COLUMN: Sorry Kris, I do not agree

From Ronald Kim's, "The Wretched of the Earth," Fall '00 From Ronald Kim's, "The Wretched of the Earth," Fall '00I recall hearing about Jesus Week my first year here. I thought that it would be a sort of "understanding and appreciation" week for the Christian religion -- not unlike the Latino, environmental or Islam awareness weeks. On Monday, while taking advantage of the late sun to sit outside at 36th and Walnut streets, I noticed a young woman wearing a blue T-shirt with the curious slogan "i agree with kris." Despite my ignorance of undergraduate life -- typical of most grad students -- I had seen this slogan on flyers around campus for weeks. But when she turned around, I saw the words "do you?" I now understand who "kris" is (Penn running back Kris Ryan, not Jesus Christ). But like many other Penn students and community members not of evangelical Christian persuasion, I felt challenged and intimidated. At the thought of my own answer, I was imbued with a sense of defensiveness -- which, I realized, was what I was supposed to feel. The contrast with last fall's Islam Awareness Week could not be more striking. Then, Penn's not-inconsiderable Muslim community hoped to combat decades of popular ignorance by increasing awareness of Islamic cultures. In that week's special DP supplement, a friend of mine of Syrian heritage wrote an informative, humorous and non-defensive piece describing her decision to wear a hijaab, or headscarf. Yet if the blue T-shirts reflect even one component of the message of Jesus Week, they bespeak a militant, aggressive belief in the exclusive truth of Christianity. Such an attitude offers little space for debate or rational dialogue with those who disagree -- or even acceptance of their right to exist. I have experienced this personally as a non-Christian Korean American who has taken more than his share of abuse at the hands of militant Christianized coethnics. This sort of narrow-minded theocratic supremacism should be familiar to us all. It is akin to the right-wing ideology of the Christian Coalition and its allies, once again in the news with George W. Bush's refusal to disavow his sponsoring college's defamation of Roman Catholicism as "a Satanic cult." It drives preachers such as Brother Stephen and Mike Leisner, his one-day replacement last September. Leisner, who in addition to damning "sodomizers" and labeling every girl who walked by a "whore" and "fornicator," told this nominal Buddhist to go join "your Buddha" and "most of the popes" in hell. Do all participants in Jesus Week believe these things? Absolutely not. It is their refusal to disavow such offensive name-calling and arrogant pressuring that gives Jesus Week such a negative name among many observers. Some will object that religious fundamentalism is hardly unique to Christianity. But one need only think of recent instances of terror -- the bombing of the World Trade Center by Muslims, the massacre of Palestinians by a Jewish settler in Hebron or the destruction of the Ayodhya mosque in northern India by Hindus -- to recognize that religious passions have far from dissipated worldwide. To these critics, I may appear to be singling out Jesus Week for extreme beliefs that characterize religion everywhere. Yet as a Christian-dominated society that wields enormous worldwide influence, Americans have a responsibility to be aware of their own prejudices and exclusivism. At the time I first spotted a Jesus Week T-shirt, I was reading Edward Said's book Covering Islam, which describes the distortion and hysteria that dominate American media and academia in their coverage -- or "cover-up" -- of the Muslim world. The irony of Christians holding intolerant views which many glibly associate with "Islam" was not lost on Said, who bitterly deplores how America supported the murderous Christian Phalange against "those bad Moslems" during the Lebanese Civil War. Nor, on Monday, was it on me. Behind this irony lies a simple imbalance of power. Muslims, along with Eastern Christians, Hindus and Buddhists -- and even in America, Catholics and Jews -- have only a fraction of the political and economic power of the nation's Protestant elite and majority population. Penn's campus and West Philadelphia, however, have large Jewish, Muslim and Hindu -- not to mention Catholic and Eastern Orthodox -- populations. This gives Penn's evangelical Christians an excellent opportunity to explain their views to others. But they should also take advantage of this opportunity to demonstrate a willingness to coexist with those who are not about to answer Jesus Week's pointed challenge in the affirmative.