Ayatollah Khomeini and Oliver Cromwell have a lot in common
– both were religious men, both were from small provincial towns, (Khomein,
Huntingdon), both despised the scent of luxury, both decided a king must die,
both led revolutions, and both were dictators.
A lot of violence
And both caused excessive amounts of violence – in the name
of God.
Over 200,000 people met an early death during the English
Civil Wars, in England and Scotland. For Ireland, the figure is over half a
million. At Drogheda and Wexford people were massacred in cold blood. A few
hundred were bunt alive in a church tower.
Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran on February 1st
1979; the executions began on February 15th. Four generals were shot
on the roof of Rafeh School, Tehran. Many more were to follow them. During
Khomeini’s reign a UN report estimates that around 7.000 were executed between
1979 – 1987; and then there were the mass executions of the milder Mojahadin
supporters in 1988, authorised by Khomeini. At least 5,000 were killed. 10,000
Kurds died in the aftermath of their uprising, perhaps a 1,000 were executed by
Khomeini’s hanging judge, Khalkhali. And around half a million Iranians died in
the Iran-Iraq war which Khomeini perpetuated. A third of the dead were aged
between 15 – 19; 3% were 14 or under.
Sickened by the slaughter of the young an old student of
Khomeini, Mehdi Haeri Yasdi, visited the author of the war.
‘He found Khomeini alone, sitting on a rug in
his garden before a small pool. He (Haeri) opened up his heavy heart to
Khomeini and asked his mentor if he could not find a way to stop the awful
slaughter…Khomeini made no sound until Haeri stopped talking. Then, without
turning his head and in even but reproachful tones, he asked, ‘Do you criticize
God when he sends an earthquake.’
Cromwell’s response to the massacres in Ireland was similar.
They were the, ‘righteous judgment on those barbarous wretches who have imbued
their hands in so much innocent blood.’
Sincere believers
It would be easy to explain all of this violence in the name
of God by saying that Cromwell and Khomeini were cynically using religion to
dupe their superstitious followers.
If only life were that simple. Cromwell and Khomeini were
both sincere believers.
In a letter to his cousin, before he was a political leader,
Cromwell wrote: ‘‘Oh,
I lived in and loved darkness and hated light; I was a chief, the chief of
sinners. That is true: I hated godliness, yet God had mercy on me. O the riches
of his mercy! Praise him for me; — pray for me, that he who hath begun a good
work would perfect it in the day of Christ’. He was clearly referring to a
conversion experience.
And in a private letter to his daughter Bridget, he wrote: ‘Let
not anything cool thy affections for Christ’. He is equally erstwhile with his
son in law. There are five volumes of his letters and papers and historians
have found nothing to suggest he was cynical about his faith.
As for Khomeini, none of his many critics have ever been
able to accuse him of religious hypocrisy. He lived as a Shia cleric. His devotion
to his faith was total - long before the revolution. As a student he would rise
before dawn for his prayers and then face an intense day of lectures and study.
His commitment can be seen in small things: when the secularist king, Reza Shah,
banned Muslim leaders from wearing clerical head-dress, Khomeini would travel
at night, rather than abandon his turban, signalling he was a cleric, and black,
because he was a Seyed (a descendent of Mohammad). In exile in Ankara, one of
his guards, Colonel Afzali, reported to his superiors that Khomeini was
‘spending most of his time…reading the Koran, praying, and eating.’ To his
Turkish hosts in exile in Bursa he seemed to be a calm, elderly man – unless
his religious scruples were crossed. His hostess, Melahat Bey, met Khomeini
wearing a normal dress, her head uncovered. Khomeini was visibly upset and
insisted that she cover her head and wear a long dress. It is hard to conclude
that Khomeini was treating his faith like a game.
The
contradiction between their faith and their violence
The tension over these two men of faith being promiscuous in
their use of political violence becomes even more tangled because their respective
religious traditions were against violence.
With Christianity this is easy to prove. Jesus refused the
way of the sword, and commanded his followers to do the same. Moreover He – and
after Him the apostles - called on all Christians to respect the governing
authorities of the day. There is no room for a New Model Army charging forth to
overthrow the emperor in the New Testament.
With Shia Islam it is not so easy because the founder of
Islam was most certainly a man of war. Hence a simple conclusion would be to
say that while Cromwell denied the teachings of his founder, Khomeini faithfully
followed in the steps of his.
Again, it’s not so simple.
