Joel Edwards of the Evangelical Alliance has some sane things to say here about the violent controversy over the Danish cartoons of Muhammad:
Respect is what you say about me – third of four lectures
True respect, says Edwards, is based for Christians on the notion that all humans are made in the image of God.
I would go on to say that a Christian response would therefore be alarmed when satire crosses the line into abuse and deliberate insult. There is much talk of freedom of speech, but what is freedom in a Christian sense? It is not freedom to do or say what I please: we are set free to do what is right. As such, freedom is not autonomous. And in this sense we should be critical of secular European liberal values. (And it’s curious to see American Christian commentators adopting these values so uncritically.)
But by the same token Christians should be equally alarmed by the violent overtones of the more militant protests. There is no sense of respect there. Nor indeed is there in parts of the Muslim world where it is apparently perfectly acceptable to draw cartoons depicting all Americans as paedophiles. I welcome the more moderate Muslim protests, but even then they would gain more credibility if they condemned not only the violent protests but also the vicious caricatures perpetrated in Muslim cartoons.
Does either side come out of this well?
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