By Norman Jameson
What is the issue for Christians in the American debate about whether or not Muslims should be “allowed” to build a mosque in Manhattan?
Such a mosque would not be the first in Manhattan. In 1991 a mosque opened in uptown Manhattan. Money from the governments of Kuwait, Libya and Saudi Arabia bought the land for the cultural center/mosque in 1966 and later built the facility.
The proposed cultural center/mosque would serve Muslims in lower Manhattan. It would rise 13 stories on the site of what is now an old building that was damaged Sept. 11, 2001, when Muslim extremists flew jets into the World Trade Center towers, killing 3,000 people of many nationalities, races and religions.
That atrocity threw our country into a funk from which a stink cloud still rises. Because we could not bear the insult, we invaded Iraq and justified a pending invasion of Afghanistan.
American response has cost many times more lives than were lost on 9/11 and the long-term human toll will color our psyche and our economy for many years. It apparently also is causing Americans to consider disregarding the very principles of our nation’s founding in favor of another dip in the pool of self-pity.
America is not a “Christian” nation in the way we think of “Muslim” nations. If it were, birth certificates would automatically indicate “Christian” as the “faith of birth.” It would be illegal to convert to another faith. Jews, Native American religions, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Mormons and atheists would be unwelcome. They would need to practice their faith covertly, at great risk of discovery and penalties unto death.
That’s the way it is when a nation defines itself by the predominant faith of its people.
That’s the way it was for Baptists 400 years ago in Europe when they stood for freedom of conscience against state churches and in some cases were chained together and thrown into the river to be “baptized” by immersion. That’s why our ancestors fled Europe. That’s why Roger Williams eventually had to flee Massachusetts Bay Colony and establish Rhode Island.
Baptists must stand for the freedom of conscience for all, for which our ancestors died.
Any question of this mosque in New York City is not about the First Amendment’s precious words that the “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof….” The question of this mosque in New York City has everything to do with self-absorbed Americans nourishing our pain from 9/11 and continuing to look for someone to blame, for someone to pay, for something to make us feel alright again.
Because the radicalized terrorists who struck at our heart were Muslims, we somehow think that to deny unrelated American Muslims the opportunity to build a worship center close to where the World Trade Center towers once stood is to strike some kind of defiant blow against terrorism. We think it will raise freedom’s torch higher because we’ve defended the memories of those who died by denying a place to read, swim, meet and worship to people who claim the same faith as the terrorists.
I’m glad that standard doesn’t hold in North Carolina, where more prisoners indicate their faith of choice is “Baptist” than any other faith. As a Baptist, I would be held accountable for their crimes.
Americans have an irritating penchant for memorializing tragedy. We want to lay wreaths on dangerous highways where fatal accidents occurred. We put plaques at the site of mass killings. We restore buildings once blown up and put parks around them so people can come and see and remember how awful it was. A commission argued for months about an “appropriate” memorial for the site of the 9/11 tragedy and a major concern was, “How will the families of the victims feel?”
I’m sorry for those who lost loved ones that day nine years ago. The truth is many thousands of families have lost loved ones since that day — not in the same way, but the death is as permanent, the pain as searing.
I’m proud of those families who hold pictures of their loved ones and remember them fondly, bearing no grudge and recognizing that life goes on. If every nation nursed, nourished and fed their injuries like America, the world would come to a grinding halt because human tragedies strike daily: terrorist attacks in markets, suicide bombers in restaurants, murderous horsemen in Sudan and Darfur, genocides, raids on villages to conscript children for armies, train wrecks in India, capsized ferries in Indonesia. The list goes on endlessly.
To be true to our principles as Christians and for other Americans to be true to the Constitution we cannot let the painful memory of a terrorist attack and sympathetic acquiescence to those families whose identity was arrested by the events of that day dictate our responses in the future to situations that — were they unrelated to that day — would be totally unremarkable.