Associated Baptist Press
April 3, 2008 (8-35)
IN THIS ISSUE:
Huckabee, in Ouachita visit, gives campaign-trail insight
‘Peace Committee’ for state proposed by Mo. layman
Fundamentalism & militancy: In world torn by religious history, stereotypes, is peace possible?
Fundamentalism & militancy: Beliefs alone not to blame when faith turns violent, scholars say
Fundamentalism & militancy: Religious violence outside the Abrahamic faiths
Opinion: What Dr. King means to me
Huckabee, in Ouachita visit,gives campaign-trail insight
By Trennis Henderson
ARKADELPHIA, Ark. (ABP) -- Describing some aspects of his recent presidential campaign as “just incredible fun,” former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee recently paid a brief visit to his alma mater, Ouachita Baptist University.
Huckabee, who served 10 years as Arkansas’ governor, put together a run for the Republican presidential nomination that consistently surprised critics, who early on dismissed him as an also-ran.
Huckabee had what he described as a “Final Four” finish in this year’s presidential race. Earning victories in eight primaries and caucuses, Huckabee withdrew from the race in early March after Arizona Sen. John McCain gained enough delegates to lock up the Republican nomination.
A 1975 graduate of Ouachita, Arkansas Baptists’ flagship institution, Huckabee also has served as a pastor, president of the Arkansas Baptist State Convention and chairman of the National Governors’ Association.
Acknowledging that “the whole experience was, in many ways, surreal,” Huckabee said the pace of a national presidential bid is “so fast that you don’t have time to stop and absorb it or even take it in.”
“At many times, I had to stop and remind myself that I was actually running for president of the United States,” he added. “The schedule was grueling and brutal. … It was early morning to late night and constantly being pushed and pulled -- almost treated like a property as opposed to a person.”
Despite the hectic schedule under the glare of the national media spotlight, Huckabee emphasized that “there were a lot of special times” on the campaign trail, including guest appearances on “Saturday Night Live” and the “Late Show with David Letterman.”
“Doing ‘Saturday Night Live’ was a real kick,” he noted. “Another fun time was the [Jay] Leno show. … I got to see there were some great people you get a chance to know in a casual way. All that was a lot of fun, and it kind of made up for the days that were anything but fun.”
Reflecting on the political impact of his presidential run, Huckabee said one aspect is that his campaign delivered a clear reminder that “ordinary people really can affect the process.”
“For virtually a dime to the dollar of the other candidates, we took this campaign to the ‘Final Four,’ and most folks didn’t think that could happen. I think it’s a transformational kind of experience in politics,” Huckabee declared. “It was very important as a hallmark of the campaign -- and hopefully future campaigns -- that people will pay attention to the candidates and their message and not just their bank accounts.”
Concerning his decision to seek the presidency, Huckabee said, “I deeply felt there was a need for someone, frankly, to be president who understood the real world where most Americans live. I think there is a disconnect with most people who have been in Washington for a good while.”
As an example, he cited a Republican debate on the economy in which other candidates “were all singing the Republican song of a great economy.” By contrast, he said he emphasized that “for people in the real world, the economy is not doing that well.”
Taking a page from his campaign playbook, Huckabee listed a litany of economic concerns in the speech, such as rising fuel prices, education costs and “health care costs rising at twice the rate [at] which pay was rising. That meant people were working harder this year than they were last year and not getting ahead; in fact, slipping behind.”
A key reason for many voters’ concern over the economy is that “when the economy is prosperous, it has a trickle-down effect, but when the economy begins to go into a recession, it’s a trickle-up effect,” he explained. “It hits the people at the bottom first and the hardest because they have the least margin with which to deal.”
Given his newfound influence in conservative Republican circles, Huckabee said one of his goals is to “continue to make the case that there can’t be a separation between economic conservatism and social conservatism.”
“The most basic form of government is self-government,” he added. “Civil government is the result of the breakdown in self-government, family and community. … The degree to which those structures break down, you’re going to have more civil government whether you want it or not.”
Highlighting the need for individuals, businesses and communities to take greater responsibility for their actions if they want to reduce government involvement, he said, “I think that’s missing out there in the discussion.”
Giving a nod to Ouachita’s influence on both his life and political career, Huckabee noted, “I’ve always said that the education I received here gave me a platform that I never had to be ashamed of or run from. I have held my own with people who had Harvard Law degrees or MBAs from Harvard or Yale. I don’t feel like I ever had to say, ‘Gee, I don’t belong up here.’ Academically, Ouachita was as good of an education as I could have had.”
