RE: Your take on anti-Christian violence

[Louie Crew <lcrew@andromeda.rutgers.edu>]

Has the Anglican Communion revoked the Ninth Commandment or is the
Deputy Secretary General exempt from it?

 

Louie Crew

 

Louie Crew, Ph.D., D.D., D.D., D.H.L.

Member of Executive Council of the Episcopal Church, Chair of the
Newark Deputation

http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/rel.html

 

 

 

-----Original Message-----

From:  Byham, Kim <Kim.Byham@nypa.gov>

Sent: Wednesday, February 22, 2006 12:08 PM

To: gregory.cameron@anglicancommunion.org

Cc: executivecouncil@episcopalchurch.org;
primate@national.anglican.ca; bishop@vancouver.anglican.ca

Subject: Your take on anti-Christian violence

 

The Rev. Canon Gregory K. Cameron

Deputy Secretary General and Director of Ecumenical Affairs

The Anglican Communion Office

St Andrew's House

16 Tavistock Crescent

London

 

Dear Canon Cameron,

 

I hope that you can now better appreciate why I was so upset at the
inaccuracies in your address to the General Synod of the Anglican
Church of Canada on June 1, 2004.  In that address you said:

 

"Whatever happened in New Westminster: within days of Nigeria's
condemnation, the whole matter was eclipsed by the election of a
Bishop Co-adjutor for the Diocese of New Hampshire in the States.
These two events together caused ... enormous pain in other places -
in Pakistan, Uganda, Nigeria, and Egypt, where Christians - and not
just Anglicans, but Baptists and Copts and others - have been
publicly pilloried and physically attacked, and their homes set on
fire, and people physically assaulted."

 

I wrote you on June 8 and when I pressed you for examples, you had
none. After considerable additional correspondence you came up with a
single newspaper ad mocking the Anglican Church.  Certainly you had
and have no support for your claim that people were "physically
assaulted" or that "homes [were] set on fire" as a result of the
Canadian and American actions in support of equal rights for gay and
lesbian people.

 

Despite your concession that you had no basis for your claims you
declined to provide the Anglican Church of Canada with a correction
for your misstatement which you say, no doubt with some sincerity,
was based on what people you assumed to be reliable told you.  As I
pointed out, however, you should have used some phrase which
suggested that you were relying on reports from others, reports which
turned out to be totally without foundation.

 

Now we are seeing true violence against Christians, certainly in
Nigeria and Pakistan and possibly in Uganda and Egypt, as a result of
the European cartoons mocking the Prophet Mohammed.  Christians are
being killed and churches burnt.  This real violence makes me more
angry than ever that you felt it was necessary to rely on invented
violence where none existed.  Indeed, in your address to the Canadian
Church you seemed to suggest that the action of the Canadian and
American Churches caused the violence.  Have you personally spoken in
any public venue condemning the actions of the European cartoonists
and those who published their work?

 

I am not suggesting you should.  Their actions were tasteless and
thoughtless but were not  Christian related, except ethnically.
However, no matter how callous was the publication of the cartoons,
it cannot justify the death and destruction which has followed.  In
part, too, it is a pretext which has ignited violence which laid just
below the surface.

 

In your address to the Canadian General Synod you did not blame the
victim or the perpetrator of violence, but rather the "outside
instigators," i.e., the American and Canadian Churches.  In the case
of the cartoons, the publishers undoubtedly share some of the blame. 
The difference is that in the latter case the violence is real, not
the product of the kind of rumor mill that many of us are all too
familiar with in worldwide Anglicanism.

 

Again, I think you owe the Canadian Church an explanation and
apology. It is not too late.

 

Yours in Christ's love,

 

Kim Byham

Member of the Executive Council of the Episcopal Church