Last Saturday my family and I arrived at my sister-in-law Cathy’s house near Washington, DC after a long day’s drive from the beach in North Carolina. Cathy and her family had left the same beach house we did a couple of hours before us and on the ride home had turned on the radio to get caught up on the news. After we had unloaded our bags and were having a drink and a snack in the kitchen, she asked if we’d heard about the terrorist attack in Norway. She stole the subtlest of glances at me out of the corner of her eye and said that it was being reported that the perpetrator was a “fundamentalist Christian.” I said something like “I wonder what fundamentals of Christianity he thought he was observing?” Which is pretty typical of how I handle such situations.
Actually, I’ve gotten so tired of practicing that kind of rhetorical jujitsu that I often don’t even bother anymore. Earlier in the week, Meg’s stepbrother had announced at the dinner table that he could never espouse a religion that would tell him what books he couldn’t read or whom he had to kill. This was followed by an uncomfortable silence. I don’t know whether anyone at the table besides me thought that I was supposed to field that remark. But what could I say, “Well, me neither”? I should think that would be pretty obvious to anyone who knows me. So I didn’t say anything.
Christian identity can be a burden in today’s world, because of the prejudice that non-Christians hold against the church and its members, but also because of those Christians who insist on confirming the stereotype. We can end up feeling a little like St. Paul, who writes in the Letter to the Romans about “the great sorrow and unceasing anguish” he bears in his heart over the refusal of his fellow Israelites to accept that Jesus is the resurrected Messiah. When it came to the violence in Norway, I guess I felt compelled to make sure Cathy understood that Anders Behring Breivik and I do not share the same faith.
When Monday came and I was back home and doing a little catching up on the news myself I found that the national spokesmen for the Christian right had been making the same argument. Breivik cannot be a Christian, said Pat Buchanan and Bill O’Reilly and Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association, because no follower of Jesus can be a mass murderer. Like I might have done, they pointed out that being Christian is not a racial, or national, or even a religious identity. It has something to do with following Jesus, with living as he lived and believing as he believed, or at least trying to. Like me, those conservative pundits resented the failure of the media to make that distinction.
So I got to enjoy the novel experience of agreeing with those fellows. Or so it seemed for a moment. But then they went on to say that while they reject Breivik’s methods, and disown him as a Christian, they find his social and historical analysis “accurate.” They had read the massive manifesto that he posted on the internet the morning of his crimes and concluded that he is right about many things. He is right that Western civilization is facing an existential threat from Islam, which commands its followers to conquer and kill infidels in the name of Allah. He is right that Muslim immigrants into Europe and America are the advance scouts in this holy war. He is right that they are being given aid and comfort by liberals, whose insidious doctrine of multiculturalism has muddled our thinking and sapped our will to resist.
Now I don’t intend to minimize the real problems of mass immigration. There can be no doubt about the real social and economic stresses it is causing in North American and Western Europe. But I can’t agree that demonizing the immigrants, or those who call for their acceptance, is the remedy. So I’d like to counter Anders Behring Breivik with a little historical and social analysis of my own. As I see it, the problem of Muslim immigration is but one part of a larger historical process. In an earlier phase of history, the nations of the “West” expanded outward in a great thrust to colonize and “Christianize” the world. In a more recent period that expansion has taken on a different form, called “economic globalization.” Western governments and corporations have used the ideology and institutions of capitalism to integrate the resources and appetites of the entire world into a single cultural and commercial system.
But the idea that somehow this process would be an endless one-directional movement of values and culture (and people) from “the West” to the rest of the world has proven to be a pipe dream. What we are seeing now is this fantasy collapsing under the weight of the facts. One of the facts that we have to reckon with is that is impossible to have a free market of money, goods and services, and information flowing all over the world while confining the labor market within national boundaries. It’s just not sustainable to have one population living in wealth and security on one side of the Rio Grande or the Mediterranean Sea while another population lives on the other side in deepening violence and poverty. Globalization has promised a free, prosperous, and democratic world for all. In large measure it has failed to deliver it. But that’s how most people want to live—even, as events in Egypt, Tunisia, Syria and elsewhere have shown, Muslims. If they are denied those things on one side of the water, they will cross it to get them.
And so what we see happening now is a colossal failure of nerve. The globalized capitalist economy that was supposed to deliver a new world order of endless peace and unlimited prosperity suddenly appears unable to provide basic employment and material security even to citizens of the homelands. The dream of infinite abundance shattered, many have now swung to the opposite pole. Haunted by the specter of scarcity, they say that now there is not enough to go around; not enough money, not enough jobs, not enough rights. From the one interconnected world of globalization, people are retreating to the old tribal identities—this is a Christian nation, an English-speaking country. You don’t belong. Get out. This is all quite ordinary, very understandable, completely human. It’s just not very Christian.
When Jesus’ disciples were trying to understand how they were supposed to carry on his work in a frightening and confusing world, one of the stories they loved most to remember was how they found themselves in a deserted place late one day, with a large crowd of uninvited guests; uninvited, and from their point of view unwanted, although Jesus seemed to care about them and cured their sick. The disciples went to Jesus and asked him to make them go away to fend for themselves. And what did Jesus say?—“you give them something to eat.” They protested. All they had was five loaves and two fish, hardly enough for them, let alone for five thousand men and their assorted women and children. But Jesus said, “Bring your five loaves and your two fish here to me.”
This is a story of the triumph of generosity and compassion over the fear of scarcity. When the instinct of the disciples was to draw tight the inner circle and keep what they had to themselves, Jesus sent them out into the crowd as sharers of the hospitality of God. As the world falls into the grip of anxiety that there is not enough to go around, as people start hoarding precious metals and cutting pensions for seniors and the disabled, nothing is needed more desperately than the confidence of Jesus. The need is seemingly endless, our resources suddenly seem far too few, but if we are disciples of Jesus our plan of action must be to do as he did, to include everyone, to take, to bless, to break and to share away what we have. What happens next is up to God, but the Gospel tells us there was more than enough. Trusting in God’s abundance, sharing with compassion and confidence, the disciples ended up with more than they started out with. No one got rich, but everyone got fed.
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