{"id":438,"date":"2011-05-06T10:41:45","date_gmt":"2011-05-06T14:41:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/?p=438"},"modified":"2011-05-06T10:45:20","modified_gmt":"2011-05-06T14:45:20","slug":"on-celebrating-bin-ladens-death","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/05\/on-celebrating-bin-ladens-death.html","title":{"rendered":"On celebrating Bin Laden’s death"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>There’s been a certain amount of distress about the celebrating Americans did at news of the death of Osama Bin Laden, not least on the part of scrupulous Christians mindful of Jesus’ words in Matthew 5<\/a>:<\/p>\n

You have heard that it was said, “Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” <\/span>But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,<\/span> that you may be children of your Father in heaven…<\/span>Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Of course, as Benedict Carey reports<\/a> in today’s New York Times, “<\/em>taking revenge and glorying in it” is natural and even socially beneficial. According to University of Miami psychologist Michael McCullough, “Revenge evolved as a deterrent, to impose a cost on people who threaten a community and to reach into the heads of others who may be contemplating similar behavior.”<\/p>\n

That, however, is cold comfort to the likes of the Rev. J.C. Austin, who in an Abrahamic trialogue<\/a> at Auburn Seminary earlier this week confessed, “Christians would agree it’s normal human behavior. But our doctrine of sin makes us very suspicious of ‘normal’ human behavior; Paul says that ‘in Christ we are a new creation; the old has passed away, the new has begun.’<\/p>\n

Indeed, what Jesus had to say was clearly meant to stand in contrast to the Jewish status quo ante. After Pharaoh’s troops were drowned in the Red Sea, Moses and the Israelites sang a song<\/a> of triumph, with sister Miriam leading the women with timbrels and dancing. At the end of the Book Esther, the Jews proclaim<\/a> “a day of gladness and feasting” to commemorate the destruction of Haman and his sons. And then there’s the celebratory line<\/a> in that most beloved of all psalms: “Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies.” Eat your hearts out, enemies!<\/p>\n

The flag-waving patriotism that greeted Osama’s end may have been unseemly. But according to my segment of the Judeo-Christian tradition, the Christian perfectionist critique is not merely unnatural; it’s, well, ungodly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s been a certain amount of distress about the celebrating Americans did at news of the death of Osama Bin Laden, not least on the part of scrupulous Christians mindful of Jesus’ words in Matthew 5: You have heard that it was said, “Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But I tell you, love…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[27],"class_list":["post-438","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-osama-bin-laden"],"yoast_head":"\nOn celebrating Bin Laden's death - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/05\/on-celebrating-bin-ladens-death.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"On celebrating Bin Laden's death - 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/438","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=438"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/438\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":442,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/438\/revisions\/442"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}