Maybe that was his goal.
Ever since I wrote about how Beckwith has moved from being a joke to becoming a dangerous joke, I’ve heard from his followers.
They’ve sent me notes—SEVERAL OF THEM WRITTEN IN ALL CAPS—telling me how wrong I was to criticize the lieutenant governor.
(An aside: Why do some people seem to think that writing in nothing but capital letters somehow will make their arguments more compelling? It’s the equivalent of people yelling during a debate. If neither logic nor facts are on your side, screaming isn’t going to change that.)
These Beckwith camp followers have sent passages, supposedly from the Koran, that they claim provide support for his contention that Americans need to hate Muslims and that Islam is “a demonic death cult.”
At least half of the quotes they’ve sent me aren’t real—or at least they aren’t from the Koran.
(Another aside: That’s the thing about a lot of these folks. Because they never fact-check anything, they assume no one else will, either.)
The others are wrenched so far out of context that they might as well be made up.
Clearly, they were identified by people who had decided on a verdict before the investigation had even been launched. Once they decided the accused was guilty, they searched desperately—and often fraudulently—for evidence to support their ruling.
That’s the way intellectually dishonest people go about things.
They look for “facts” that support their prejudices and ignore anything and everything that might contradict their intolerant beliefs.
Every major religious text has passages that trouble both the modern age and the modern conscience.
There are other troubling parts in Christianity’s holy text.
One reason the United States had to endure one of the bloodiest civil wars in human history—a conflict so savage that one out of every four American men between the ages of 16 and 44 died between 1861 and 1865—was that Southerners could and did point to passages in the Bible that justified human slavery. Many Southerners who enslaved and exploited other human beings actually thought they occupied the moral high ground in America’s great national conflict because they could cite Scripture to buttress their position.
Critics since then have often pointed to the slaveholders’ contentions as evidence that Christianity is a religion of repression.
The fact that many of the enslaved Black Americans saw in the same Bible at the same time messages and promises of liberation and salvation does little to quiet those critics’ condemnation.
Devout Christians today push back against those aspersions regarding their faith. They argue that an entire religious tradition should not—cannot—be denigrated and dismissed just because some people with earthly axes to grind have chosen to misinterpret or misappropriate passages from their holy text.
In fact, Micah Beckwith and his amen chorus would be among the first to screech in protest that such attempts were nothing more than anti-Christian bias.
But that’s what Beckwith and his enthusiastic band of bigots are doing to Muslims. They’re trying to make a case that all Muslims are terrorists because some extremists who proclaim themselves members of the faith have used religion-based arguments to justify reprehensible acts.
That’s like arguing that Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, Olympic bomber Eric Rudolph and the Southern slaveholders represent the entire broad swath of Christianity.
If a member of another faith—if a leader in a position of authority from another faith—tried to say that about Christianity, most Christians would and should resent the insult to themselves and their faith.
We in Indiana and America are in an unfortunate period.
We have too many people in positions of power who seek not to bring out the best in us but to speak to and stir up the worst among us. They do not want to rally us to meet pressing common challenges but instead prefer to pit us against each other for their own petty purposes.
Sadly, tragically, Micah Beckwith is but one of them.
