Nor was his evil, murderous rampage inspired by any form of Christianity, fundamentalist or otherwise.
Nevertheless, media articles repeatedly refer to him as a Christian fundamentalist. For example:
Here:
Anders Behring Breivik, the main suspect in the Norwegian bomb attacks and shootings, has been described by police as a Christian fundamentalist with right-wing views.
Here:
On the Facebook page attributed to him, he describes himself as a Christian and a conservative.
Here:
What has emerged so far paints a disturbing picture: a Christian fundamentalist with a deep hatred of multiculturalism, of the left and of Muslims, who had written disparagingly of prominent Norwegian politicians.
The enthusiasm that the mainstream media has demonstrated in identifying – misidentifying, really – Breivik’s religion is quite absent when it comes to identifying the religion of those responsible for Islamist attacks – around 16,000 since 9/11. Going by media accounts, when it comes to Islamist terrorism there is not a Muslim to be found anywhere – except among the victims.
As my wife is Norwegian, we have followed this nasty business quite closely over the last few days.
Breivik, in his manifesto, explicitly states that his “movement” is culturally Christian, rather than religiously Christian. Small comfort, but if his actions don’t put the lie to any serious claim to Christian faith, his own statements certainly do.
Certainly the BBC news I saw was careful to repeatredly
cite him as a fundamentalist Christian who was extreme right wing; when reporting jihadist attacks, of course, they never ever use the word “Muslim”, but then their bias is quite open and acknowledged. Stalin, Mao and the others, to the BBC, are never persons of “extreme left wing views”.
However, IF we insist that Islam has to take the ultimate consequence for jihadist atrocities (and also Muslims, whose responsibility it is to purge their faith of evildoers, if they claim to be the “Religion of Peace”) then I don’t think we can just deny this entirely (though we might wish to). In the end we have to accept that any religion or ideology might be able to be so totally distorted, by some, that a few of its “believers” will do bad things (atheists/secularists/”Humanists” as well, of course). We just have to emphasize that Christianity “produces” very few, by comparison.