Baptists warned of Islamophobia
Christians and Muslims need to recognize that they are "spiritual siblings," said speakers at a recent global Baptist congress in Hawaii, even as they warned fellow Baptists against the signs of Islamophobia displayed in Western countries.
"The vilification of Christianity by Muslim extremists in order to justify militant jihad and the need to convert an 'immoral' West to Islam is alive and well," Nabil Costa, executive director of the Lebanese Baptist Society in Beirut, Lebanon, said during the five-day Baptist World Congress that ended August 1 in Honolulu. But he went on to say that in "the same way, political and media voices in the West have used longstanding prejudice against Islam in order to paint a vile picture of a religion that is part of an 'axis of evil' and bent on the destruction of a so-called free world."
As reported by EthicsDaily.com, a Web site of the Baptist Center for Ethics, both Costa and Robert Sellers, a missions professor at the Logsdon School of Theology in Abilene, Texas, warned of a widespread demonization of Islam that has taken root in some evangelical churches.
