Many Christians have said that they will forgive Muslims only when they all apologize for terrorism, or that they can build a mosque in their neighborhood only when Christians can build a church in Saudi Arabia. Jesus lived a life of unconditional forgiveness, saying that we should forgive others 70 times seven (the conventional wisdom being that a righteous man would forgive seven times). Jesus said we must forgive in order that our sins may be forgiven. Muslims, and indeed all non-Christians, are in the same state that we once were. All apart from Christ are separated from the God who loves them. If our prejudices or resentment get in the way of loving others, we reveal ourselves to be false disciples. If love of nation or ethnicity exceeds the love of God and the love of others, we prove ourselves to be idolaters, because we have misplaced our devotion.
Jesus is not an American, and he does not love us more than he loves Muslims.
Loving Muslims may be easier said than done, especially for someone who has lost loved ones in terrorist attacks. However, Jesus didn’t say that we must follow his commandments only when they aren’t too hard. He said one must carry a cross to follow him, and expect to be hated by the world for our trouble. Those of us who are Baptists must lead the way for other Christians to love all Muslims, to know the difference between the ones who hurt us and those who don’t, and to forgive the ones who are our enemies. After all, Jesus said in Matthew 5: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.”