Kindly LET GO of your "ISM"...
Recently, National Public Radio (NPR) broadcast Kelly
McEvers’ interview with Maajid Nawaz. According to McEvers, Maajid Nawaz is “a
British citizen of Pakistani descent who himself joined an Islamist group when
he was a teenager. He recruited for the group, spent four years in prison in
Egypt, and then later renounced the group. Nawaz wrote a book about the
experience and is the co-founder of Quilliam. That's a British think tank that
focuses on countering extremist beliefs.”
In the interview,
Nawaz described his journey into “radicalized Islam” and described what he
perceives as some factors that lead men and women like himself down that
particular religious path. He describes
how extremists groups take advantage of youthful feelings of frustration, anger,
injustice which they exploit, concretize, and use as a bridge to radicalized
ideology. What attracted my attention
most in the interview was Nawaz’s description of the difference between the religion of Islam and what he says is the
distorted practice he calls “Islam-ism”…
Here is an excerpt of the interview:
NAWAZ: “So the
grievances - you know, you'd expect somebody who's a teenager to be quite angry
at the various injustices of the world, but you wouldn't expect someone in
their 20s to continue using those grievances as an excuse for the most
unjustifiable acts. And that's the bridge. The bridge there is that what the
ideology provides. It fossilizes an anger that someone once felt, and then, you
know, it becomes the justification for all sorts of atrocities that are then
committed by the ideologue.
MCEVERS: “Yeah,
it's that final step from the ideas to the acts.
NAWAZ: “Indeed,
it is, yeah. And actually, the ideology, what I call the Islamist ideology -
the desire to impose any version of Islam over society anywhere - that's
Islamism as opposed to Islam, which is a religion.” (A full transcript of the interview can be
found at NPR.org.)
I want to observe
that this phenomenon of “fossilized” feelings of injustice being used to
support religious ideology isn’t exclusive to Islam…indeed it is an endemic
problem of all major religious traditions, Christianity and Judaism
included.
In the New
Testament of the Christian Bible, Jesus observes the frustrations of an
occupied people, oppressed not only by the Empire of Rome, but also by the religious
authorities of his time. We read of
Jesus speaking out publicly against this authority to offer a message of
religious/spiritual liberation. It was,
after all, his subversive spiritual message which led directly to his arrest
and execution for religious heresy and political sedition. Rather than fixating on ideology and strict
observance of revealed law, Jesus offered a simple spiritual practice of
forgiveness and love of one’s neighbor.
Centuries
earlier, Gautama Buddha delivered a similar message of spiritual liberation
after observing the suffering of people in his community and the inability of the
religious ideologues of his day and time to address this suffering. Looking deeply at the nature of reality and
the processes of the human mind and heart, Gautama Buddha recognized that
clinging to anything: existence,
material wealth, religious ideology, only leads to suffering for self and
others. In response, he offered a
practice of “letting go” of certainties and ideology for the sake of practicing
compassion and loving kindness.
In more recent
times, theologian and pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer observed the fossilization of frustration
and anger by extremist groups in post-war Germany. This fossilization of fear, anger, and
xenophobia created a religious and political ideology in Germany which led to the
radicalization of his country’s government and state-controlled church; the
result of which ended in the horrendous extermination of 6 million human
beings. In his personal struggles to
make sense of what was happening, of how the “Christian” citizens of Germany
could remain silent (and in many instances complicit) in genocide, Bonhoeffer
began to conceptualize a “religion-less” Christianity; a Christianity in which
the basic virtues Jesus expressed in the Sermon on the Mount could really be
lived out and God’s reign of peace, love, and compassion could be made
manifest. Bonhoeffer’s invitation to
practice a “religion-less Christianity” through a “new form of monasticism” is,
I think, his contribution for guarding against the trap of fossilized fear and
anger, and radicalized religious and political ideology.