In 2005, Ouachita named its school of education after Huckabee to honor his education-reform initiatives as governor.
Huckabee, who has served as a trustee of the school, said another benefit of his OBU education “was that it helped me come to deep convictions about principles that I believed in and not just what they were but why -- and the ‘why’ is more important than the ‘what.’”
“The best value that I had from Ouachita was an analytical education, an education that taught me to think critically and to question and to put my own convictions to the test,” he affirmed. “It was truly a challenging education, and I value that a lot.”
Looking to the future, Huckabee acknowledged, “I haven’t really settled on ‘Gosh, here’s what I want to do when I grow up.’ I think I will continue to be involved politically and also from a policy standpoint, helping people to get elected and keeping my own options open for the future.
“I want to affect the discussion of public policy as it relates to the bedrock issue of why individual morality and the structure of the family really does have an impact on the direction of civil government,” he added. “And the respect for human life is fundamental and foundational to our culture.”
Emphasizing that such respect is not limited to the abortion issue, he said, “That’s where people get messed up. It deals at the heart of whether or not we are, as our forefathers said, all equal. If there’s intrinsic worth and value in each person, then one person is not more valuable than another or less valuable than another.”
What about another run for the presidency in four or eight years? “I won’t rule it out,” Huckabee said. “I mean I’m not making an announcement to say, ‘Yeah, I’m going to.’ The circumstances and everything -- who knows what they’re going to be? But it’s not like I’m saying, ‘Boy, I’ll never do that again.’ I won’t rule that out.”
Asked about the possibility of helping her husband conduct another presidential campaign, Huckabee’s wife, Janet, who also attended Ouachita, answered simply, “I’m with him. Whatever he does, I’m there.”
Glancing at the former candidate, she added, “I was very proud of what Mike did. He came from virtually nobody knowing who he was; as we say, he came from being an asterisk to second man standing.
“I’ve always known that if people got to know him, they’d love him,” she concluded. “We just have to get a few more people to know him next time.”
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‘Peace Committee’ for state proposed by Mo. layman
By Robert Marus
REPUBLIC, Mo. (ABP) -- As battles between conservatives continue to roil the Missouri Baptist Convention, one prominent layman in the state is proposing a miniature re-creation of the infamous Southern Baptist Convention “Peace Committee.”
But the convention’s president -- cautioning that he had not gotten a chance yet to look at the proposal -- said April 3, “I’d be in favor of everything I could do to promote and bring about peace, but I’m not sure a peace committee is going to be an answer.”
MBC president Gerald Davidson said he had only received a copy of Missouri Baptist layman Kent Cochran’s proposal the night before and hadn’t had time to review it in detail due to travel.
Davidson, the retired pastor of First Baptist Church of Arnold, Mo., noted that he was a veteran of conservatives’ successful efforts on both the state and national levels to take control from Southern Baptist moderates. “I go back to the ‘80s, you know; I was involved in the struggles then, and the [SBC] Peace Committee didn’t solve many problems at that time,” he said.
Cochran -- a Republic, Mo., layman who is also a veteran of the SBC and MBC struggles against moderates -- sent a news release detailing the proposal to media outlets April 1. Cochran’s release said he mailed the proposal to all members of the MBC executive board, which is scheduled to meet April 14-15. He is not a member of the body.
The proposal asks the board to establish a committee of 14 members representing the two “major sides” in a struggle that, since 2006, has divided the convention into warring factions of conservatives. The committee would “research the perceptions, activities, expectations, history, present and future of Missouri Baptists focusing particularly on the three issues of: theology, methodology, political activity and any related matters that involve Missouri Baptist life,” according to the proposal.
Conservatives in Missouri, led by Missouri Baptist Laymen’s Association founder Roger Moran, cemented their control of the convention’s governing structures in 2001. Many moderate churches in the state withdrew support from the convention, with some joining a new alternative body, the Baptist General Convention of Missouri. Many of those churches were later kicked out of the MBC because of their ties to the new convention as well as a nationwide moderate group, the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.
But intramural disputes between Missouri conservatives over the convention’s former executive director, Moran’s control of the nominating process and funding for church plants associated with a nondenominational emerging-church network boiled over in 2006. That year, Moran and allies attempted to force a showdown over then-MBC Executive Director David Clippard. The executive board later fired Clippard.
