Terrorism: Is Anders Breivik a Christian?

It came as a surprise to precisely no one, said Tom Mockaitis in the Chicago Tribune, that the man who killed 77 Norwegians in last month’s bomb-and-gun rampage turned out to be a religious fanatic. “The religion he embraced, however, shocked many.” Anders Behring Breivik, 32, is not just “100 percent Christian,” in his own words, but has explicitly stated that he committed his crimes in defense of Europe’s “Christian cultural heritage.” This news doesn’t sit well with many American Christians, said Alex Pareene in Salon.com, particularly those right-wingers who have insisted since 9/11 that terrorism and Islam are two sides of the same coin. But the facts are the facts. The latest mass-murdering zealot is emphatically one of theirs: a self-made, unapologetic “Christian terrorist.”

Secular leftists relishing the thought of a “Christian jihadist” need to check their facts, said Daniel Flynn in HumanEvents.com. Breivik’s 1,518-page manifesto includes the admission that he has no “personal relationship with Jesus Christ and God” and the explicit statement: “I’m not going to pretend I’m a very religious person.” The Christendom he speaks of restoring and defending is more a deluded vision of racial and cultural purity than anything spiritual. If nothing else, there is the minor theological detail that slaughtering civilians is rather at odds with Jesus Christ’s message of love and peace. Who cares whether Breivik considers himself a Christian? said Douglas Murray in the London Spectator. He is a “sick and deranged man.” Let’s not waste time searching for reason “in a mind that was clearly a stranger to it.”

I agree that Breivik is not a true Christian, said Andrew Sullivan in TheDailyBeast.com, but it isn’t just because he turned to violence. One of the other “core messages of Christianity is a rejection of worldly power.” Breivik, like the 9/11 hijackers and the Taliban, is obsessed with acquiring as much political and military power as possible “to control or guide the lives of others.” Just as we use the term “Islamist” to describe those angry, twisted individuals who distort Islamic teachings to justify their violent pursuit of worldly power, we should distinguish between true, peace-loving Christians and people like Anders Breivik, who would more properly be called a “Christianist.” His actions, like al Qaida’s, spring from “a simplistic parody of religion,” not “from real religious faith.”

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