Which brings us
back to our present period of extreme political and religious ideology and the
violence it generates. One only need
turn on the radio, television, or internet and see the effects of fossilized
anger and radicalized, religious ideology; not only Islamic radicalization, but
Christian radicalization, too. Western
Christians may like to hide behind a veil of self-righteousness and modern
“civilization” and point out that Christians aren’t the ones beheading
innocents; but historically and culturally, Christians, Jews, and Muslims all
have blood on their hands form centuries of violence perpetuated in the name of
their faiths. It should be pointed out that throughout
history, scripture has been used by religious groups to justify slavery, war, genocide,
child abuse, sexual exploitation, oppression, and other injustices. The vitriol and hate shouted out by groups
like the Westboro Baptist Church (and other harshly fundamentalist
“Christians”) and the self-proclaimed Islamic State (ISIL) is not only
identical, but arises from the same seed of suffering in each human heart.
I should stop at
this point and offer clarification that not ALL Christians are xenophobic fundamentalists;
not all Muslims are radical extremists, not all Jews are militant
Zionists. And groups like the Westboro
Baptist Church and ISIL do not speak for nor represent the totality of the
faith traditions from which they grow.
But that is part of the point I wish to make. What sets these violent and dangerous groups
apart is their perversion of faith and embrace of hate-filled radicalization. These groups fossilize their sense of
injustice, hatred and anger into a particular xenophobic, hateful, angry, radicalized
ideology. The “problem” isn’t
Christianity, Judaism, or Islam per se. The
problem is the distortion and perversion of compassion-based faith into an
ideological excuse for hatred, anger, violence, oppression, rape, slaughter,
genocide. The fierce attachment to
religious ideology perverts the practice religious faith into a distorted practice of religious-ism. The problem is NOT Christianity,
it is that fearful, angry people calling themselves “Christian” are actually practicing
Christian-ism. The problem is NOT Islam, it is that fearful,
angry people who call themselves “Muslim” are practicing Islam-ism.
The problem is that true justice has not been actualized, negative
feelings have not been healed, and pain has been fossilized into radicalized
ideology to which people become fiercely attached. In doing so, faith is twisted
and distorted, and so what was once supposed to be the solution to injustice
then becomes the cause of only more injustice and suffering for everyone.
As a Christian
priest, one solution I hope to inspire people to return to is Bohoeffer’s idea
of a “religion-less” Christianity. In so
doing, I hope we can finally release our institutional death-grip on Christian
dogma and ideology, stop practicing Christian-ism, and start practicing the compassionate expression of faith
that Jesus inspired us to live out.
When Dietrich
Bonhoeffer was organizing his Finkenwalde seminary in 1935, living in prayerful
community with participants in the underground seminary, he began to develop
his ideas of what came to be called a “new monasticism”…
"The restoration
of the church will surely come from a new kind of monasticism, which will have
nothing in common with the old but a life of uncompromising adherence to the
Sermon on the Mount in imitation of Christ. I believe the time has come to
rally people together for this." ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer
In a religionless
Christianity, I Bonhoeffer is calling for a genuine expression and practice of spiritual
faith as taught by Jesus of Nazareth. What
Jesus taught in his Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) is spiritual practice in
in simplest and truest form. In this
teaching, Jesus is pointing beyond the fossilized injustice and ideology of the
established religious authorities of his time and ours, and inviting everyday
people (including people like you and me) to let go of attachment to dogmatic religion-ism, and live more fully into a practice
of faith and compassion. In his time, Jesus
invited people to let go of their Judaism,
and simply be a compassionate, Godly people.
In a religionless Christianity, Bonhoeffer is inviting us to do the
same. Bonhoeffer is inviting us to let
go of Christian-ism and practice
being a compassionate, Godly people. In
our current times, theologians like Franciscan priest and teacher Richard Rohr
are (thankfully!) leading us in the same direction.
My own belief is
that if circumstances been different, had Bonhoeffer not been arrested and
executed, had he been able to continue his work and exploration of
religion-less Christianity, had he been fortunate (as we are) to live in a
world of communication and connectivity, had he (like the beloved Trappist monk
and author Thomas Merton) been able to encounter Buddhist monastic practice and
its teachings of non-attachment, Bonhoeffer may have appreciated an integration
of his “religionless Christianity” and Zen Buddhist practices of non-attachment
and compassion, a practice I call “Mindful Christianity”.To learn more about Mindful Christianity, visit New Seeds Priory at: www.newseedspriory.org
