[Vision2020] Food for Thought

[Art Deco]

Is Anders Breivik a 'Christian' terrorist?
By DAVID GIBSON Religion News Service
Published 05:06 p.m., Thursday, July 28, 2011 
The mass murders in Oslo have raised a host of agonizing questions, but few have such contemporary resonance as whether Anders Behring Breivik, the right-wing extremist arrested in the attacks that killed 76 Norwegians July 22, is a Christian.

Breivik claimed that he is a Christian in various forums, but most explicitly and in greatest detail in the 1,500-page manifesto he compiled over several months and posted on the Internet.

"At the age of 15 I chose to be baptised (sic) and confirmed in the Norwegian State Church," the 32-year-old Breivik wrote. "I consider myself to be 100 percent Christian."

But he also fiercely disagrees with the politics of most Protestant churches and the Roman Catholic Church.

"Regarding my personal relationship with God, I guess I'm not an excessively religious man," he writes. "I am first and foremost a man of logic. However, I am a supporter of a monocultural Christian Europe."

Breivik fashions himself a "cultural Christian" and a modern-day crusader in a resurrected order of the medieval Knights Templar, riding out to do battle against squishy "multiculturalism" and the onslaught of "Islamization."

Not surprisingly, conservative pundits who share some of Breivik's views and also consider themselves Christians quickly sought to distance themselves from Breivik by declaring, as Bill O'Reilly did on Fox News, that "Breivik is not a Christian."

O'Reilly said Tuesday, "No one believing in Jesus commits mass murder. The man might have called himself a Christian on the 'net, but he is certainly not of that faith."

His point was taken up by any number of commentators and religion scholars.

Mathew N. Schmalz, a professor of religious studies at the College of the Holy Cross, wrote in a Washington Post column that Breivik's vision "is a Christianity without Christ" because the attacker rejected a personal relationship with Jesus.

Writing in The Guardian, Andrew Brown wrote that "even in his saner moments (Breivik's) ideology had nothing to do with Christianity but was based on an atavistic horror of Muslims and a loathing of 'Marxists,' by which he meant anyone to the left of Genghis Khan."

But others pushed back against such a carefully cordoned-off interpretation of Breivik's faith, or Christianity itself.

"If he did what he has alleged to have done, Anders Breivik is a Christian terrorist," Boston University religion scholar Stephen Prothero wrote on CNN.com.

"Yes, he twisted the Christian tradition in directions most Christians would not countenance. But he rooted his hate and his terrorism in Christian thought and Christian history, particularly the history of the medieval Crusades against Muslims, and current efforts to renew that clash."

"So Christians have a responsibility to speak out forcefully against him, and to look hard at the resources in the Christian tradition that can be used to such murderous ends."

Andrew Sullivan, the popular blogger and Catholic, wrote that "it is obvious that Christians can commit murder, assault, etc. They do so every day. Because, as Christian orthodoxy tells us, we are all sinners. To say that no Christian can ever commit murder is a sophist's piffle. ... Do the countless criminals who have gone to church or believe in Jesus immediately not count as Christians the minute they commit the crime? Of course not."

Sullivan said Bill O'Reilly's argument "is complete heresy in terms of the most basic Christian orthodoxy."








______________________________________
Wayne A. Fox
wayne.a.fox at gmail.com
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