WHAT MAKES A “RELIGION OF HATE”?

What makes a religion a “religion of hate”?

Does barbarism simply inhere at the taproot of some religions? Usually not. Each religion’s holy writ leaves enough ambiguity and ambivalence – enough “good stuff” and “bad stuff” – to make an equal case for humane and inhumane conclusions. Jews, Christians, Muslims and the rest, must see within their sacred texts the potential for a mishmash of honorable and dishonorable alternatives.

What then? We must look at the preponderance of tradition that has been brought to interpreting and teaching each of the sacred texts. Acknowledge it or not, the world’s religions have largely been shaped by an “oral” tradition – that is, the predispositions that each generation’s masters have brought to presenting the holy word to their inspiration-hungry disciples. Thus, the real persona of a religion is determined not so much by chapter-and-verse of a foundational text as it is by what Hillel and Akiba, Aquinas and Assisi, conveyed to us about the text.

If we deem a set of holy doctrines compassionate and peace-loving, it is inevitably because they have been consistently interpreted in a compassionate and peace-loving manner by the venerated prophets of that faith. On the other hand, if a religion has a consistent legacy of promoting bloodlust and genocidal frenzy, we must assume that its generations of spokespeople have pulled its sacred writ in that direction.

What role do disciples play in shaping the nature of a religion? No matter how much demagogues may shape the tone of the masses, disciples still wield the all-powerful prerogative of “buy in.” Ideally, this means that the listening audience is capable of exercising the moral autonomy to reject out of hand teachings that pervert honorable ideals.

Usually, though, that is asking too much. We can, however, hope that a people well conditioned to hearing its legacy consistently interpreted in a compassionate and peace-loving way will instinctively be repulsed by a renegade voice that dares to fly in the face of that generations-old tradition. Sadly, the converse is also true: If the faithful of a particular religion brands as an infidel a spokesman who dares call for compassion, we may be quite sure that a tradition centuries in the making has conditioned that response.

What, then, would qualify Islam, or any venerated legacy, as a “religion of hate”? The answer is not to be found in the text of the Koran or the words of its earliest prophets. It is not even to be found so much in what Islam “was” two or five or ten centuries ago. The only criterion for determining whether Islam is a “religion of peace” hijacked by infidels or truly a thoroughgoing “religion of hate,” is the here and now: What are mullahs and imams around the world preaching to their faithful? And, what are they not? What do the world’s Muslims accept as legitimate from the interpreters of their faith? And, would they welcome or shout down a voice that spoke to them of understanding and compassion, if they were ever to hear it?

So, enough already of the liberal, upper middle class, white Protestant clergy and academics struggling to convince us that Islam is really a “religion of peace.” I for one will not believe it until I hear it loud and clear from Muslim clerics themselves, and preferably, when they preach not to us, but to their own less-than-forthcoming masses.