On Twitter, James Taranto at The Wall Street Journal found a “stunning inversion” in a CNN Belief Blog post by liberal minister Brian McLaren: “At a time when U.S. embassies are being attacked and when people are getting killed over an offensive, adolescent and puerile film targeting Islam - beyond pathetic in its tawdriness – we must begin to own up to the reality of evangelical Islamaphobia [sic].”
But do a Nexis search for Brian McLaren and “South Park,” or “Piss Christ,” or “The Golden Compass,” and you find nothing. You can find he praised the Christianity-trashing book and movie The DaVinci Code in a 2006 interview in the leftist magazine Sojourners:
For all the flaws of Brown's book, I think what he's doing is suggesting that the dominant religious institutions have created their own caricature of Jesus. And I think people have a sense that that's true. It's my honest feeling that anyone trying to share their faith in America today has to realize that the Religious Right has polluted the air. The name "Jesus" and the word "Christianity" are associated with something judgmental, hostile, hypocritical, angry, negative, defensive, anti-homosexual, etc. Many of our churches, even though they feel they represent the truth, actually are upholding something that's distorted and false.
I also think that the whole issue of male domination is huge and that Brown's suggestion that the real Jesus was not as misogynist or anti-woman as the Christian religion often has been is very attractive. Brown's book is about exposing hypocrisy and cover-up in organized religion, and it is exposing organized religion's grasping for power. Again, there's something in that that people resonate with in the age of pedophilia scandals, televangelists, and religious political alliances. As a follower of Jesus I resonate with their concerns as well.
So somehow it's not unattractive to McLaren if Muslims in the Middle East are "male-dominated, power-oriented, cover-up-prone, judgmental, hostile, hypocritical, angry, negative, defensive, anti-homosexual, misogynist and anti-woman." Look again at how disgusted McLaren is with the incredibly crude (and previously unwatched) YouTube video:
I tried to watch it, but I couldn’t make it halfway to the 13-minute mark. Everything about it was tawdry, pathetic, even pornographic. All but the most fundamentalist believers from my evangelical Christian tribe who watch that video will be appalled and ashamed to be associated with it.
It is hate speech. It is no different from the anti-Semitic garbage that has been all too common in Western Christian history. It is sub-Christian - beneath the dignity of anyone with a functioning moral compass.
Islamophobic evangelical Christians - and the neo-conservative Catholics and even some Jewish folks who are their unlikely political bedfellows of late - must choose.
Will they press on in their current path, letting Islamophobia spread even further amongst them? Or will they stop, rethink and seek to a more charitable approach to our Muslim neighbors? Will they realize that evangelical religious identity is under assault, not by Shariah law, not by the liberal media, not by secular humanism from the outside, but by forces within the evangelical community that infect that religious identity with hostility?
McLaren was also welcomed and interviewed on National Public Radio to "embrace diversity" last Saturday night on the badly named All Things Considered.