Moran and his allies accused Clippard and others of negligence in approving a $200,000 loan for a St. Louis church start, called The Journey, that was part of the Acts 29 church-planting network. They particularly criticized The Journey for an outreach activity that involved convening a theological discussion group at a St. Louis-area brewpub. Moran claimed that it -- and all churches associated with Acts 29 -- were out of step with what most Southern Baptists believe about the acceptability of alcohol use.
The conflict eventually led to a group of prominent conservative pastors who had worked with Moran in his efforts against moderates to organize against their former ally. The group, calling itself “Save Our Convention,” held rallies and backed Davidson and a slate of officers for convention posts at the body’s 2007 annual meeting.
Moran -- who ran for first vice president -- and the other MBLA-backed candidates all lost to the Save Our Convention candidates by wide margins. It was the first time in eight years that a slate of MBC officers won without Moran’s backing.
In March, Moran’s organization announced it would gear up and try for a comeback at the next MBC annual meeting, scheduled for October in St. Louis. Along with a press release signed by scores of pastors and laypeople -- including Cochran -- Moran’s group put out a document detailing what it considers the moral and theological excesses of the Acts 29 movement.
David Sheppard, the informal leader of the Save Our Convention group and pastor of First Baptist Church in St. Charles, Mo., released a statement decrying Moran’s tactics.
“Roger’s whole approach has always been guilt by association,” Sheppard said. “He has identified about 10 churches in the Missouri Baptist Convention that are questionable on these matters. I am absolutely positive that every one of us could find that many churches in this convention that we have serious concerns about their practices and perhaps their beliefs. If we go after everybody’s list of 10, pretty soon we can narrow the convention down to those 10 that agree with us.
“This is about the legalistic powerbrokering of a few people who want absolute control of this convention,” Sheppard’s statement continued.
Cochran’s proposal is modeled after one that established the SBC Peace Committee in 1985. The committee was charged with finding a resolution to the moderate-conservative war that had been raging in the SBC since 1979. It conducted interviews and presented several reports, including a final one that SBC messengers approved at the convention’s 1987 meeting.
However, many moderates denounced the report, saying its conclusions were inaccurate and biased in favor of the conservatives’ rhetoric. Most eventually left the SBC for other groups, including the CBF and the Alliance of Baptists.
Moran, reached by telephone April 3, said he had only heard about Cochran’s proposal the night before and had not yet seen a copy.
“Generally, Kent talks to me, but he didn’t mention anything to me about it,” he said. Moran declined to discuss his reaction further, citing a policy of only answering questions from the MBC’s and SBC’s in-house news organs. But he directed an Associated Baptist Press reporter to the anti-Acts 29 manifesto on the MBLA website. “The stuff you’re talking about is on the website and you can probably draw some logical conclusions about that,” he said.
Kerry Messer, MBLA’s president and a lobbyist from Festus-Crystal City, Mo., said April 3 that he had not heard of the proposal or received it as of the evening of April 2. “This is brand-new news to me,” he said.
Davidson said April 3 that he didn’t know if the proposal would even get a hearing at the April 14-15 meeting.
“Well, I don’t even know that we’ll bring it up at the executive board meeting,” he said. “You know, the agenda was already pretty well set. I’ll just seek a little counsel about this.”
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Fundamentalism & militancy: In world torn by religious history, stereotypes, is peace possible?
By Greg Warner
WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. (ABP) -- Is it possible in today’s world for religions to live at peace? It is if they are true to their natures, according to world-religions expert Charles Kimball.
“Peace is a central feature of all of the world religions that have stood the test of time,” said Kimball, author of the seminal book When Religion Becomes Evil. To warrant long-term devotion, he said, a religion “has to provide hope, guidance, serenity and a way to be at home in the world.”
But in a country at war with militant Islamic terrorists, interfaith understanding is at a premium today.
“Some people think that Muslims wake up and think, ‘What am I willing to destroy today?’ But that’s not how most Muslims think,” said Kimball, professor of comparative religion at Wake Forest University and an expert on Islam. “They’re not plotting anything. They’re trying to feed their family….”
But, as in other faiths, peaceful intent can be distorted. “In Islam there is always a responsibility to defend yourself when attacked,” continued Kimball, who recently was hired by Oklahoma University to direct its religious-studies program. “In the hands of a[n Osama] bin Laden and others, this is an open license to do anything.”
