I am a member of a weekly zoom Sunday Sermon Discussion group through a church I am mainly only able to participate with online. One discussion we had was on Jesus as the center of our faith and hope. A part of this discussion included the seemingly pervasive infiltration of “Christian Nationalism” and mixed nationalistic/religious ideologies within many Evangelical churches and congregations – churches from which many of us in the group have left as refugees and orphans. We concluded that this infiltration has worked to diminish, and even supplant, the centrality of Jesus and His kingdom, and the teaching of, and allegiance to, His gospel of peace and love.
During the time of the discussion, I was in the process of reading “Love Thy Neighbor – A Story of War”, by Peter Maass, and I mentioned during the meeting how the war in the Balkans in the early 1990’s was driven by unbridled nationalism and attendant religious and ethnic animosities – the intolerance, mindlessness, and violence of a threatening nationalism always rooting in the toxic soil of incessantly proclaimed “us and them” worldviews, and always breathing-in and exhaling the equally poisoned air of lies, deceit, resentment, and inflaming hate. I ended my comments with how we need to guard ourselves against allowing these gospel-destroying ideologies to take root within our own hearts and minds, ideologies that constantly swirl all around us in the world, and within the churches where these Christless, political, nationalistic, and us-them ideologies and theologies of the world flourish, dutifully scripture-wrapped, voiced over with Christian double-speak, and religiously cultivated with care.
Several of the participants on the zoom asked for the name and author of the book, which I provided. However, thinking about my comments on the book in the zoom meeting over the days following our discussion, I decided I needed to send a caution about the book because of the difficult images of the war being reported on in places, and thus I wrote and sent out to the zoom group the short cautionary book review below.
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October 22, 2021
Concerning the book I spoke about on last Tuesday’s zoom: Love Thy Neighbor – A Story of War, by Peter Maass. 1996
Peter Maass, in my opinion, is an excellent writer. This book centers on his time as a journalist covering the Balkan war in Bosnia in the early 1990s for the New York Times. The author bases much of the book on his eyewitness accounts and personal experience in Bosnia during the war and it is not an easy emotional read.
The war in Bosnia, precipitated by the breakup of Yugoslavia, was essentially an ethnic cleansing campaign against the Bosnian Muslims by the Serbs and Serbian government desiring to carve out of Bosnia more land to create a “Greater Serbia”. The author writes of the brutality of the ethnic cleansing, of the desperation of individual Muslims and the Muslim enclaves and communities, of those individuals fighting to preserve their humanity, and the humanity and safety of others, amidst the carefully planned attacks and the equally deadly casual and weekend recreational actions against Muslims – men, women, and children. His interspersed analyses of the bigger backdrop of the war speaks volumes about modern powers – European and American primarily – doing nothing to contain, restrain, or stop the killing and violence because, basically, to do so, did not align with their own political and nationalistic interests. The analyses of these nations address how by their essential apathy and inaction, the powers lengthened and further darkened everything about the war, eventually producing an overwhelming and crushing weight of despair upon the journalists, a few of the political leaders and generals, and especially upon the remaining Muslim communities and people clinging to existence with hope rapidly evaporating around them.
Again, it is not an easy read, but it is forcefully informative as to the perpetual reality of the strength of emerging evil within the human heart, and the continued working of nations and powers within the world, many times careful and polite, but essentially sanctioning evil through a carefully manufactured blind-eye and a diplomacy of ceaseless double-speak – and specifically within Bosnia, lengthening and at times intensifying a war of ethnic cleansing, producing as by-product, approximately 200,000 corpses, many mangled or in pieces.
I remember listening to the confusing news reports and contradictory statements and press releases of the American government at this time. The author quoted an old ditty on this subject, “Diplomacy is to do and say / The nastiest things in the nicest way” and presented multiple examples of this polite yet morally obscene diplomatic charade publicly performed by ministers, leaders, generals, and backroom players of the double-speak powers. I, as the reader, received an image of a carefully choreographed minuet, one employing well-established and well-tested steps, and the one here perfectly danced, scoring, as usual it seems, a perfect 10 for deceit and the appeasement of evil and murderous violence.
To end, the basic caution about the book is that it is, again, not an easy read, though truth rarely is. However, I would advise that if you begin to read the book, then finish it, as the entire book and especially the ending chapters, all written about the war in Bosnia, will provide the thoughtful reader with insights and cautions concerning the very similar dangers and impulses that are present, powerful, and growing around and among us even today. We need to be vigilant. Jeremiah 9:23-24 comes to mind.
Jeremiah 9:23-24 v. 23 Thus says the Lord, “Let not a wise man boast of his wisdom, and let not the mighty man boast of his might, let not a rich man boast of his riches; v. 24 but let him who boasts boast of this, that he understands and knows Me, that I am the Lord who exercises lovingkindness, justice and righteousness on earth; for I delight in these things,” declares the Lord.
If we are rightly and fully to love our God with our whole heart, soul, and mind, and our neighbor as ourselves, we should pursue, protect, and live the things that the Lord Himself delights in.
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To view all the book reviews in the Books Read, Thoughts Upon Them subcategory, please use the link below.
Books Read, Thoughts Upon Them – Writing In The Shade Of Trees
Truth be told, current times seem to mimic the past. Will need to read this book.