It is an appropriate day—this first day of Ramadan—to call out and counter those “Christian” bigots and nativists fueling the rising number of attacks on Islam and on mosques across the nation.  Their actions are despicable, their religiosity abominable.  And the clergy who are stirring up the cauldrons of anti-Muslim hate are themselves to blame for the civic unrest and potential for violence that they seed and sow.

While these despicable attacks on Islam and on mosques stretch from coast to coast, so do counteractions by Christian and Jewish religious leaders and communities who themselves have taken to the streets in large numbers to rightly condemn the bigotry.  National Christian leaders need to step more boldly into the fray and make it clear that there is no room for anti-Islamic bigotry in the U.S.; quietness on this matter is not an option.

The attacks on Islam and on mosques are a reminder that the stain of bigotry in American Protestantism has not faded away.  Catholicism was once its primary target, and Judaism has most always topped the list, giving rise to the Klan, the Know-Nothings, and an array of ill-founded, ill-grounded “Christian” nationalist and white nationalist manifestations.  To this day it’s easy to start a heated debate anywhere in the country on the matter of whether the U.S. was founded as “a Christian nation,” or just how far the guarantee of freedom of religion really stretches.  It does not, according to the bigots, stretch to Islam, to Muslims, to mosques.

The current “Christian” fervor against Islam is theological heresy.  It is counter to the very foundations of the Christian faith, and an affront to the One who created all.  If bigotry, hatred, and hysteria is what  these “Christians”  have to offer when it comes to professing, practicing, and living their faith within the context of a religiously diverse nation, they are a lost lot.

For the past three decades the primary terrorists in the U.S. were home-grown, self-proclaimed “Christians.”  The heretical Christian Identity movement, grounded in vile and vicious racism, anti-Semitism, and deadly hate violence in the 1980s, the “Christian Patriot” militias of the 1990s, and the array of “Christian” nationalists preparing for a religious Armageddon today posed and continue to pose a greater threat to communities and country than any mosque in our midst.  Need we always be reminded that the most deadly act of domestic terrorism occurred in Oklahoma City but fifteen years ago, perpetrated by an American fanatic?

It is no small irony that last week the Taliban executed ten members of a Christian team doing medical work in Afghanistan.  While bigots would lift this tragedy up as an example of the dangers of violent Islam, it is—to the contrary—an example of how Christians might live out their faith, not condemning Islam, not proselytizing but treating others justly and willing to die doing it.

If the bigots would take time to meet their Muslim neighbors instead of protesting their presence and their right to worship where they wish, as they wish in this country, and embrace them as Children of Abraham, they might claim once again the boldness and strength of their own Christian faith.  Until then, they’re just bigots and nativists.