And, he added, Muslims aren’t alone in that tendency.
“The two religious traditions that have the most to be ashamed of are Christians and Muslims,” Kimball said, noting both are also both monotheistic and “missionary,” and the largest and most global religions.
“By numbers of persons killed,” said Bruce Knauft, an anthropologist and director of Emory University’s Institute for Comparative and International Studies. “Christianity has very likely been the greatest perpetrator of violent religious extremism during the past 1,000 years, including the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the Thirty Years’ War, and the wars of the French Reformation. Like current violent religious extremism, these deaths were linked with political disputes and rivalries.”
“If you ask which [religious] empire provided a more hospitable environment for [other] religion[s], it was the Muslims,” said Kurt Anders Richardson, a Baptist who teaches comparative religion at McMaster Divinity College, an evangelical seminary in Hamilton, Ontario. “Sure, Jews and Christians became second-class citizens, but you never had the Inquisition or [Nazi] pogroms of eradication.”
Christianity’s violent past is not lost on Muslim audiences. Iraq’s Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, an American ally, called the 20th century’s world wars Christian-on-Christian violence, noting both German and Allied armies were full of chaplains who prayed for victory.
Similarly dangerous, several scholars said, is the belief that politicians with the right beliefs are more capable of moral leadership. “What got us into this war [in Iraq],” said Richardson, “was a belief that sanctified leadership is not only possible but realized and deserving of extraordinary trust.”
The overwhelming percentage of the world’s extremist violence is Muslim-on-Muslim, Richardson said. While many Muslims are struggling to cope with the encroaching demands of the modern world, he said, “most Muslims believe it is possible to be faithful and modern.”
“The vast majority of educated and politically responsible Muslims in the world want stable governments, peaceful co-existence among religions, and control of all forms of religious extremism,” Richardson said. “That’s not bad.”
Some Westerners fear “a global Islam,” Richardson said, but the only Muslims who envision such an empire are in the least developed countries. “They imagine people on horseback and camelback getting this done. What are we really afraid of here?”
The threat of an “expansionist Islamic nation” is unrealistic, and a “transnational militant Islamism will not provide a standing army anywhere,” he said. “There’s nothing even workable.”
Shlomo Fischer, who has spent his career teaching democratic principles to Israelis, said viewing other faiths as enemies has “terrible consequences.” He advised seeking common ground with potential adversaries. “When I go to conferences, I almost always sit with my Muslim colleagues,” a Jewish scholar at Israel’s Tel Aviv University. “We have a lot in common. We don’t eat meat and don’t drink wine.
“I don’t think of myself in a worldwide war with Islam. And I don’t think it would be right for Christians to view themselves as in a worldwide war with Islam.”
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Fundamentalism & militancy: Beliefs alone not to blame when faith turns violent, scholars say
By Greg Warner
ATLANTA (ABP) -- Every faith group has its extremists, but not all extremists turn violent. What makes the difference?
While most religious violence follows common patterns, faith seldom turns violent except in response to social oppression, say experts who study extremists.
“In most cases, it’s not a religious thing as much as frustration in an encounter with society at large,” said Graham Walker, a Baptist theology professor who studies religious violence in Asia. “But it takes just one imam, one leader or pastor to trigger a group -- one authoritative person who speaks for God and who can establish a [group’s] identity or paint a scapegoat. Then the rage within the [faith] community can be projected outside the community.”
When that happens, religious doctrine is distorted to rationalize violence, Walker and others agree. And no faith system is exempt from that danger.
“Religious extremist violence is a potential in all major religious faiths, including even Buddhism,” said Bruce Knauft, an anthropologist and director of Emory University’s Institute for Comparative and International Studies, which recently hosted some of the world’s top religion scholars for a conference on extremism.
But religious-inspired violence is relatively uncommon, said Knauft. Instead, the worst violence is “secular and political forms of large-scale killing and brutality,” such as World Wars I and II, he said.
While 9/11 has come to symbolize religious violence for Americans, that attack is the exception that proves the rule, said Kurt Anders Richardson, a Baptist who teaches comparative religion at McMaster Divinity College, an evangelical school in Hamilton, Ontario.
“In the major faiths, there is not a single case where violence in God’s name is accepted,” said Richardson, who taught at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary from 1987 to 1995.
Some Christians tend to see al Qaeda, the Islamic terror group responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, as typical of all hard-line Muslims. Ironically, they do so the same way Osama bin Laden labels all 2,603 people killed in the World Trade Center as “infidels” and all Westerners as oppressors.
