Liverpool bomber was a Christian convert. So what?
Liverpool bomber was a Christian convert. So what?
Christian terrorists are nothing new, writes George Pitcher. But it's all about politics and paranoia, not faith
There was more than a whiff of religiophobia in this week’s reporting of how the Liverpool bomber was a Christian convert. Emad Al Swealmeen, who died on Remembrance Sunday when his bomb exploded in a taxi outside Liverpool Women’s Hospital, had been prepared for confirmation as an Anglican at the city’s cathedral, which is indeed a legitimate thread of the story.
But it made the lead item for a while, with an implied nudge from the media that it isn’t just Mad Muslims who are terrorists – so all these religious nutters must be as bad as each other.
Political motivation
There was some cheap political motivation behind it. Home secretary Priti Patel looked to be making opportunistic capital from the incident by claiming that asylum-seekers such as Al Swealmeen, who was from Iraq, were “gaming the system” by converting to Christianity, so that they could claim that their lives would be threatened by repatriation.
But that barely explains why Al Swealmeen’s faith was considered so important on the news agenda. There are two issues here: Whether Patel’s line, peddled to sympathetic right-wing journalists, stands up. And whether it matters, or should be a surprise, to which religious tradition the would-be murderer adhered.
The first is easily dealt with. Patel – and the rest of us – simply don’t know why Al Swealmeen was baptised and confirmed into the Christian faith. Maybe, as Patel claims, it was an attempt to support his asylum application, though his Anglican friends claim his conversion seemed sincere and genuine. The bombing doesn’t prove he was a religious fraud – maybe he was clinically depressed by his failures to win UK residency; maybe his conversion was a cry for help that went unheeded. We can’t know.
The second issue is more complex, because it may arise from a sublimated and visceral preconception: Blimey, even Christians can be suicide bombers.
First Crusade
Anyone with a passing knowledge of its history knows that Christianity is bound up with terrorism. It may be a very extreme exemplar of the bullied becoming the bullies – a direct line between persecution by the Romans (and others) to the First Crusade in 1099, when the streets of Jerusalem were said to have run with rivers of blood from the massacre by Christian zealots of the “infidels” in the mosque.
Furthermore, violent antisemitism is a stain that runs through our Christian heritage. A little less than a century after the Muslims of Jerusalem were put to the sword, the entire Jewish community of York were rounded up in a tower and burned to death. Genocides in the name of colonialism were sometimes led from the front with the cross held high. And the Church’s widely-held decision that Nazism was the lesser evil compared with Communism endorsed the greatest act of mass terrorism of the 20th-century.
In more recent history, America has raised the standard of Christian-inspired terrorism. Not just in its foreign policy, trying to bomb Arab enemies into democracy from the skies in a psychotic notion that the US is God’s chosen people, but on the domestic front too.
The anti-abortion movements there are fuelled by a distorted form of extremist Christian ideology, which makes claims inter alia that the coming of God’s Kingdom will usher in a new absolutist theocracy, founded on biblical law, in which (in alphabetical order for convenience) adulterers, astrologers, blasphemers, homosexuals and witches will all be put to death. Does that sound a tad familiar? Yes, it could be a newsletter from Islamic State.
And for Christian-on-Christian terrorist violence you’d be hard pushed to find a better paradigm than the Troubles of Northern Ireland of the latter decades of the 20th-century (not that it’s over). It was never really about Roman Catholics against Protestants, like some kind of unfinished terrorist business from the Reformation. The bombs and the shootings and the knee-cappings were about unionism versus republicanism.
Fundamentalism
But that’s very much to the point. Religious terrorism is only very rarely about religion. It is politicised and militarised religion. It is about a fundamentalism that emerges from a cultural paranoia that modernism is out to destroy its alleged victims’ way of life. And self-hatred – it’s why the almost-hilarious, hyper-Calvinist Westboro Baptist Church of the US peddles its hate-speech with “God Hates America” and “God Hates Fags”.
In her excellent book The Battle for God (interestingly enough, published in paperback just ahead of 9/11 in 2001), Karen Armstrong traces how the fundamentalists of the three Abramic faiths of Islam, Christianity and Judaism have conflated the wonders of the mythos of their traditions with the hard rationalities of their logos. Therein madness lies.
So when a sad and desperate little man blows himself up in his attempt to murder countless others, who in some way he has come to blame for his misfortunes, it is inadequate to wonder – as countless headlines implied – whether this was an “unChristian” thing to do. History demonstrates that, on the contrary, it’s a profoundly Christian thing to do, if an unrecognisably distorted and irreligious version of our faith.
Rather, it befalls the rest of us to kneel down and be counted. And to examine what has been done in the name of fundamentalist Christianity and then to say simply and firmly: “That’s not a gospel I recognise.”
George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the LSE and an Anglican priest