Yesterday I began writing about religious extremism. The talking point popularized by Rosie O’Donnell on The View is that Christian extremists are just as dangerous to America as Muslim extremists. This doesn’t even pass the laugh test. Here’s how one filmmaker made this point, in An American Carol:
There’s a few arguments used to bolster these false statements.
Claim: Timothy McVeigh was a Christian extremist/terrorist.
The thought pattern is: McVeigh was the Oklahoma City bomber, he was a Christian, therefore that’s the equivalent to the terrorists that crashed planes into the world trade towers on September 11th, 2001.
However, McVeigh described himself as a theist and declared “science is my religion.” That sounds much more like our atheist or agnostic friends than our Christian ones. Further, McVeigh did not commit violence or murder in the name of Christianity. He did not declare before or after that he was killing people for the advance of Christianity.
The effects of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) are now fairly well known. If a soldier called for active duty overseas mentally snapped and started going on a shooting rampage, it would likely be blamed on PTSD, regardless of the religion of the person. If, however, they had been attempting to contact known violent leaders in a religion and shouted out before or during the violence that they were doing this for the advance of their religion, that’s a much better indicator that they’re killing in the name of their religion: Because they’re saying that they are.
That’s why the Fort Hood shooter was a religious terrorist, but McVeigh was not. McVeigh never even revealed what he actually believed, much less said that he was murdering because of that faith.
