The Christian evangelical mission to convert Muslims

It turns out that there’s not just one Christianity. There are, instead, many Christianities, each one slightly — or much more than slightly — different from the next. (The same is true of other major religions, too.)

Yes, Jesus of Nazareth, whom Christians call the Christ, or Messiah, has something to do with all of them, though the vision of who Christ was and is can vary significantly from tradition to tradition.

In addition to the major institutional branches of the faith — such as Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox and Pentecostal — there are differences of opinion about what, theologically, is most important, what is central, what is the top priority for followers. In other words, people from different Christian branches often differ about what should be the core of the faith.

For instance, some branches emphasize a fear of hell. They ask potential converts to commit themselves to becoming followers of Christ primarily so the new converts can be "saved" and avoid spending eternity in a place of fire and pain because they would be considered unrepentant sinners. You can hear that kind of preaching almost any hour on many Christian radio stations.

Over the centuries, fear-based religion has had a strong appeal but also has caused people a lot of mental and emotional agony. In this kind of approach, the idea is to get people “saved” — not so much saved for something as saved from something, and that something is an eternity on fire as punishment for rejecting Christ Jesus. That’s essentially what they mean by “the gospel.”

By contrast, other branches of Christianity emphasize that a commitment to Christ should result in a life of self-giving love — love for God, for self and for others. Jesus was and is the model of that love, which should produce good, charitable deeds for others as a way of expressing gratitude to God for what God already has done for followers.

Do such Christians believe in a heaven and-or a hell? It varies, but to many, if not most, of them, "the gospel" is not primarily about pledging allegiance to Christ so they can avoid going to hell -- if there even is such a place. Rather, it's about recognizing that despite human sinfulness, each person has been created in the image of God and is, therefore, of ultimate worth.

Putting all that in American political perspective, I thought historian Dominic Erdozain, in his book One Nation Under Guns, put it well: "Modern democracy differed from its classical forebears in two critical respects: The first was the principle of equality -- the belief that every life is sacred, and none (is) born to rule. The second was the belief that all men are equally flawed: creatures of passion and slaves to self-love. . .The American system was based on a theory of social contract. . .It was the attempt to reconcile two burning convictions: the principle of equality and the problem of passion."

Well, there are many other divisions and types of Christianity, but the two I've just described cover a lot of the territory.

I begin with this simplified background as a way of introducing a book that explores why some Christians who call themselves evangelical have spent so much time and effort trying to get Muslims to quit following Islam and become Christians. The book is Soul by Soul: The Evangelical Mission to Spread the Gospel to Muslims, by Adriana Carranca.

It’s an intriguing read by a good reporter (who is not one of the evangelical missionaries). But the kind of proselytizing she describes is often rooted in the idea that only Christians can or will enter into an eternal relationship with God that most people call heaven, while followers of any other faith tradition are doomed to perdition.

Given the limits of what human beings can know about the divine, their certainty about all of that is not just presumptuous, it’s also responsible for both pain and agony -- as well as resulting sometimes in happy people who have come to embrace a kind of Christianity that brings them joy. (There are no simple answers here.)

As Carranca notes: “By the end of the nineteenth century, Americans were convinced that they had a mandate from God to spread Christianity anywhere in the world.”

And what would Christianity replace? Carranca says that a prayer at an evangelical summit in Bali in 2012 put it this way: “We ask God for the liberation of those souls from Islam. Release them from the darkness and deception.”

So evangelicals — first Americans among them and later people from other parts of the world, including South America — went to “preach the gospel” to Muslims so the followers of Islam (which dates from the year 610 C.E.) would convert.

As the editor of a mission magazine whom Carranca mentions wrote soon after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, “The civilized world has declared war on terrorism. Now it is up to Christians to tear down the strongholds of Satan that have held the Muslim people in bondage for hundreds of years. It’s time for us to set these captives free.”

This save-the-Muslims drive took some time to get organized, but, as Carranca notes, a global conference of evangelicals in the mid-1970s set the agenda for the next 40 years "as evangelicals turned, heart and soul, toward the world."

By the late 1980s, evangelicals began talking about something called the "10/40 Window," which was a reference to "Africa, the Middle East and Asia between approximately 10 and 40 degrees latitude north of the equator, where the majority of Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists lived." Those lands became the primary evangelical conversion target.

The post-9/11 language often used at the time by President George W. Bush seemed to add to the zeal of evangelicals to convert the non-Christian world to Christianity. As Carranca notes, Bush repeatedly used the term "evil-doers" and he "urged Americans to return to work because 'this crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while.' It was a regretful choice of words."

The move to proselytize the Muslim world began, of course, before 9/11, but as the author reports, "between 1990 and 2003, the number of missionaries in Islamic countries quadrupled." And because conversion to Christianity was a crime in some of those countries, the missionaries had to work quietly underground. Indeed, much of the book is devoted to accounts of exactly that in Afghanistan after the U.S. began the war there. And those accounts include "epic adventures, unimaginable risks, severe threats and attacks they had either suffered or witnessed and a seemingly unbroken faith."

One particularly interesting development that Carranca chronicles is the displeasure many evangelicals felt at President Donald Trump's so-called "Muslim ban," which sought to keep Muslims from coming to the U.S. Those evangelicals wanted nothing more than to be able to preach their version of the gospel to those arriving Muslims. As Carranca explains, "God's Kingdom, conceived by evangelicals as universal and borderless, sharply contrasted with Trump's isolationist foreign policy."

As for evangelicals' participation in American politics, Carranca writes this: "Ultimately, American Protestant evangelicals will need to choose whether to be citizens of a nation or part of the global, diverse and borderless Kingdom of God." That assumes, of course, that one can't be part of both, which seems like a doubtful proposition.

In the end, the author offers important insights into what motivates evangelicals, and she has developed a good working relationship with them without becoming one of them. And for that independence, readers can be grateful.

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ARE WE JUST VIOLENT PEOPLE, AND DOES RELIGION HELP?

In the aftermath of the recent assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, Joanne M. Pierce, professor emerita of religious studies at the College of the Holy Cross, has written this interesting piece about how the Catholic Church has viewed political violence, war and forgiveness. It's a good summary that will be a helpful background for when you read my next Flatland column, scheduled to post early Sunday morning here. In it, I suggest that the many sharp divisions and differences in institutional religion have formed something of a pattern that has been picked up now in our political divisions. I hope you'll give it a read after you read Pierce's history piece.

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P.S.: My latest Flatland column posted this morning, Sunday, here. It suggests that institutional religion drew people into false certitude, an attitude that now infests our politics.