For in Shia Islam there is a strong quietist tradition based
on the firm hope that the hidden Imam, Mehdi, will return. He would usher in a
reign of justice, for that was not the work of ordinary mortals. So when Shia
Islam became the national faith of Iran in the early 17th C, the
religious leaders kept away from politics, loath to challenge Mehdi’s
authority.
Ayatollah Khomeini rejected this teaching and propagated his
doctrine of Velayat-e Faqih. Here the ‘Guardianship of the Jurist’ ruled,
not a king - until Mehdi returned. This was a radical departure from the normal
teaching of Shia Islam regarding religion and the state.
Here then we have a puzzle. We have two sincere believers in
God who believe they are faithful representatives of their religions; yet they
both radically opposed the tenets of those religious traditions when it came to
politics and violence. But then they both claimed that the very religion they
are opposing was the reason for the excessive violence they used. And millions
of the adherents of these two religions supported them when they exercised
power, and still vehemently support their reputation today.
The poison of nationalism clothed in ‘manifest destiny’
Step forward nationalism, and the puzzle starts to untangle.
What dominated Cromwell and Khomeini was a fierce loathing of all that
threatened their xenophobic vision for their country. Hence Cromwell reviled
the French and their Catholicism, for, with their stooge Charles 1st,
they threatened the culture of the Protestant English. And Khomeini reviled the
West led by the Americans, for, with their stooge Mohammad Reza Shah, they were
a secular threat to Iran’s Islamic way of life. This is easy to understand.
What is troublesome, for Christians and Muslims, is that
both men clothed their revulsion to these threats in the language of their
religion. How did they both manage to convince millions of their supporters
that it was the will of God to execute kings and courtiers, to wage war, to
order mass executions?
Enter the pernicious creed of ‘manifest destiny’ which says
God has a special destiny for a particular nation. Obviously, it is easy for
the patriotic and usually racist masses to believe that they are God’s chosen
ones. So when a strong leader says it is God’s will for England to crush the
Irish, or for the Iranians to crush the Kurds, - murder gets to work.
For a Christian leader like Cromwell this preaching of
‘manifest destiny’ is that much easier because of the Old Testament paradigm where
God clearly had a special destiny for the people of Israel. Cromwell bluntly used
this in the opening paragraph of his ‘Declaration as Lord Protector’ in 1654.
That this
hath been a nation of blessings in the midst whereof so many wonders have been
brought forth by the outstretched arm of the Almighty, even to astonishment,
and wonder, who can deny? Ask we the nations of this matter and they will
testify, and indeed the dispensations of the Lord have been as if he had said,
England thou art my first-born, my delight amongst the nations, under the whole
heavens the Lord hath not dealt so with any of the people round about us.
Cromwell was the leader of a new Israel, another Joshua,
judging God’s enemies with the sword, to keep the promised land for God’s people.
This is not Christianity. Indeed, this use of the Old Testament is a mirage.
Apart from Israel there is not a whisper of evidence in the Bible that God has
any other chosen people, and now that role for Israel no longer exists. It has
been superseded by the church. There is only one chosen people, Christians from
all nations, and they are called to follow Jesus of Nazareth, not Joshua.
For Islam there is more tension for the peddlers of
‘manifest destiny’ because the whole point of Islam is that there is no special
nation, just a special language (Arabic). Khomeini moved the goal posts. He
claimed to be the leader of all Muslims, and so was committed to eradicating
all Western influence from Islamic lands. He was just starting with Iran. However,
with the revolutionary slogan, ‘Neither East nor West, Iran is best’ it is
obvious that Khomeini was encouraging vulgar nationalism.
And so, Cromwell and Khomeini, despite their religious
traditions, fuelled by crude nationalism, cloaked in the miserable creed of
‘manifest destiny’ became epicentres of political violence in their respective
eras.
And God’s name was soaked in the blood of the innocent.
Nationalism, still a threat to the churches in Britain
and Iran
The lesson for church leaders in Britain and Iran is clear:
eschew nationalism and treat the racist creed of ‘manifest destiny’ with the
contempt it deserves. Sadly though nationalism is very much a dark cloud
hanging over the Christians in these two countries.
