Free The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam by Eliza Griswold Page B

in the north, where he watched the persecutionof a Christian minority. He has repeatedly spoken critically about Islam and liberal Western Christians, and he was wary of my motives in asking him to comment. For Akinola, the relationship between liberal Protestants and Islam is straightforward: if Western Christians abandon conservative morals, then the global Church will be weakened in its struggle against Islam.
    “When you have this attackon Christians in Yelwa, and there are no arrests, Christians become
dhimmi
, the status within Islam that allows Christians and Jews to be seen as second-class citizens. You are subject to the Muslims. You have no rights.”
    When I asked if the men wearing name tags that read, “Christian Association of Nigeria,” had been sent to Yelwa before the massacre of Muslims, the archbishop grinned. “No comment,”he said. “No Christian would pray for violence, but it would be utterly naïve to sweep this issue of Islam under the carpet.” He went on: “I’m not out to combat anybody. I’m only doing what the Holy Spirit tells me to do. I’m living my faith, practicing and preaching that Jesus Christ is the one and only way to God, and they respect me for it. They know where we stand. I’ve said before: letno Muslim think they have the monopoly on violence.”
    Akinola was more interested in talking about the West than about Nigeria. “People are thinking that Islam is an issue in Africa and Asia, but you in the West are sitting on explosives,” he said. “What Islam failed to accomplish by the sword in the eighth century, it’s trying to do by immigration so that Muslims become citizens and demand theirrights. A Muslim man has four wives; the wives have four or five children each. This is how they turned Christians into a minority in North Africa,” he asserted.
    The archbishop believed that he and his fellow Christians living at the periphery of Muslim North Africa knew the future that awaited the West. “The West has thrown God out, and Islam is filling that vacuum for you, and now your Christianheritage is being destroyed. You people are so afraid of being accused of being Islamophobic. Consequently everyone recedes and says nothing. Over the years, Christians have been so naïve—avoiding politics, economics, and the military because they’re dirty business. The missionaries taught that. Dress in tatters. Wear your bedroom slippers. Be poor. But Christians are beginning to wake up tothe fact that money isn’t evil, the love of money is, and it isn’t wrong to have some of it. Neither is politics.”

 
     
6
MODERN SAINTS AND MARTYRS
    Standing in his pajamas at the foot of the living room stairs, the seven-year-old boy struggled to remember his father’s cell phone number. When he tipped his head up to me politely, I noticed that his mouth was scarred with white lines that lookedlike someone had sewn stitches through his lips. I was looking for his father, the Middle Belt’s Anglican archbishop. Benjamin Kwashi came up repeatedly as both a victim of religious violence and, like his boss, Peter Akinola, as an outspoken critic of the liberal West. Apparently Kwashi had forgotten our appointment on this Saturday morning in July 2006. When I arrived at the locked gate, twoferocious dogs speckled with mange bared their yellow teeth and barked. I yelled for someone to call off the dogs, but there was no answer, so I darted past them, sprinted down the driveway, and pushed open the front door. It seemed at first that no one was home, until I heard a pair of small feet thump down the stairs.
    The sound reminded me of my own feet on the back steps of a Philadelphiarectory twenty years earlier, in the days before people locked their doors in the suburbs. On Saturday mornings, with my parents out somewhere on church business, people would wander into the rectory looking for help. I was left, like this boy, to solve grown-up crises. I stood there, sorry I’d come, until the boy