In reality, violent extremists of any faith have more in common with other violent groups than with the majority within their own faith, added Shlomo Fischer of Israel’s Tel Aviv University. He presented a paper on violent Jewish Zionist groups during the Emory conference, called “The Wrathful God: Religious Extremism in Comparative Perspective.”
“Violent extremists may be different from us in crucial ways,” he said. On the other hand, violent extremists are “not far removed” theologically from mainstream believers. “We tend to see fundamentalists as irrational totalitarians, while we are rational. That’s probably not true.”
Extremists -- whether Eric Robert Rudolph, Mohammed Atta, or the Zionists who tried to blow up Islam’s Dome of the Rock shrine in 1981 -- see themselves as part of a “revolutionary vanguard” whose violent tactics are in the best interest of the public, Fischer said. “It’s rational within its own terms.”
He added: “We’re not talking about people who are from the moon.”
So what’s the difference between Jerry Falwell -- the late Religious Right leader who prayed for the death of pro-choice Supreme Court justices -- and Rudolph, the fundamentalist Christian whose anti-abortion views drove him to bomb the 1996 Olympics, a Birmingham abortion clinic and other targets, killing two and injuring dozens?
Charles Kimball, author of the seminal book When Religion Becomes Evil, identifies five major warning signs of religion gone awry:
-- Claims of absolute truth. “When people absolutize their truth claims, they can justify anything,” said Kimball, professor of comparative religion at Wake Forest University. “We should always have a measure of humility.”
-- Blind obedience. “When any religion tells you, ‘We’ll do the thinking for you,’ something is terribly wrong.”
-- The end justifying the means. Even the recent Catholic child-abuse scandals bore this symptom, Kimball said. “They saw protecting the ministry of the church as an end” that justified lying about sexual abuse by priests.
-- Declaring holy war.
-- The pursuit of the “ideal” time. Much of the violence associated with Christianity is linked to eschatology, or end-times theology.
Violent extremists see themselves as “avant-garde catalysts” ushering in “a utopian order,” added Fischer. When such a socio-political goal appears achievable, Richardson added, “it will lead to this kind of theologizing,” where the extremists’ goals are identified with God’s will.
Perhaps the deadliest example of such an episode relatively unknown to many modern-day Christians: the Taiping Rebellion of 1850-1864 in southern China. Christian convert Hong Xiuquin, claiming to be the brother of Jesus, established an army to overthrow China’s Qing dynasty. His apocalyptic theology identified the dynasty as the dragon in the book of Revelation. The rebellion and government retaliation claimed between 20 and 30 million lives -- more than World War I.
The tragic chapter is often blamed for the Chinese government’s continued distrust of Christianity. “The Chinese government is realistically terrified of this apocalyptic power,” said Walker, professor of theology at Mercer University’s McAfee School of Theology in Atlanta.
Walker, a former missionary and seminary administrator in Southeast Asia, is studying Christian tribes of northern Myanmar that have been largely cut off from outside Christian influence for years because of government restrictions. In that vacuum, “two different eschatologies” have developed among the tribes, Walker said. Those with an apocalyptic interpretation of the faith are inclined toward revolution and violence; those with a present-world interpretation of eschatological scriptures have remained peaceful under a repressive government, he said.
But, Walker added: “Christian fundamentalists are not more prone to violence than other faiths. It is possible in any faith community.” He cited fundamentalist Hindu rioters in India who have killed Muslims in recent years and the quasi-Buddhist sect Aum Shinrikyo, an apocalyptic cult that committed the 1995 sarin gas attack in Tokyo’s subway that killed 12.
Despite the prominent role of religion in the world’s violence, Knauft said in an e-mail interview, it must be kept in perspective. “During the last 150 years at least, the tally of those killed by secular political causes -- and in massive response to extremist political violence -- far drawfs the number killed in religious extremism.”
For example, while almost 3,000 people were killed in the Islamic-inspired attacks of 9/11, Iraqi deaths attributed to the American-led invasion are estimated between 200,000 and 1.2 million.
But there’s often a connection between secular oppression and violence and subsequent religious violence.
“Most extremist religious violence has occurred in tandem with political antagonism and the perception of social injustice from those who are powerful,” said Knauft, who has written extensively on social inequality, politics and violence.
