A thought
Last week, a group of us went to a discussion panel run by the Muslim Student’s Association.
I’m not exactly sure what I expected. I guess I expected to get some sort of understanding with Muslims – not a terribly innovative idea, but certainly the most obvious one. While it’s certainly true that, to an extent, understanding was what I received, that was not really the core of the message that the group presenting was trying to communicate. Instead, they managed to (rather expertly) speak about how the issues confronting them were more or less the same issues confronting us – Christians, America, people, whatever.
The result of this is that I ended up feeling challenged (and to an extent, inspired) in my own faith much more than I anticipated.
The highlight of this, I suppose, came when a question was posed to the panel about what likely is the most popular issue regarding Islam today: how, exactly, does a mainstream Muslim deal with various forms of terrorism and extremism promoted by various groups that claim the same faith? The answer that the panel gave – one of several, but the one that stood out to me the most – was a rather simple analogy. “What if I told you I was a surgeon?” the panelist said “Would you allow me to operate on you based on that fact alone, or would you look at my past patients, my record as a surgeon, and base your judgment on that?” Continuing on, the panelist drew a rather simple conclusion as to how this applied; stating that while those men called themselves Muslims, they don’t act as a Muslim should, and, as such, one can’t really judge Islam by their actions.
Something in this seemed incredibly convicting to me. This is an issue that I feel like I, as a Christian, face every day: my perception, at least, is that almost everyone I run into on the street has some sort of exposure to Christianity, and so much of the time I find that the exposure that people have is terribly embarrassing to me. While I was thinking about this, I was reminded of a talk I heard Donald Miller give when I was a freshman (ok, to be technical, a talk that I heard a recording of when I was a freshman, whatever) where Miller recounts the story of being on a radio talk show – confronted by a host that was rather anti-religion – and I really think that it does a wonderful job of explaining what I feel like is so important here:
“Defend Christianity,” the host said.
“I can’t, I don’t want to defend it,” Miller responded, “I mean, you have a quarter of a million listeners, and every person listening to this radio show has a different definition of Christianity. I mean, there’s a guy driving a cab who was, you know, abused by a minister somewhere; There’s a gal listening to us who thinks Jesus is her best friend and she’s rubbing her Bible for good luck. I’m not going to defend what anybody thinks Christianity is, it’s a relative term. It’s not a sacred term, it’s not a holy term, it’s not a biblical term. I just won’t defend it.”
Essentially, these two comments – the Muslim panelist’s analogy and Donald Miller’s comment to the radio show host – get to the exact same thing: if my faith is my personal choice, why should I have to defend your perceptions of it?
If I’m honest, though, I generally feel obliged to – and this, I think, is my problem. Or, at least, I feel like that is a limitation that I need to work with: somehow, I need to make all previous perceptions of Christianity – from the mildly insane guy handing out fliers by the mall on up – to fit within the framework of whatever explanation of my faith I give, and that any explanation that simply states that some people don’t represent the values of Christ is flawed in some way.
Perhaps the deeper problem here, though, isn’t even the idea that all of this needs an explanation, but rather the idea that this is a reasonable argument for me hiding my faith. The fear that we will be judged against society’s impressions of what we say believe is such a hard thing to get over, at least to the extent that those you are sharing your faith with have a negative impression, somehow, of your belief system.
And that, maybe, is really what I need to get over.
-s