Responsibility for our Religious Extremists?

William Saleton gets it exactly right. Protestors throughout the Muslim world are holding Christians in general, and U.S. government officials in particular, responsible for one tiny church’s planned burning of the Koran this Saturday to commemorate 9/11. What’s our response? We denounce the Florida church and insist that they represent neither Christianity nor the United States. We refuse to be held responsible for the acts of a small number of extremists.

Fair enough. But when a developer wants to build an Islamic center on a site two blocks away from “Ground Zero,” what do we do? Well, we ignore the fact that the act was committed by a small band of religious extremists. We then judge the entire religion by the acts of those extremists and insist that all the adherents of that religion are somehow responsible for 9/11.

I think the Pastor of that small church has done us a small, albeit unintentional, favor. He’s given us an opportunity to look into the mirror.

Joe