“During the last 50 years, political disempowerment, disenfranchisement and discrimination have greatly increased the possibilities and likelihood of extremist religious violence,” he continued. “This pertains to Sikhs in India, Christians in eastern Indonesia, and perhaps even Buddhists in Tibet, as well as Palestinian Muslims and many of those in Iraq.”
Other scholars agreed religious violence almost always comes in tandem with social and economic conflict. “I’ve seen that over and over again, all over Asia,” said Walker, the former missionary.
“There often is a nexus between religion and power,” added Kimball. “When the two get interwoven, religion is used to justify power.” It occurs more often in Islamic countries and Israel, he said, where religion and the state are joined.
Fischer, the Israeli scholar, agreed most violence is more political than religious, particularly when social conflict exists first. But sometimes those factors are hard to sort out. Zionism is “a nationalist movement,” and “Zionists believe the land of Israel belongs to the Jewish people,” he said. “Still there is a violent conflict going on with the Palestinians that need not have anything to do with religion.”
When religion comes into political power, said Richardson, the McMaster theologian, even a non-violent faith “can be complicit with extremism” by providing the rationale and opportunity for merging religious and political might. When that happens, Christians lose all influence in advancing peace, he said.
Despite the tensions between religion and politics, most of the scholars did not predict a worldwide wave of violence in the future.
Knauft said Christianity tends to be peaceful in the developing countries of the Southern Hemishere, where it is expected to grow fastest.
“Violent confrontations between Christians and Muslims in Africa and Asia are mostly confined to limited areas were land and political disputes, and ethnic differences, have a long history of sowing discord -- such as northern Nigeria and eastern Indonesia,” he said.
“Violent polarization between Islam and Christianity is not inevitable or even likely,” Knauft continued, “except where state discrimination, disenfranchisement and disempowerment render people few options of counteraction or resistance except through religious extremism.”
But the greater threat, said Knauft and others, is that the military superiority of the United States, the sole superpower, would “increase resentment and frustration of disempowered peoples.”
Still, the wild card in the violence equation, most scholars said, is the possibility that terrorists would acquire a nuclear weapon or other weapons of mass destruction. “Today,” Kimball said, “the world is so much more interconnected that a small group of people can affect the whole world.”
So what can be done to reduce the risk of extremist religious violence?
More and more people are becoming aware, said Mercer’s Walker, that the solution is “to reduce the sources of anger and frustration” in less powerful countries and regions. Work for “sustainable economic development,” he advised.
And Kimball suggested America export one of its best inventions – separation of church and state. “In our world, we have to have freedom of religion, freedom from religion, and respect for diversity,” he said. “America has some experience that can help the world. The rest of the world desperately needs that kind of modeling.”
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Fundamentalism & militancy: Religious violence outside the Abrahamic faiths
By Graham Walker and Greg Warner
(ABP) -- The three Abrahamic faiths – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – are the most violent of the world’s religions, scholars say. But all faiths can resort to violence on occasion, even the normally peaceful Hindus.
A common characteristic of violence among the Abrahamic religions is radical end-times expectations. The apocalypticism of the Taiping Rebellion in China (1845-1963) was taken directly from the book of Revelation and led to more than 20 million deaths. But apocalypticism also surfaced in the syncretistic beliefs of the contemporary Aum Shinrikyo cult, which also borrowed from Revelation.
-- Aum Shinrikyo
Aum Shinrikyo was a destructive doomsday cult centered in Japan. Their name was a combination of Aum, which is a sacred Hindu syllable, and Shinri Kyo, which means "supreme truth." It appears to be a syncretistic religion combining elements of Buddhism with Christianity. As an illegitimate Buddhist group, it has been rejected by Buddhist leaders in Japan.
Aum Shinrikyo terrorists released the nerve gas sarin in a Tokyo subway station March 20, 1995. The gas killed 12 passengers and injured over 5,000. Over 100 Aum members were charged, including its leader, Shoko Asahara.
Asahara was born partially blind in 1955 as Chizuo Matsumoto. He was trained as an acupuncturist, operated a folk-medicine shop, and opened a yoga school. He traveled to the Himalayas to study Buddhism and Hinduism. This led him to organize the Aum Shinrikyo in 1987, which reached a peak membership of about 20,000 worldwide, many drawn to the group's rejection of Japan’s corruption and materialism.
