Comes Christmas, columnists rummage through their metaphorical larders for a hidden morsel of topical originality to tempt readers’ jaded palates.
This year, my musings are inspired by two otherwise unrelated stories highlighting the distortion rather than the beauty of religious faith. In both cases, the protagonists’ actions resulted in immediate abuses of the faith they claimed to represent and, as a result of their folly, continuing grief to co-religionists.
One story’s essence was captured in a photograph, taken at the recent Holocaust denial conference, of Iran’s President Ahmadinejad exchanging a warm greeting with a representative of Neturei Karta, billed as “Orthodox Jews United Against Zionism.”
Although numerically negligible, this fanatical sect has attracted wildly disproportionate media attention by publicly aligning itself with Israel and world Jewry’s worst enemies: Before Ahmadinejad, they had befriended, amongst other bottom feeders, Yasser Arafat, Hezbollah and the virulently anti-Semitic Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam.
The other story concerns James Loney and his pacifist Christian Peacemaker Team. Falsely appropriating the ideal of Christian mission, the group decamped from Toronto in 2005 to act as human shields in Iraq. Predictably, these “useful idiots” were promptly kidnapped by Iraqi insurgents.
Loney displayed no gratitude whatsoever to the British soldiers who at great risk eventually rescued him. Roundly lambasted by the media—a Post editorial criticized the Christian Peacemakers Team for being “either callous or woefully naive”—Loney haughtily shrugged off such censure as the ignorance of spiritual yahoos.
The two stories are an object lesson in the fungibility of religious extremism. In Judaism, holiness has traditionally been associated with devotion to God’s Torah laws and moral precepts, interpreted more or less literally. In Christianity, belief in Jesus and imitation of his moral perfection is the measure of spiritual progress, mediated through the distinctive interpretations of various denominations. In both Neturei Karta and Christian Peacemakers, what perhaps began as spiritual motivation ended in dark parody.
To distinguish what is admirable from what is perverted in the spiritual impulse to holiness, ask: Is the individual or group using their religion as a tribunal to plead all of fallible mankind?s case to a compassionate Father; or as a tribunal for expediting a partisan Judge’s punitive dissatisfaction with certain lesser men and women?
Abraham risked God’s wrath by using His own moral law to argue for the depraved city of Sodom on behalf of a few righteous inhabitants. In the throes of his death agony, Jesus asked God to forgive his tormentors. These spiritual titans defended mankind at its weakest before a Father perceived as merciful. By contrast, anti-Semites, partisan terrorists and anti- Western bigots, acting as prosecutors for a wronged and vindictive Deity, justify their all-too-human vendetta against infidels and political apostates as holy war.
Neturei Karta assumes God is angry with other Jews for their support of a prematurely created Israel. Christian Peacemakers assumes God is angry with America for invading Iraq. In their treasonous embrace of this angry God’s proxies, these quislings are guilty of spiritual as well as worldly sabotage.
Shamefully, Neturei Karta flouts the post-Holocaust sanctity of Jewish survivalism, given eloquent voice in what philosopher Emil Fackenheim called the “11th commandment”: Thou shalt not give Hitler a posthumous victory.
Hubristically, Christian Peacemakers (comparing themselves to “Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Jesus”) has put fellow Christians and Westerners at risk by imitating a simplistically masochistic version of a theologically complex Christ. (Compounding their narcissistic fecklessness, they refuse to testify against their captors, which will doubtless inspire those liberated criminals to further crimes against humanity.)
These subversive Jews and Christians who give comfort to their communities’ enemies have been treated by those betrayed with remarkable indulgence.
Neturei Karta are loathed by mainstream Jews, but the official community hasn’t publicly blacklisted them. Nor has the Toronto Catholic Worker community, which supports Loney’s group, disassociated itself from the Peacemakers.
Real saints are accountable only to God. But in these parlous times, when a photograph can shift history, mischievous pretenders should answer to their peers. As George Orwell wisely noted, “Saints should always be judged guilty until proved innocent.”
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