I had some instinctive feeling that Bryan was right to be annoyed, but couldn't quite put my finger on why until I read Glenn Reynolds' rebuttal:
Bryan Preston says I'm wrong, and that Christians won't do such things. I tend to think that conduct that's rewarded gets engaged in more. We'll find out which one of us is right, soon enough.
I'm surprised Glenn is trying this lame excuse. Palestinians get rewarded every time they take out a pizza parlor or a busload of old people and children. "Oh, look how aggrieved they are. Let's give the poor things more money and concessions." But have the Israelis started imitating them? Of course not, and for the same reasons that Christians will not.
This behavior will never be widespread in the Christian community precisely because Christians know they will not be rewarded for it in the manner that Muslims are. Of course self-detonating Christians wouldn't get sympathy from the media since they aren't an approved minority with an approved grievance. But it is so much more than that.
Terrorist Christians would not get sympathy from other Christians. Unlike Muslim terrorists, Christian terrorists would not benefit from world-wide excuse making, fund raising, and network forming. Can Christians produce one-off nut jobs who do terrible things? Of course. But that's all it will ever be. To paraphrase Mao, there's no sea for the Christian terrorist fish to swim in.
Timothy McVeigh, far from proving Reynold's point, is the perfect example of what I'm taking about. McVeigh pretty much single-handedly destroyed the militia movement. After Oklahoma City, moderates (normal people who liked target shooting and playing paint ball in the woods) were so horrified that they left in droves, leaving behind only the compound-dwelling freaks. Outside of those (famously anti-Christian) compounds, no one defended McVeigh. No one said "Well, the ATF blah blah blah." The most I saw was, "Well, I hate the ATF as much as the next guy, BUT NO WAY is murder acceptable." The rejection was unequivocal.
I'm sure Glenn was just making a joke and doesn't want to get into an existential debate, but it doesn't take a rocket scientist (or a law professor) to see that there's just no pay-off for terrorism among Christians.
2 comments:
Glenn at times seem to operate in blind spot zones. Is it just because he doesn't meet Christians all that often and thus lack a sizable database from which to extrapolate greater behavioral trends?
Sometimes it's hard to tell when Glenn Reynolds is joking. He's a bright guy and by all accounts a polymath, but he suffers from libertarian-tinged ignorance when talking about Christianity.
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