Why Are We Silent When Christians Are Massacred in Lahore?

27 March 2016. Lahore, Pakistan. Easter Sunday. A peaceful park. Hundreds of families picnicking and playing, laughing, running, breaking bread together, relishing foods specially prepared for the holiday, celebrating with loved ones, celebrating the most important religious holiday of their faith, a holy day commemorating the triumph of good over evil, compassion over intolerance, wisdom over violence, love over torture, hope over despair, life over death—Jesus Christ risen from a battered, broken, and bleeding body.

A welling up of hope in a world falling daily to new depths of violence.
Into this affirmation of life, Muslim extremists carried bombs.

70 killed. Over 300 bleeding, mutilated, scarred eternally. Mostly mothers and children. Murdered.

Because they were Christians. To the Muslims who murdered them, they were not just Christians but “those who stubbornly reject the one, the only, the final truth of Islam” and therefore deserving of death.

And we say nothing. No colors of the Pakistani flag lighting up the Eiffel tower in solidarity. No presidential speeches of sympathy and support. No cries of “Je suis Chrétien.”

Why this silence? Are we embarrassed by religion? Are we so comfortable in our secular world and safe in our assumption that the separation of church and state is shared by all people that we can see victims of terrorists acts only when they appear to us as random, generalized, secularized, “Western,” globalized? Only when terrorist attacks are perpetrated in places like theaters, nightclubs, bars, airports, and subways? Are we cowed by political correctness? Afraid of being charged with Islamophobia?

Why is it that we aren’t calling attention to the Christian faith of the innocent victims of the Lahore massacre, even though that is exactly why they were targeted, because they were Christians? Why is it that we don’t say too loudly that the people attacked in the kosher grocery store in Paris were targeted because they were Jews? Is it because as good post-Enlightenment people we don’t think religion should matter? Does matter? Because, confident that we’ve put all the religious wars of the past behind us, and besotted with economic and sociological theories for all action on the world stage, we don’t recognize the power of religious faith to motivate people?

Why are we not saying that these “terrorists,” these “suicide bombers,” these “evil-doers,” these “radicals,” these “extremists” are Muslims? To say this is not Islamophobia. To say this is not to say all Muslims are terrorists or that Islam is, in essence, a religion of violence. Quite the contrary. Throughout my professional and personal life, I have been a strong critic of Christianity’s abuse of power and its use of violence, and also of Jewish extremism and violence, while maintaining respect, appreciation, and admiration for both these faith traditions and their followers. Should I keep silent about violence in Islam for fear I might be misunderstood?

Let’s call the attack in the Lahore park on Easter Sunday what it is: a religious massacre, an unholy slaughter of God’s children in the name of God.

I am a Jew. But today, Easter Monday, Je suis Chrétienne.

[written on Easter Monday, 2016]