For promoting holy war, subjugating women, oppressing gays, Salon hits — Christians

When was the last time Salon criticized Muslims for promoting holy war, subjugating women, and oppressing gays in the name of their religion? That’s right, never. They routinely ignore, or downplay and diminish, the ways in which Islamic jihadists use the texts and teachings of Islam to justify violence and the oppression of women and gays. For the Left, the only religion whose adherents ever commit any evil in its name is Christianity.

Note also the stretch to create the impression that Christianity promotes holy war. No Christian text does any such thing, and no Christian sect teaches that Christians have any obligation to wage war against and subjugate unbelievers. No, but one remark by George W. Bush, in connection with the Iraqi misadventure, which — whatever else it did and did not do — had nothing whatsoever to do with spreading Christianity, and it’s a holy war. Meanwhile, the Qur’an’s teachings on jihad, and the teachings on jihad warfare affirmed by all the schools of Islamic jurisprudence, have never had any airing in Salon, and probably never will.

“9 sinister things the Christian right does in the name of God,” by Valerie Tarico, Salon, July 18, 2014 (thanks to Jerk Chicken) — typographical irregularities as in the original:

…3. Demeaning and subjugating women is evil.When it comes to dignity and equality for women, instead of acting as moral torchbearers, Bible believers have been at the back of the pack for generations, along with conservative factions from other Abrahamic traditions ranging from Islam to Mormonism. The American Quiverfull movement, “complementarianism,” theexpulsion of Southern Baptist women who were making inroads into the clergy, the Mormon Patriarchy’s threats to excommunicate women who seek equality, the Vatican’s decision to crush nuns who thought poverty was a bigger problem than abortion . . . Need I say more?…

6. Promoting holy war is evil.What first flipped my bit, what transformed me from an agnostic into an outspoken full-time antagonist of Bible worship was a conversation with my Evangelical relatives about the Iraq war. From the vantage of my relatives and my childhood church “family,” George Bush needed no diplomatic or cultural expertise; he was Born Again. He didn’t need to seek input from his earthly father about the invasion, because he asked his Heavenly Father. Besides, Jesus is coming soon and war in the Middle East is predicted in the Bible. That makes it not only inevitable, but—in a manner of speaking—desirable.

Evangelical Christians have spent tens of millions of dollars funding the “return” of Jews to Israeland settlements in the West Bank “as it is written in the scripture”—with the perverse expectation that their presence will one day cause blood to flow in the streets as high as a horse’s bridle.

7. Abusing and killing queers is evil. The Bible’s clobber verses may be open to interpretation, but the fact that those verses have caused centuries of suffering is not. For much of American history, the common term for queer was the biblical “sodomite,” implying that gays are so offensive to God that they pose a threat to society as a whole. Thanks to Christian missionaries, African and Latin American queers also have now lived for centuries now under the threat of violent death. As progressive Anglican Gay Clark Jennings observes, “There is no getting around the Bible when searching for the origins of the homophobia that is rampant in many African cultures. What’s more, Europeans and North Americans bear much of the historical responsibility for this sad state of affairs.”

It would be bad enough if we were simply talking about history. But homophobic American Christians, thwarted at home, have turned to inciting oppression in Uganda and Nigeria where their hatred still finds fertile ground.

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