Ask Larry Olson, DMin, Fuller Seminary.
DP Benke, rescued from oblivion by McCain-Barry, forced himself (uninvited) onto the Yankee Stadium pan-religious celebration to commemorate the innocents slaughtered on 9/11/2001. Benke gave a a generic prayer at this generic service, ran into a little flak from conservatives, and triumphed again. The conflict spawned ELDONA.
Martin Luther College's promotion of AnnMarie is worse than Yankee Stadium. The school invited her and paid her handsomely to perform, an event scheduled for September 22nd.
AnnMarie is not just a guitarist, although she is well known for her music. She earned a PhD in theology from Notre Dame and uses that credential to teach "understanding Islam" for the US government. She has published her propaganda on the Internet.
I have taught about Islam for years, drafted into teaching world religion. That assignment got me into reading thousands of pages of history. No one can summarize 14 centuries of Islam. I will offer some thoughts about why the MLC program is a disaster.
Mohammed was hated during his lifetime and there were efforts to eliminate him. After he died, a failed attempt to get rid of his reform ended in Muslim victories. Islam is a reform of Bedouin polytheism, and many customs and ideas (such as the meteorite at Mecca) predate Mohammed.
Mohammed died in 632 AD, and Islam expanded militarily until 1683, stopped outside of Vienna by a brilliant charge against the undefended Ottoman camp.
Much earlier, Islam captured Jerusalem from the Christians and precipitated the First Crusade by capturing Christian pilgrims to Jerusalem and selling them into slavery. Subsequent crusades were not successful, unless one counts the Spanish campaign to drive Muslims out of the country into North Africa. That created one dream - to recapture the days of Muslim dominance over Spain.
The great dream of Islam had been to capture Constantinople (now Istanbul, Turkey), which was a Christian empire for 11 centuries. They accomplished this on May 29, 1453, and sold their captives into slavery. Constantinople had prevented Islam's surge into Europe, which moved forward after that victory.
Ottoman Empire
The Ottoman Empire (Turkish) is the best known Muslim territory. The empire expanded in every direction and survived until WWI.
There was some religious toleration in the Ottoman Empire, but there were also rules that encouraged Christians to become Muslims.
If a Christian area was captured, the Muslim army thought nothing of forcing circumcision on all males. They also took away the sons of Christians and turned them into Janissaries, fanatical troops trained especially in military skills. A man who objected to having his son taken away was simply killed on the spot.
When Islam encountered Hinduism in its conquests, thousands of Hindu priests were slaughtered because they were pagans and deserved death. Hindu temples were destroyed. The tensions in India today date from that period. Partition after WWII caused unimaginable bloodshed, from both parties.
The most famous example of persecution by Muslims is called the Armenian Genocide. At the end of WWI, there was a systematic campaign to murder or drive out all Armenians from the Ottoman Empire (Turkey). Hitler is credited as saying that he could get away with persecuting the Jews because no one lifted a finger to help the Armenians. (The Kardashians are Armenians.)
Myths Promoted
Religious persecution is a fact, and no religion has been free from that accusation. The myth of Muslim toleration is often contrasted with carefully selected episodes of Christian behavior.
The Muslims did absorb and transmit culture, but they did not single-handedly preserve the classical culture of Greece and Rome, as some school materials claim. That kind of puffery exists only because the Greek-Christian Byzantine Empire is almost completely unknown and unstudied. Greek scholars fled Constantinople to help start the Renaissance in Europe.
The Irish also preserved classical culture - an interesting sidebar all by itself.
In fact, war and conquest are great ways to spread culture and technology, as Alexander the Great proved.
The British were seldom sensitive to local concerns while building their world-wide empire, but they left behind higher education and democracy wherever their flag flew: America, Canada, Australia, India, and a few other countries.
Reading the news from Europe (Eurabia, as it is called) - I fail to see religious toleration or the improvement of culture in those developments.
What Will WELS Do?
WELS will not even have a minor dust-up over this lecture/concert offered by a visiting female theologian. Decades of unionism have turned spines into Silly Putty.
