The Other Side of Apologetics

I often speak in favor of nuance and finding the reasonable center of things.  Generally speaking, I think that the thing that is lacking in many of our dialogues is an inability to experience empathy and to truly walk a mile in one another's shoes.  I believe that people are generally good, but that they often buy into systems that are utterly twisted.  I believe that there is a such thing as sin, and I think it has very real power in the world, and what's worse, the power that it has is given to it by the choices of humankind.
I believe it is possible for good people to do bad things, and it is fairly common for good people to allow bad things to happen.  I also believe that there are fair number of people who have become so twisted by sin that they no longer see their violence, greed and lust for power, as being evil.
Every so often, we get a full on glimpse of these sorts of lost souls: Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Charles Manson, Osama Bin Laden, they range from garden variety sociopaths to megalomaniacs bent on genocide.
The appearance of a truly epic villain does not happen in a vacuum.  If comic books and movies have taught us anything, a villain usually has a pretty compelling back story.  A lot has been said in recent weeks, including by me, that we should not judge the global religion of Islam based on the actions of ISIS.  I'll stand by that.  I'll stand by it, because I wouldn't want to be judged as a Christian because of the acts of the Klu Klux Klan, or the Westboro Baptist Church.
But to be fair, I also think we need to examine where and how the system that produces hateful fundamentalist groups.  We can pin all of the blame on cultural circumstances: poverty, ignorance, fear of change, but you have to also acknowledge that most of those systemic problems can be ameliorated by a true religion that preaches faith, hope and love, rather than a false one that preaches, hatred, anger and fear.
There's this line in a Jethro Tull song that has always kind of stuck in my head as a Christian, "Well if Jesus saves, then he'd better save himself, or the gory glory seekers, will use his name in death."  Maybe it's the Reformed idealist in me coming out, but I think the best defense against extremism in any situation is a truly self-aware orthodoxy.  Let me explain what I mean by that: a grounded center of people who are fully aware of the strengths and weaknesses of their belief system and the culture it produces.  Christianity has this, currently it is beings staffed by the likes of Eugene Peterson, Walter Brueggeman, and N.T. Wright, but it does not just consist of big celebrity author types, it is represented by the large majority of faithful pastors and laypeople who do not buy into the madness of the lunatic fringe.  This does not stop the lunatic fringe from existing, but it keeps them for, the most part, from becoming violent.  The rise of the Nazi party in pre-WWII Germany was an instance where the center did not hold, and by the time the "good" guys got around to writing the Barmen Declaration it was already too late.
As it turns out, it was important for Christendom to take stock of it's racist and imperialist tendencies, and it took a villain as out of balance as the Nazis to make it happen.  Up until WWII it was unheard of to question the assumptions of nationalism and exceptionalism that were so central to the Nazi sales pitch.  Until it erupted across Europe and produced the apocalyptic horrors of Auschwitz, Birkenau and Sobibor, good Christian people never would have believed that a "Christian Nation" would have been capable of such atrocities.
The idea that your mission is sanctioned by God makes you dangerous, always.
ISIS currently has that idea, and no one, including the voices of their more moderate Muslim brothers, is going to convince them that they're wrong.  It's going to take a cooperative effort of all the world powers to root out ISIS, but even if we manage to defeat this villain, as the Allies defeated Hitler, unless there is some extensive soul searching to follow on the part of Islam, there will just be another one to take their place.
Islam has become a fertile breeding ground for villains.  It is not the religious aspect alone, just as it was not Christian doctrine alone that created Hitler.  It is a combination of economic and imperialistic catastrophes that have made the Arab world what it is, but the militaristic and often misunderstood teachings of Islam have certainly added a necessary and dangerous ingredient to the stew.
I am not saying that all Muslims are terrorists or villains, but very few of them are actually willing to examine the hard truths that produce things like ISIS and Al Quaida, most would prefer to just insist that "we're not like them."
This is akin to saying, "It's not my fault," it's not particularly helpful.  Global Islam has some real problems: factionalism and inter-sectarian violence, the treatment of women, the troubling imposition of Sharia law on non-Muslims, and a general backward motion in many regards that does a great disservice to the heritage of the followers of Mohammed.
I am committed to trying to examine the log in my own eye, meaning I want to constantly examine the systemic injustices that Christianity is complicit in perpetrating.  I'm not a big fan of the constant violence and imperialist activity of the "Christian" west.  Some would say, "well we can't exactly call the west Christian any more," but that's a cop out, and it's exactly the same sort of thing we decry when moderate Muslims say, "we don't like ISIS, but what can we do?"
Well, I believe in this process called sanctification, which means that we should always try to do a little better, which means we should always try to be a little more like Christ.  Being like Christ does not require a specific cultural context, or at least it shouldn't.  Being like Christ doesn't mean that everything around me needs to shape up, it means that I need to see the way things are with the eyes of a loving and merciful God.  It means I need to challenge the assumptions of the world around me, to show them "a more excellent way."  That often means pointing out what is wrong with the way things are.  It means admitting all the ways we're complicit in unjust and violent systems, it means never getting to cozy with the status quo, even, and especially, when it's working out just fine for us.