Sometimes religion gives faith a bad name. How many times have we seen intolerance disguised as faith? Instead of glorifying God, that kind of religion is used as a tool to impose one group’s beliefs on others.
There are plenty of examples, recently and throughout history, of misusing the good that is religious faith to cause evil.
On 9/11/2001 we witnessed death and destruction caused by misguided religious fanatics using passenger planes to crash into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. Earlier that same year we had seen the same kind of perversion of Islam in a terrible act of vandalism by the Taliban, who claimed that their strong and unwavering belief in God required them to dynamite the Buddhas of Bamyan, obliterating the two massive sixth-century statues of Buddha carved into the side of a cliff in central Afghanistan.
During my pilgrimage in Egypt in January, I saw examples of the deliberate defacing of Egyptian hieroglyphics, first by Christians and later by Muslims, because both believed that the “pagan” images were evil.
Zealous Spanish Roman Catholic priests burned and destroyed a treasure of Aztec literature in Mexico, also trying to erase anything that had to do with a “pagan” religion.In the name of God, both Protestants and Catholics justified slavery as a way to bring “heathens” into the Christian faith.
It is sad to know that at the same time that the Shinto-Buddhist government of Japan was killing Jesuit missionaries and their Christian converts, the Catholic Inquisition was killing Protestants and Jews in Europe.
Over the centuries the Inquisition, which began with the intent of preserving the purity of the faith, had more than 40,000 individuals tortured and killed Anglicans, who suffered at the hands of Roman Catholic “Bloody Mary” in 16th century England, cannot criticize her too harshly; when Protestant Queen Elizabeth I came to the throne, the Protestants then managed to torture, burn and kill Roman Catholics, because they professed a different interpretation of the faith.
Unfortunately, we have not advanced much since those dark days: Religious intolerance is still part of our daily life. We may not burn witches anymore, but instead we now use more sophisticated ways to discriminate against, exclude and denigrate those who are different from us.
Here in Southeast Florida we have had our share of attacks and burning of Jewish synagogues and Islamic temples, as well as threats against people because of their race, religion or sexual preference, or because they are recent immigrants to this country.
Intolerance is not only in Northern Ireland, India, Pakistan or the Middle East; it is also spreading in our Episcopal Church.
One of the reasons I was attracted to the Episcopal Church was because you don’t have to surrender your brain, or who you are, as you come into church. That meant that I was going to encounter others who would have different ideas and who might be different from me in every way—except in our love for the same Lord. We all could pray together from the same Book of Common Prayer, regardless of whether we did it standing up or on our knees, with incense or with tambourines, in modern or archaic English, or in any of the countless other languages of this planet.
I miss the days when our only litmus test for being “in” was if we loved God with all our heart, soul and mind and our neighbor as ourselves. It saddens me when in the name of the purity of religion some try to destroy and divide our church, and ostracize those who are different or express another opinion.Please note that I am not naming any one side on any one issue or referring to any specific ethnic or cultural group. I am speaking of anyone, of any background or theological position, who uses his or her belief as a weapon to denigrate any other child of God.
Let’s stop using God as an excuse to discriminate against and put down those whose beliefs, religious practice, sex, race, national origin, language, social class or sexual orientation may be different from ours.
I hope and pray that we in this diocese will continue respecting each other, regardless of our stance on issues in the church and in our society. Our tent is large enough for conservatives, moderates and liberals to pray together without needing to deface what is holy to others, as Christians and Muslims have done to some of the Egyptian antiquities, by taking over property or trying to expel those who disagree.
If we are unable to reconcile our opinions with each other then let’s do our best to unite our hearts.
+Leo Frade
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