Using the book of Revelation and the writings of Christian astrologer Nostradamus, Asahara predicted major disasters for the final years of the last millennium. He called for the group to fight in a final world revolution against the enemies of Japan, including the United States. The group established chemical factories and stockpiled various chemicals, as preparation for this Armageddon, and launched at least nine biological attacks on different Japanese targets, including the legislature, the Imperial Palace, and the U.S. base at Yokosuka.
After the arrest of Shoko Asahara and others for the sarin attack, Aum Shinrikyo changed its name to Aleph in 2000. Rika Matsumoto, third daughter of Asahara, has now taken charge of the cult.
-- Sikhism
Sikhism combines elements from Bhakti Hinduism, Advaita Hinduism and Sufism, with an emphasis on tolerance and coexistence between Muslims and Hindus. Sikhism grew on the borders between Islamic and Hindu regions of India, which have been violently contested areas for centuries.
Between 1981 and 1994, thousands of young men and perhaps a few hundred women were initiated into secret fraternities of various rival radical Sikh organizations. Their enemies were secular politicians, police, Hindu journalists and community leaders.
In June 1984, Sikh terrorists seized a Sikh holy shrine, the Golden Temple in Amritsar. When Indian security forces retook the temple, 500 or more people were killed, including many innocent worshipers. Six months later, India’s Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by two of her Sikh bodyguards as revenge for this act of profanity. On the following day, more than 2,000 Sikhs were massacred in Delhi and elsewhere.
In 1991, over 3,000 people were killed during disturbances in the Sikh-dominated province of Punjab. Sikh extremists then attacked the Indian ambassador to Romania. The Romanian government helped to capture the Sikhs. Later that year militant Sikhs kidnapped a Romanian diplomat in Delhi in retaliation.
-- Hinduism
Hinduism is generally viewed by outsiders as a peaceful religious system. However, there have been violent incidents, such as the 1948 assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, a champion of non-violence, by Hindu fundamentalist Nathuram Godse.
Believers in the doctrine of Hindutva asserts that Hinduism, as the ‘indigenous’ faith of India, must be dominant and that all ‘foreign’ religions must be subject to the will of the majority. For a time, a certain form of fundamentalism has exerted considerable impact on Indian mainstream politics. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was formed in 1980 as the political expression of Hindutva.
Hindu fundamentalism is manifested in the family of Hindu nationalist organizations known as Sangh Parivar. In 1992, Sangh Parivar activists stormed and destroyed the 16th century mosque in Ayodha, India. The act sparked riots between Muslims and Hindus, which killed thousands.
In late 2007 and early 2008, Hindu fundamentalists in the India’s rural region of Orissa attacked Christian churches and villages, burning many and forcing thousands of people to flee into the forest. Hindus in the region say Christian mobs responded in kind. Some people blame anti-Christian rhetoric of politicians and residents; others say it is a social and not religious problem.
-- Buddhists and Hindus in Sri Lanka
Tamil Tigers are fighting for independence for the Tamils, a mostly Hindu ethnic population in north and east Sri Lanka, the island nation southeast of India. Tamils have suffered persecution by Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese Buddhist majority for decades. An estimated 70,000 people have died since 1983, 5,000 in the last 18 months. Violent opposition to the Tigers is now led by hard-line Buddhist monks.
-- Christian-Muslim violence in Indonesia
While Christians have been persecuted in other parts of Muslim-dominated Indonesia, they were once the majority in the island chain of Maluku because of settlement by colonial Dutch, Portuguese and English traders seeking valuable nutmeg and other spices of the islands. More recently, deep fear and mistrust between Muslim and Christian residents of Maluku’s main island, Ambon, has led to violence on both sides.
The history of Ambon is very similar to what has taken place all over Southeast Asia after the collapse of colonial rule, including conflicts in Nagaland, India, and the situation of the Karen people in Burma. While the violence is often dubbed religious sectarian, there are larger political and economic issues at stake. In many cases, “religious identities” are simply ways to mark identities and form alliances between tribal and ethno-linguistic communities.
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-- Graham Walker, a former missionary and seminary administrator in Asia, is professor of theology at Mercer University’s McAfee School of Theology in Atlanta.
Opinion: What Dr. King means to me
By David Gushee
(ABP) -- This week marks the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. In this column I want to honor Dr. King by offering reflections about what his life and work mean to me today. I aim to be appreciative -- but unsentimental -- in reflecting on one of the Christian leaders whose work has had the deepest impact on my own moral vision.
