Let’s parse. The first two statements echo the President’s call for unity and strength in the face of terrorism and unified action against ISIS. The last two raise the issue of existential fear (“Our country is at stake” and “...a lot of people in our country … hate...”) and call for action against 1) refugees from countries with a ”significant” terrorist presence (currently undefined), or 2) any refugees and/or immigrants coming across our southern border from whatever country, and 3) any and all Muslims living in neighborhoods in the US.
Candidate statements #2 and #3 stand in direct opposition to each other. One speaker calls upon us not to undermine the democratic values our nation is founded on, the other proposes that those values have already been undermined and equates upholding them with ”surrendering to the enemy”. It proposes that, instead, we surrender to fear and hatred—in more religious terms, that we surrender to what Christian scripture refers to as the ”spirit of anti-Christ."
If you think I’ve stated the case too strongly, simply do the math. The first epistle of John (1 John 4:8) tells us this: "He who does not love does not know God, for God is love.” If you believe that Christ is God, or the Son of God, or the Word of God made flesh, or the Spirit of God, then clearly you believe that love is also the Spirit of Christ.
I ask, in all seriousness: If the spirit of Christ is love, then what is the spirit of anti-Christ?
In a word, hatred. It doesn’t matter who manifests it or why. Love is as love does; hatred is as hatred does.
Is that clear enough?
So, back to our speakers’ reactions to this fresh act of terrorism, which is, itself a manifestation of hatred—a manifestation, to use Christ’s standards, of anti-Christ. Do we vanquish anti-Christ by manifesting that same spirit ourselves? By what logic?
Beyond the spiritual ramifications of surrendering to the spirit of anti-Christ or—for readers who are not religious—to hatred so strong it can cause us to undermine the very values we claim mark us as a people—there is the practical application of the measures vaguely suggested by the last two statements. To wit: What is a “Muslim neighborhood”?
In my experience, with few exceptions, Muslims do not live in ”Muslim neighborhoods”. They live in neighborhoods with Christians, Bahá’ís, Hindus, Buddhists and secularists. My family had Muslim next-door neighbors for some time. Muslim children go to my daughter’s middle school. Does that make our diverse neighborhood a Muslim neighborhood?
Closer to home, does the fact that some fringe theologies consider my faith (Bahá’í) an offshoot or heretical sect of Islam make my family one that speaker #3 proposes we should "empower law enforcement to patrol and secure” and which #4 proposes hates the rest of y’all as much as ISIS hates everybody who is not ISIS?
Does speaker #3 perhaps envision local authorities patrolling and securing any neighborhood containing a mosque or a Muslim community center? What, indeed, does ”patrol and secure” actually mean?
Let’s take the words at face value. ”Patrol” seems clear enough; law enforcement would "keep watch” in neighborhoods defined as Muslim by parties yet to be named. What would they be looking for, exactly? Gatherings? Where? In mosques? At schools? In back yards? What are they empowered to do if they see such gatherings?
What about ”secured?” What does that mean in this context? Its dictionary definition includes such words as ”closed”, ”shut”, ”locked”. Does it mean that law enforcement will encamp around neighborhoods that meet whatever definition is proposed for a ”Muslim neighborhood”? That Muslims and their non-Muslim neighbors be under siege? Will there be checkpoints? Roadblocks? Will I have to show my Bahá’í ID card to prove I’m not a Muslim? Indeed, will that dog-eared item mean anything to those securing my neighborhood?
But really, you might ask, aren’t these acceptable inconveniences in the name of Freedom?
These are, after all, neighborhoods in which speaker #4 assures us (sort of) that people ”probably and definitely” hate non-Muslims as much as ISIS does. Let’s overlook the nonsensical arrangement of words and cut to the chase: speaker #4 argues that large numbers of people with hatred as toxic as the hatred of Islamist extremists live among us in our neighborhoods. He has already said that ISIS must be taken out. After an attack on US soil, this same individual made the startling sequence of claims that the terrorists’ families and friends always knew what they were planning and that there was no way to know who those allies were, but we needed to ”take them out”, too.
Do you understand what’s being suggested here? Do you understand how it impacts your Muslim neighbors and friends? How, in the end, it impacts all of us and undermines what we repeatedly tell ourselves and the rest of the world is our national character—our soul?
If you are tempted to argue that, yes, these are acceptable safeguards to protect our Freedom, I would ask you how you define the word and suggest that perhaps it does not mean what you think it means.
In fact, I would propose that the word is meaningless if fear has taken such a stranglehold on this nation that freedom is something only some of us enjoy within our walled encampments.
These last two statements are clarion calls to surrender. Surrender to fear. Surrender to hatred. Surrender to the spirit of anti-Christ. I pray that most Americans are better, stronger, more intelligent, more good-hearted, and more clear-headed than that. In a word, more Christian—no matter what religious or non-religious label they claim.
Later in the same epistle I quoted above, John writes that "There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves torment.” (vs 18) This is torment that we do not need to endure. It is torment that we visit upon ourselves literally without reason.
Yes, speaker #3, our country is at stake.