Wasatch Presbyterian Church - IN THE NEWS
Last days or first days?
By Rev. Scott Dalgarno
The Salt Lake Tribune, September 9, 2011
As published in the Salt Lake Tribune. Click here to view full article.
I have a Christian friend who was in turmoil in the wake of 9/11. Her pastor announced to all, “We’re living in the last days, that’s the only way one can explain these events.” My friend believed him completely. “I just hope it will be quick,” she said.
We’ve heard this all before, and since. Just last spring, an Oakland-based radio evangelist, Harold Camping, announced that the world would end on May 21. “The Bible guarantees it,” he said. Embarrassing.
Well, rather than being in the last days of the world, I’m thinking that now, 10 years after 9-11, we are still experiencing trauma because we are actually in the first days of an era of openness the like of which we have never seen. We are in a struggle with the Muslim world, it’s true, but it’s nothing to the struggle Muslims are having with one another.
We are living in the first days of an age when America is getting its clearest lesson since before the Revolution about how important it is for church and state to be separate, and the world is literally dying to understand how this can work.
Christian fundamentalists don’t see this at all. Many of them still believe, as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell said back in 2001, that the terrorist attacks were “God’s punishment” for America’s tolerance of abortionists, feminists and homosexuals.
Well, such people think they have the best interests of our nation at heart, but I happen to believe that they are way out of touch with the movement of the Spirit. Robert J. Lifton of New York’s City College speaks of something he calls the fundamentalist impulse — the impulse to destroy the world in order to save it.
Let me hurry to acknowledge that there are some positive impulses in fundamentalism. Fundamentalists keep those on the left connected to their history, and their traditions, but it must be said, fundamentalists don’t often like real democracy. It’s too sloppy. Men (and I mean “men” here) don’t always have the last word.
Radical fundamentalists prefer a theocracy. Osama bin Laden preferred rule by a God made in the image of the Ayatollah Khomeini — a humorless God of wrath. Fundamentalists don’t like seeing the world opening up to all peoples. They especially don’t like seeing unveiled women on the streets of Cairo. They want a world where women ride coach class, and they make their scriptures sound like God sanctions that.
What we have been witnessing since the Twin Towers fell is a contest between the medieval and post-modern worlds. The impulse of fundamentalism is medieval. It cannot abide the post-modern world and its inclusiveness. It cannot abide a world where women can have control of their own bodies, their own lives or the lives of nations.
What sets Christians apart from Muslims isn’t that we are right about God and they are wrong. What sets us apart is that the Muslim religion is 1,400 years old and hasn’t had a Reformation yet. Well, it took Christians 1,500 years before we had ours, so maybe Islam is just due.
You know, Osama said he wanted two things from 9/11. He wanted American air bases in his home country, Saudi Arabia, closed. He also wanted women to stay under total control of their husbands. Well, he got his first wish. President Bush pulled the Air Force out of Saudi Arabia ever so quietly two years after the towers fell.
But bin Laden will never get his second wish. Muslim women will not give up on trying to have a life of their own. They work quietly, collectively, all over this globe to have the freedoms Western women have.
You want to know the real reason the jihadist agenda will never win? It’s because Muslim mothers love their children just as much as Christian mothers and refuse to sit still while some of them still blow themselves up for nothing. The majority of their children agree. Think of those Arab young people in Cairo’s Tahrir Square last spring, aching to throw off the chains of Mubarakism, and with it, bin-Ladenism.
What I am saying is that the Muslim reformation is happening right now. It may well prove to be as long and bloody and awful as the Christian one. Fundamentalisms don’t give up easily. But, as Martin Luther King Jr. attested, “The arc of history bends slowly, but it bends toward justice.”
Scott Dalgarno is pastor of Wasatch Presbyterian Church in Salt Lake City.
