Pastor Terry Jones

Photo Credit: Chip Litherland for The New York Times

What Dove Outreach Ministries’ (Pentecostal) Pastor Terry Jones fails to do is quite frankly what a lot of people fail to do: think deeper about the complexity of the social fields in which Muslims live. I say “Muslims” here because obviously we’re dealing specifically with the claims Jones is making about Islam, but it could just as easily apply to any religion or people. When asked for Jones' response to the deaths and injuries sparked in Afghanistan by his plans to burn the Qur’an he said: "We're pointing the finger at the wrong person. I haven't even done anything. I think it reveals ... the violence in Islam” (1). This kind of surface thinking utterly fails to understand the more fundamental social and economic complexities involved. This isn’t the first time Jones has gotten into trouble for his radical behaviour. In 2009 he was expelled from a church in Germany where he had demanded complete obedience from church members, preached a radical form of demonology (not that uncommon in the Pentecostal assemblies I would argue), and resulted in a number of members having to seek out therapy for the psychological damage he caused (2).

What would a Leftist critique of Jones’ statements be? Quite obviously this doesn’t come down to a matter of religion, but economics. I will not comment on the other important aspects of the social field, of which economics is a part, or on the ethnic and political aspects, which are also fundamentally important. I merely want to highlight the irony involved in Jones’ understanding of Islam. The Pentecostal church has always been known as the church of the poor. It is growing like wildfire in the global South, and churches in Africa, Asia, and South America are increasingly sending missionaries to Europe and North America to preach the gospel. What Jones has failed to analyze is the connection between poverty and violence in what he has called “Muslim” violence. In almost every instance of so-called “Muslim” violence, it has in fact been a violence of the oppressed. For example, just today “Islamic” insurgents carried out a suicide attack in Russia’s Caucasus region, killing at least 18 people. Was it politically motivated? Absolutely. What Denis Dyomkin at Reuter’s news agency astutely observes is that “The blast was a new blow to the Kremlin, which is struggling to contain a growing Islamist insurgency in the North Caucasus, a strip of impoverished, ethnically mixed provinces along predominantly Orthodox Christian Russia's southern border” (3). Jones’ own politically Rightist orientation reflects the very angst so often found to characterize other right-oriented commentators and their counterparts abroad: the fundamental opposition between rich and poor. Religion is a smokescreen Jones. Properly speaking, Islam is not "of the devil": Poverty and its self-deluded big brother, Capitalism, deserve that distinction.