As a thinly-veiled mouthpiece of the American establishment, the TIME magazine is strictly outside the purview of my regular reading. I must, however, confess that I was tempted into breaking my vow of abstinence last week. The June 30, 2003 issue of the magazine carried too provocative a cover to resist. It pictured an upheld fist clenching a cross, nudging against a slogan asking a cryptic query: "Should Christians Convert Muslims?" Now, inter-religious polemics have ceased to interest me lately, tired as I am of loud-mouthed fanatics peddling their wares. However, since the niggling issue of relations between Muslims and others continues to exercise a fascination for me, I shed my scruples about the venerable TIME, and clicked on its web-page to go through the cover-story.
The gist of the story, based on reports filed by correspondents in North America and West Asia, was, to put it in a nutshell, this: Western, largely American, Christian evangelist fundamentalists appear to be convinced that the time has now come to wage an all-out spiritual war against Islam. Islam, as many of them see it, is a satan-inspired programme of terrorism that bodes ill for all humankind, and represents the greatest challenge to Christianity and Christiandom. As an American evangelist, identified simply as "Barbara', puts it, Islam is in itself the ultimate "weapon of mass destruction". Gripped by a fanatic zeal to spread their faith to "benighted" Muslims, the story speaks of scores of Christian evangelists following close on the heels of American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, offering 'aid', both material as well as 'spiritual', with the latter, predictably, being tied to the former. The report quoting the Massachusetts-based Gordon-Cornwell Theological Seminary suggests that there are today more than 27,000 Christian missionaries working in Muslim countries, almost double the number two decades ago.
The events of September 2001, the TIME tells us, seem to have galvanised the American Christian rightwing to take its evangelical duty of 'saving' the Muslims more seriously. There can be no doubt that growing unrest in many Muslim countries, and the threat that the West perceives from this, is a, if not, the, major factor in stirring the missionary zeal of the evangelicals. As in classical colonial times, in these days of American global neo-colonialism, a symbiotic relationship appears to bind the imperial ambitions of the American military establishment with the missionary fervour of the proselytising Christian right-wing. Evangelical fundamentalists today enjoy the warm endorsement of the American president. In turn, they faithfully serve American goals abroad, propagating an extremely conservative, ultra-reactionary theology, based on the deeply-rooted conviction of the ultimate superiority of the American 'way of life', on the one hand, and the firm belief that all religions other than (their own edition of) Christianity are wholly false, if not downright 'satanic'.
Little wonder, then, that evangelists are often the most fanatic defenders of American foreign policy, from zealously supporting Israel to excitedly welcoming the invasion of Iraq, seeing in all this both a triumph over the 'forces of evil' represented by Islam, as well as an opportunity to proclaim their 'good news'. If Bush proclaims, in the war against terrorism, that those "not with us are against us", so, too the evangelicals announce: In the war against the 'powers of darkness', if you are not one of us—if you choose to remain Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu or anything other than Christian—then you are a minion of the devil.