Six out of ten British Christians supported Brexit, some
because the Cromwellian manifest destiny creed was preached. So at a national
prayer meeting before Brexit the veteran eighty plus evangelist and preacher
David Hathaway, much loved by Pentecostals and Charismatics, said this about
the European Union: ‘We have to come out’. The statement was loaded. The ‘we’
meant the Protestant Britain Christian nation had to ‘come out’ of the
corrupted (and Catholic) EU and so fulfil its divine destiny. Hathaway was not
the only preacher to draw on this anti Catholic, anti-Europe mind-set in the
run up to Brexit. Peter Horrobin, the founder of Ellel Ministries, wrote that
Brexit was a ‘massive answer to prayer’ and that ‘God had acted to set the UK
free from the external spiritual control of the EU’. It is a 17th
script, complete with illustrations, for there were all sorts of articles
explaining how various statues in Brussels were from the devil. This divisive
type of national thinking is not in the Bible. Here God only has a special plan
for the church - but such is Cromwell’s influence, this nationalism is still
etched into the mentality of many British Christians. The evil needs to be
whipped out of the UK churches as forcefully as Christ whipped out the money
changers, otherwise UK Christians could find themselves being sucked into an
epicentre of violence, as happened to Christians during Cromwell’s time.
Iran’s church is also not immune from the poison of
nationalism. Sickened by the violence and authoritarianism of Khomeini’s creed,
many Muslims in Iran have now become Christians. Indeed a reliable survey puts
the number of converts at around half a million.
Nationalism though threatens this growing church. As with
Cromwell and Khomeini, this threat again comes in the silky clothes of
‘manifest destiny’, an unhealthy assumption that God is especially interested
in Iran, rather than say the Japanese or the Bolivians. This rests on two
falsehoods. One is that because Iran is mentioned several times in the Bible, ergo,
Iran is a special nation for God. The reference to Cyrus freeing the Jews from
Babylon reinforces this idea. There is nothing of course in the Bible that says
Iran – or indeed any nation – is today ‘special’. To think that God loves one
nation more than another just because its name is in the Bible is ludicrous,
but strangely it has gained traction. The other falsehood is the dogmatic
interpretation of an obscure verse in Jeremiah 49:39 about God restoring the
fortunes of Elam. Some have hung Iran’s ‘manifest destiny’ on this verse. It is
a broken hook. Elam was never Iran. It was a completely separate nation,
conquered first by the Assyrians, then by the Medes and Persians. To make this
verse mean that God has a special plan for today’s Iran is to adopt a cavalier approach
to Scripture which, perhaps unwittingly, encourages nationalism..
While the claims for Iran’s ‘manifest destiny’ are baseless,
the appeal is vigorous and widely believed. So the focus shifts from a
Christianity where Jesus Christ and serving the poor is centre stage, to a Christianity
where Iran and her political future is centre stage. And unless the church is
robust in exorcising this emphasis, there is a danger that all the sacrifice and selfless service that
has contributed to the growth of the church in recent years will be thrown to
the dogs of nationalism.
Indeed this danger has already reared its loathsome head.
The Iranian Mojahadin, a cult like Islamic political movement, totally
committed to violence, is well aware of that the numbers of Christians in Iran
are growing. Now they want the support of Christians even though Christianity
and the Mojahadin have not a jot in common. Sadly the Mojahadin have
successfully managed to get some Christians to talk as if the two belong on the
same team. Saeed Abedini, a Christian who was in prison in Iran for his faith,
spoke in 2016 at a large Mojahadin meeting in Paris saying the cause of the
Christians and the Mojahadin were one. His argument is wholly false. There is
no call for regime change in the New Testament, indeed Christians are told to
‘honour the emperor’. And yet here was a
well-known Christian saying his cause was the same as a group who wanted to violently
overthrow an official government. Thankfully many Iranian church leaders have
publicly denounced Abedini, but here is a warning for the need to relentlessly
preach against nationalism in Iran’s new house churches. Not least because an anti-Islamic
nationalism is very much on the rise in Iran these days. In 2011 there were
less than 25,000 Zoroastrians in Iran; in 2020, 7.7% in the Gamaan survey of around
50,000 Iranians,
identified themselves as Zoroastrians. Spread that across the whole country and
it means from 25,000, the number of Zoroastrians is now over six million. It is
widely believed that the reason for this massive increase is because Iranians
associate nationalism with this ancient religion which dominated their country
before the coming of Islam. Zoroastrianism is the faith of the nationalists.
Preach Christ, not Britain or Iran
Cromwell and Khomeini belonged to very different faiths, but
they stand together on a terrain soaked in blood, both their names synonymous
with political violence. The blood-shed was primarily because of nationalism.
May British and Iranian Christians take a zealous stand
against this ugly emphasis. May they eschew all the loud claims proclaiming
this and that for their countries, and instead determine to preach Christ
crucified to the lost, minister grace and truth to believers, and to always
remember the poor, regardless of what is happening on the political canvas in London or Tehran.
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