The Ballad of Joking Jesus
Who's zoomin' who in postwar Iraq?
By Tim Cavanaugh
...In his book The Arabists, Robert Kaplan traces the long history of distain Arab sympathizers felt for eastern Christians. That's an antipathy Kaplan follows all the way back to the earliest Protestant missionaries, beautifully depicting the mood among Congregationalists in the early 19th century:
Their initial experiences in Smyrna, Alexandria, Jerusalem, and Beirut had taught the Congregationalists that the Eastern Christians were no less in need of Christ than the Moslems. If anything, they needed him more.
The very impossibility of converting the Moslems—or the Eastern Jews, for that matter—forced the missionaries to accept these two peoples as unalterably different: part of the exotic Oriental milieu requiring serious study. But to arrive in Jerusalem...only to see the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the other Holy Places guarded by a dirty and superstitious rabble of Greeks and Byzantinized Arabs, all kissing icons and burning incense amid gold-leaf finery, scandalized these well-bred and puritanical New Englanders. In the eyes of the missionaries, it was the Oriental Christians—the Greek Orthodox, the Egyptian Copts, the Lebanese Maronites, and others—who had truly usurped the Holy Land, by emphasizing the hypnotic mechanics of liturgy over the Word of God! The Protestant missionary animus toward these strange Eastern rite churches, products of Byzantine rule in the Middle East from the fourth through sixth centuries A.D., was never to dissipate. In fact, it would grow. In 1920 a Beirut missionary, Margaret A McGilvary, writes: "The Oriental Church is the canker at the heart of Christianity, and inasmuch as it is the chief point of contact with Islam, it behooves the Christian world to renovate the system which so unworthily represents its cause in the Near East."
