By now most of you have heard about the seemingly neverending saga involving atheist science blogger PZ Meyers and a communion wafer. Apparently some kid failed to eat the wafer as instructed, causing Catholic extremists to go apeshit (including the now-obligatory death threats). To underline the point, Meyers announced long in advance that he would do something VERY VERY BAD to a communion wafer. If, as Meyers surmised, activist Catholics are only a few steps removed from the radical mullahs that we are told to hate with every fiber of our being, then death threats and attempts to disrupt his job and his personal life would follow. To his credit “crunchy con” Rod Dreher saw through the trap (via):
I was thinking last night what the proper Christian response is. If you think about it, P.Z. Myers has done far more to damage himself than anything any of us might do. With his Satanic pride and diabolical act, he has put himself in serious danger of hell — and that’s far worse than any worldly sanction we might (justly) [?? — ed.] see applied to him…
But what would he do if the response to his hideous blasphemy is … love? What would he do if Catholics and other Christians, and even sympathetic members of other faiths, turned up en masse on his campus simply to pray quietly for him? What kind of witness would that be to the wider culture? How might that make straight the path to salvation for P.Z. Myers, and many who now admire him? Wouldn’t that be blessing those who persecute you, as Christ commands us to do?…
Let’s provide a counterwitness for what faithful Christianity is capable of. God may work a miracle in that man’s life yet (consider the example of Saul). Let’s not get in the way of the work of redemption in this lost man’s life. As much as we can, let’s answer hate with love…
If Dreher’s advice won the day then I think most would agree that Meyers lost his gambit. In failing to provoke the Christianist hordes Meyers would have looked like an asshole. Fortunately for Meyers’s point Dreher’s resolve didn’t last.
If we’re better than the Islamic menace it’s because we have people like PZ Meyers, not because of insecure dominionists who can’t resist expanding their parochial brief to cover believers and non-believers alike.