![]() ![]() I am even more tired of hearing that Christianity is inherently peaceful. The reason I bring up the Manicheans is because I am tired of hearing, from Bill Maher and from Donald Trump, that Islam is inherently violent. Augustine called for their energetic persecution. And I mean ruthlessly: Adherents of a Manichean-tinged Christianity had their goods confiscated and were put to death, even if they converted to proper Christianity but still kept in touch with their Manichean contacts. If the word “Manichean” has negative connotations today, it might be because it was deemed a heresy by the early Catholic Church, one that needed to be ruthlessly rooted out of the Christian universe. In the secular vernacular, we might call this view “Manichean,” that is, a binary between light and darkness, good and evil.īut it’s worth noting that “Manichean” was originally used to describe a religion that spread from Persia to the eastern and northern African parts of the Roman Empire in the third century, one that influenced many early Christians. This is a worldview that is shared by people who are Trump supporters and not Trump supporters. Both are inherently one thing or the other, immutable blueprints etched in stone for the behavior of their respective adherents. Christianity is tolerant and Islam intolerant. Christianity is peaceful and Islam violent. In that world, only one religion can be bad, and so Christianity is good and Islam is bad. It is zero-sum: Either guns kill people or radical Islam kills people. Speaking after “appreciating the congrats” on the Orlando shootings, Donald Trump again insisted that what mowed people down at Pulse was not an assault rifle but radical Islam, because in Trump Tower, it cannot be both.
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