Bill O'Reilly's double standard

O'REILLY'S DOUBLE STANDARD: As if we didn't see this coming. Bill O'Reilly has, rather unsurprisingly, jumped upon his Fox News soapbox to denounce the notion that the deplorable series of attacks in Norway is the result of Christian extremism, which, by his measure, it undoubtedly was — despite his failure to admit it.

Now, on Sunday, the "New York Times" headlined "As Horrors Emerged, Norway Charges Christian extremist". A number of other news organizations like the "LA Times" and Reuters also played up the Christian angle. But Breivik is not a Christian. That's impossible. No one believing in Jesus commits mass murder. The man might have called himself a Christian on the net, but he is certainly not of that faith.

Also Breivik is not attached to any church, and in fact has criticized the Protestant belief system in general. The Christian angle came from a Norwegian policeman not from any fact finding. Once again, we can find no evidence, none, that this killer practiced Christianity in any way.

That is to say that all people of faith who have acted in a repugnant and deplorable fashion in the past have, in doing so, somehow automatically severed all ties to that faith, and can no longer be considered a part of it; that anyone who has ever acted violently in the name of religion ceases to be a member of that religion, or cannot possibly subscribe to it because the teachings of that faith forbid their actions. That, when someone acts in a despicable fashion – which contradicts the peaceful ways of that religious group – it's acceptable to, although not shrugging it off, refuse to accept responsibility: to disown it. I thought O'Reilly's remarks on the lack of an attachment to a church particularly jarring, as if to say that you have to belong to a particular denomination to be recognised as a Christian, or that you cannot present criticism toward a denomination as a Christian, and that in doing so you should cease to be recognised as one: well, I guess Martin Luther (who essentially founded Protestantism) wasn't a Christian. 

This view is actually entirely acceptable: it's okay to dismiss far-flung violence as extremism, to write it of as being something other than what the core members of a faith had intended and taught. But, surely, if you subscribe to this view, you must apply it to every other faith in the world, which O'Reilly does not, and makes this unabashedly unambiguous, albeit in the absence of complete admission. Surely, if you deride Muslim extremism and refuse to make a distinction between it and Islam itself, you cannot then simply disown Christianity's remote pockets of extremism. "The left wants you to believe that fundamentalists Christians are a threat just like crazy jihadists are." Perhaps more of an issue lies in O'Reilly's inability to draw a distinction between Christian fundamentalism – living as the Bible dictates, taking it in a wholly literal sense – and Christian extremism, to which Breivik undoubtedly subscribed, just as he struggles to make any distinction between extremism and normal practice in the Islamic sense.