So, on Monday as I was driving back to DC from a weekend in Pittsburgh, I spent some time listening to some low-on-the-dial radio as I made my way through Western Maryland. At first I thought I was listening to an all news network, but eventually it became apparent that I was listening to an evangelical station. I usually skip over the Christian rock when I drive, but often I stop to listen to the Christian talk material–it’s sort of an anthropological exercise.
So, this time I ended up with a broadcast from Focus on the Family Radio. Very interesting stuff. The main broadcast, aptly titled “From Jihad to Jesus,” was a testimony, given shortly after September 11 by a Dean from Liberty Theological Seminary (Jerry Fallwell’s institution), Ergun Caner. Though this fellow teaches systematic theology and church history, he isn’t your average evangelical Christian. Rather, he was raised as a Muslim and his father was a prominent mwazien. So, he addressed a Texas congregations in an effort to explain to them how the 9-11 terrorists, and other suicide bombers, could do what they did. Of course, he was also testifying about his conversion.
It didn’t take long for me to be totally fascinated by this man’s talk–troubled, but fascinated. For instance, he explained that since a Muslim’s life is judged by weighing his good acts against his bad acts, he can perform all of the duties and rituals of Islam and still go to hell–based on this behavioral accounting. Then, he explained Muslims have no way to alter this situation other than through martyrdom. Thus, suicide bombers abound. As far as I can tell, this is the most simplistic explanation for this phenomenon that I’ve ever heard.
Simplistic though it was, it fed right into his conversion story. After coming to the United States at the age of 17, Caner was asked to come to a revival by one of his new friends. By the end of the week, Caner had embraced Christianity based on the availability of redemption through faith–no more permanent scales of good and evil acts. This all sounds fine to me — based on a narrative of Islam in which there is no way to make up for past transgressions, salvation through a merciful and all-forgiving god really does seem like a reasonable choice.
Yet, there were things about his conversion story that troubled me. For example, in Caner’s narrative, after he has tackled the preacher at the end of the revival, ready to articulate his acceptance of Christ, he and the rest of the teenagers in the congregation go out to Denny’s for food and fellowship. Caner’s first act as a Christian is to order a ham steak. This portion of the story drew gails of laughter from the audience, as he explained, “Now I’m a ham-eating man.” As if the dietary laws of Islam were the essence of the entire religious system…..
After his conversion, Caner saw not only his brothers, but also his mother and his grandmother, convert to Christianity. His father disowned him, but eventually, when he was on his deathbed, did speak with Caner. This all seems fine and good.
In his closing remarks, however, Caner articulated a stance that I just cannot get my mind around. As a man who came to Christianity based on the notion of God’s forgiveness and mercy, Caner was still able to express the belief that had he not converted, his whole family would be “on its way to a devil’s hell”. Go figure. God is only loving and forgiving if you’re a Christian–the rest of you are up a creek….. Needless to say, this is not my understanding of Christianity and the fate of my many, many non-Christian friends. I gotta figure that we are all so flawed as human beings, God cannot hold our very different understandings of the world against us….
But, this was all thought provoking none the less.
The next program on the network was about domestic violence, and I was totally interested to hear how they would approach this topic since the intro piece began with the startling statistic that “one in four women in your congregation is or has been a victim of domestic abuse.” But alas, as I got closer to DC I lost the signal….