by The Taliban took “credit” for killing ten medical aid workers in Afghanistan on Saturday. It explained that it did so because the workers were promoting Christianity among the people whom they helped. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton responded that we “condemn the Taliban’s transparent attempt to justify the unjustifiable by making false accusations about these aid workers’ activities in Afghanistan. . . . Terror has no religion.”
There are two problems with Clinton’s reaction. First, it almost suggests that one could “justify the unjustifiable” if it was indeed true that the workers were promoting Christianity. One would hope that our government would defend the workers even if they were evangelizing. Clinton’s message almost implies the opposite. I doubt that is what she meant to communicate, but her statement would have been more forceful if she insisted that it didn’t matter what the workers were doing there.
The second problem is the casual assertion that “terror has no religion.” Perhaps not, but this act of terrorism seems to have been all about the religion. The aid workers were Christians working for a Christian organization; their killers targeted them for precisely that reason. Again, Clinton could have accurately said that acts of terrorism are not uniquely associated with one religion, but what she left unsaid is that religion does inspire terrorism. That explains this heinous action, and it also explains a host of related threats to religious freedom in troubled places such as Afghanistan.
I understand why the aid organization wants to disavow any proselytizing by its workers, but one unfortunate result has been that the media underemphasizes the role that their Christian faith has in their work. They did not just happen to be Christians. They were spending their lives working among Afghans because they were sharing Christ’s love. Whether or not they were carrying bibles, religious faith is central to the story, not peripheral.