Over two thousand years ago, Jesus used the parable of the Good Samaritan to teach the first Christians who their “neighbors” were—those they were to love as they loved themselves. The Good Samaritan did not know if the injured traveler he rescued was a thief or a murderer. He did know that the victim belonged to a group that hated Samaritans and thus could possibly do him harm. But as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. observed, the priest and the Levite who passed the victim by asked, “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?” while the Good Samaritan reversed the question: “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?” What Jesus demanded of his followers was that they envision themselves in the place of those who suffered.
Today we have to wonder how prominent “leaders” like Gov. Abbott, Senator Cruz, and Donald Trump, all of whom claim to be present-day Christians, could be applying this parable to the Syrian refugee crisis. Instead of heeding the teachings of Christ, they portray these suffering families as enemies and appeal to our worst instincts: hate and fear. Tragically, they know this tactic is politically more effective than the love Christ taught; after all, people are more easily controlled when they are afraid. They may get votes and gain power and perhaps we will even be marginally safer, but we will lose our souls.
We can’t hate, shoot and kill our way to victory over ISIS or other evil extremist groups that threaten the values of all civilized people everywhere. If all we can do to counter these groups is hate as intensely and kill as viciously as they do, then everyone loses. The world that could survive that holocaust won’t be civilized and it certainly won’t be Christian.
Ironically those who claim to make us safe actually offer the best possible gift to ISIS—grist for their propaganda mill. With their anti-Muslim hatemongering and vicious rejection of suffering children, our purported leaders are empowering the hatemongers on the other side. Undoubtedly every Dark Internet site recruiting fighters for ISIS is playing non-stop footage of Gov. Abbott, Senator Cruz and Donald Trump spouting their hate against all Muslim people. ISIS’s only hope to destroy civilized values is to prove to these potential recruits that the West intends to destroy their faith. Supposedly Christian pastors like Robert Jeffries and thugs like those who took their guns to protest at an Irving mosque give them some pretty convincing evidence, and too many of our leaders join the hate fest.
There is no mystery as to why evil people commit evil deeds; more difficult to explain is why good people sometimes follow evil leaders. Hitler who convinced Germans to sign on to the Nazi program, white supremacists who once led lynch mobs in America, Christians who executed “witches” in Salem, the “citizens court” who killed their neighbors in the Gainesville Great Hanging, and countless other tragedies in human history all share a common theme: good people committed horrible acts because they succumbed to hysterical fear. ISIS may win over good people using that same theme if our spokesmen continue to escalate the vicious cycle of fear. Surely we can learn something from tragedies of the past.
If instead of responding to human suffering with fear, what if our own leaders appealed to the “better angels of our nature” and extended a helping hand to those in need, just as Christ challenged the first generations of Christians to do? How could ISIS then convince good people that we threatened to destroy them? Again, as Dr. King taught us, “Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” And that would be a victory worth taking significant risks for.
