The Tragedy in Norway

Last week, Anders Breivik murdered 91 people in Norway while disguised as a police officer. In the days that followed, the Norwegian Prime Minister gave an amazing speech with a few nice swipes at George W Bush, and made me wish we had him instead of Bush as our President on 9/11(1).

Mr Breivik's 1500-page manifesto was released upon the internet, in which he derided "Marxists" and Muslim immigrants, as well as feminism, and lamented that conservative members of Parliament were invertebrate pragmatists.

And I sit here, for the past week, bewildered. I wondered why such a thing has not happened here. Yes, George Tiller has been murdered; earlier this week a Molotov cocktail was thrown into a Texas Planned Parenthood, but no conservative has thus far had the balls to bring the Tea Party to its logical conclusion (Gabrielle Giffords does not fall into this category because Laughner was ruled apolitical in motivation)2. Most of the conservative party in the United States can directly sympathize with Mr Breivik: They hate Islam and Marxism, and they fervently believe in a "Christian America," some of them as fervently as Mr Breivik himself believed in Christian Europe, it would seem. They even denounced Obama as a terrorist himself, and continue to question his legitimacy as President; their hatred seemingly knew no bounds.

There is a direct correlation between belief and action, and judging by the beliefs of those who listen to Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, it would seem to me that anything at all is possible.

What is also interesting to me is that Fox News is kind of playing a double game: They have been quick to emphasize the connection every other terrorist has with his respective religion (i.e. Islam), such as Faisal Shazad and the Fort Hood shooter, but here--because of the proximity of what their anchors and hosts declare to their viewers every single day to Mr Breivik's stated ideology, they are quick to de-emphasize, or even flat-out deny the connection--and they would be right. But it would only be fair to do the same for terrorists on the other side. This is duplicitous because they are denying Breivik's Christianism (more on that in a minute) while at the same time telling their viewers to think in a manner similar to him. The prospect of violence naturally makes everyone uncomfortable, so it is in their interest to deny that they could have anything in common with him in order to continue to do what they are doing and not have to take responsibility for it.

Andrew Sullivan of The Atlantic defined Christianism in an editorial for Time back in 2006 in order to differentiate Christian Conservatism from Christianity as a religion.

Christianism is an ideology, politics, an ism. The distinction between Christian and Christianist echoes the distinction we make between Muslim and Islamist. Muslims are those who follow Islam. Islamists are those who want to wield Islam as a political force and conflate state and mosque. Not all Islamists are violent. Only a tiny few are terrorists. And I should underline that the term Christianist is in no way designed to label people on the religious right as favoring any violence at all. I mean merely by the term Christianist the view that religious faith is so important that it must also have a precise political agenda. It is the belief that religion dictates politics and that politics should dictate the laws for everyone, Christian and non-Christian alike3.

Sullivan, in writing about Breivik, described him as being an example of what he means by "Christianism":

But Christianist? Breivik's picture should accompany the term in any dictionary. Christianism is all about power over others, and it has been fueled in the last decade by its mirror image, Islamism, and motivated to fury by hatred of what it sees as is true enemy, liberalism. Both Islamism and Christianism, to my mind, do not spring from real religious faith; they spring from neurosis caused by lack of faith. They are the choices of those who are panicked by the complexity and choices of modernity into a fanatical embrace of a simplistic parody of religion in order to attack what they see as their cultural and social enemies. They are not about genuine faith; they are about the instrumentality of faith as a political bludgeon4.

This "religious nihilism"--to use Karen Armstrong's term--is a last-ditch to save one's faith, to make it manifest in order to prove it to one's self after it is lost5. Religion as a political ideology is not, according to Sullivan, a manifestation of one's authentic conviction, but the inner panic of a person who lost it and has nothing else. The less one believes in a religion, the more fervent this need is for their beliefs to be made actual.

But I find this incredibly tragic, as those like myself, and others, are fully able to be genuinely good without being religious. We can only assume that he loved his religion, and it died in his heart despite how much he fought to keep it. Instead of blaming himself, or augmenting his faith with reality--as many do with great success--he blamed greater society and other people for the death of religion in his mind, ultimately killing 76 innocent people.

1) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mGBGspE8FM

2) http://www.rawstory.com/rawreplay/2011/07/dallas-area-planned-parenthood-clinic-attacked-with-molotov-cocktail/

3) http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1191826,00.html

4) http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2011/07/revisiting-christianism.html

5) Armstrong, Karen. The Battle For God: A History of Fundamentalism. Ballantine Books. (C) 2001 New York, NY.