Finding God at Gunpoint

Early in the morning, you gather the family to attend worship services. You put on your best attire, hop in the car and head down the road.

Approaching an intersection, a pair of fatigue-clad individuals armed with automatic rifles signal you to stop. They size you up, ask a few questions with a foreign accent, and finally wave you past. But not before handing you a coin.

Unfortunately, this coin has no monetary value.

One side reads “Where Will You Spend Eternity?” The other side quotes John 3:16.

No, this isn’t a case of overly aggressive Jehovah’s Witnesses terrorizing the townies. It happened in Iraq.

As the McClatchy papers reported, “The U.S. military has confirmed that a Marine in Fallujah passed out coins with a Gospel verse on them to Sunni Muslims.” The Marine was removed from duty and reassigned, and the incident is currently being investigated.

Naturally, McClatchy continued, the act angered many residents who were already displeased with the US “occupiers,” who felt that the troops were now becoming “Christian missionaries.”

This isn’t good.

In no way should this be construed as a commentary on the armed forces, or even the Iraq war itself. Candidly, a college buddy was a Marine involved in the fierce early battles in Fallujah.

No, what matters here is that this Marine was an ambassador of the United States who interacted with everyday civilians.

That this happened at a military checkpoint and not a street corner is disturbing because it is the apotheosis of a “captive audience.” If someone proselytizes in an open street, you generally have the option of “tuning him out” and ambling past. You don’t have that luxury at a mandatory stop.

For now, we’ll assume it was one individual behind the engraved religious coin operation. (I may revisit the issue with a “conshpeeerashy” angle after fashioning my tin foil hat). The point is this:

Dispensing oppositional religious coins at military checkpoints was at best a misguided altruistic act, and hopefully a limited one as well. But the damage to the image and credibility of the U.S. as a “hands-off” peacekeeping force is disconcerting to any reasonable observer.

Yet here the McClatchey story is, on page A16.

Al-Qaeda’s PR wing could not have fabricated a better anecdote. This is precisely the type of catalyzing event that generates interest in the Insurgency.

Many Americans are proud of their religious tradition, and hold it dearly. But even the math (five times a day versus once a week) lends credence to the suggestion that religion plays just as large a role, if not more so, in the daily lives of many Iraqis.

My hunch is many Americans would not view Jehovah’s Witnesses in the same light if they were suddenly armed while making their conversion pitch. If, after more than five years of daily interaction, they leaned into car windows with a finger on a trigger while making a religious pitch, some people might become resentful. On the other side of the coin and on the other side of the globe, we have a lone U.S. soldier clouding his assigned mission with actions more fit for a Christian soldier during the Crusades. Let’s just hope that the residents of Fallujah are not as predisposed to violence as a solution as we seem to be.

Stories like these on page A16 go a long way in explaining why the stories on page A1 read the way they do.