King was murdered when he was not yet 40 years old. It is bracing for me to think that Martin King was an exact contemporary of my father. With good health he might even be alive today, just like my own beloved father. Think about what he could have done with 40 more years!
Jesus was right in saying that we kill our prophets and then honor them after they are dead. I am very glad that the United States honors Martin King with a holiday and a street named after him in most every major city -- but that cannot erase the hatred and contempt that he experienced during his actual lifetime. I am sure that Dr. King would have much preferred a positive response to his message in his lifetime rather than posthumous sanctification.
Any who would seek to follow the example of Martin Luther King should expect fierce opposition. Their presence brings not peace but division, because their message exposes injustice and challenges the status quo. That opposition can take a variety of familiar forms, from rejection to assassination. If our stance as Christians in a brutal and unjust world evokes no opposition, we are playing it too safe -- not living as we ought to live.
King teaches that these often-hateful responses to a fight for social justice should be expected as a kind of structural consequence of such advocacy, almost like a law of nature. When you push against wrong, it stirs up the hornets.
This reaction is so predictable that there is no need to over-personalize it, and certainly no need to respond in kind to the hornets themselves. This realism about how social change happens contributed to King’s ability to remain in the fight for justice without giving in to despair or hatred of those who hated him.
I have learned from King to appreciate the difference between platitudes and concreteness in ethics. Just about everyone now says they are “for peace,” or “for justice,” or “for reconciliation” -- platitudes all. But when the conversation turns to the concrete -- like provisions requiring that all public schools offer quality education through redistribution of tax revenues -- then you have a fight on your hands.
The lesson is that if you want praise, offer high-sounding words in favor of universal platitudes. But if you want justice, tackle specific wrongs, propose specific remedies, and resist the move to platitudes so often employed as a deflection strategy. Then the praise will soon end and the real fight will begin.
The recent flap over Jeremiah Wright, Sen. Barack Obama’s controversial pastor, raised, among other issues, the question of patriotism. Can you love your country while also criticizing it intensely?
Of course you can. King already showed us this during his lifetime. He loved America –but he opposed America’s racism in the name of what he loved about the United States. That was the genius of the “I Have a Dream” speech. This dream, in part, was that America “would rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed.”
King had not given up on the creed despite the many cruel ways Americans had violated it over the years. There was a kind of eschatological expectation in King -- surely shaped by his Christian faith -- that this nation could one day reach its own professed values.
There is a difference between criticism of a community from within or from without. If I criticize, say, Saudi Arabia, I do so as a foreigner and stranger. If I criticize the United States, I do so as a citizen who loves this country and wants what is best for it. King loved America enough to criticize it and to work for its internal reform. Somehow, there is a brittleness about our patriotism that often seems unable to accommodate both love and critique. King can help us do better.
Martin Luther King keeps in front of me the issues that he dealt with most directly -- racism, poverty, war -- while training me to attend to other expressions of social evil. Those who would honor Dr. King should oppose – concretely -- particular instances of racism, economic injustice, and needless wars. And so I, for one, want to talk about racism in our criminal justice system, our cruelly flawed health-insurance system, and the misbegotten war in Iraq.
But I also want to try to stretch to think about which victimized peoples might have caught Martin Luther King’s attention if he were with us today. I personally think that they would include aborted, abused, abandoned, and neglected children; people who can’t get basic health care; homosexuals who have been rejected and loathed by society; victims of environmental degradation here and abroad; our mistreated terror detainees; Darfur’s refugees and so many more.
Finally, Martin Luther King teaches me about what it means to follow the real Jesus rather than the culturally comfortable Christ. So often we turn Christ into little more than “my atoning Savior” or “the object of my doctrinal speculations” or “the one who makes me happy (and rich)” or “our national God” or “my personal friend.”
There is certainly a place for atonement, doctrine, happiness, and intimacy with Christ. But the Jesus of Martin King was the one who, in his actual ministry, advanced justice, loved the loveless, attacked social evil, taught peacemaking, and was met with crucifixion.
I want to adore Jesus Christ. I want Jesus to be absolutely central in my life. But not just any version of Jesus.
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-- David Gushee is distinguished university professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University. www.davidpgushee.com
Actor James Franco (left), best known for his role in the Spider-Man series of movies is the spitting image of influential indie rocker Jeff Buckley (right). I hope that he will one day play him in a biopic. Buckley(1966-1997) died at age 30, drowning in Wolf River Harbor, a tributary of the Mississippi River. No drugs were involved in his death.
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