Religious Minorities

Two stories that I have read in the New York Times in the last day or so speak of religious minorities.

The first from July 28 relates the horrific shooting in Knoxville Tennessee at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church. It can be read at this link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/28/us/28shooting.html?scp=1&sq=knoxville%20tennessee&st=cse. Vicki and I were in that church for Lamaze classes more than 30 years ago.

The person arrested for the shooting is from Powell, which is a small community located in the greater Knoxville area. According to news reports, he was dealing with many issues, being unemployed and losing food stamp benefits, that affected him. Yet, one of the reasons he gave for shooting people in that church is their liberal positions on issues, including their acceptance of homosexuals.

The second story was posted on the NYT website today and deals with the plight of Christians in Egypt. It can be read at: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/02/world/middleeast/02egypt.html. In the news account are details of attacks on and the fears of the Coptic Christian community in that overwhelmingly Muslim nation.

I will confess that it is hard for me to understand what it is like being part of a religious minority. While I have often held views that were out of step with many of the people around me, I am pretty much a mainstream kind of guy. Growing up, I was a member of a Southern Baptist church in Knoxville Tennessee. Southern Baptist Convention churches were everywhere in the South. Even now, as a practicing Christian, though part of a significantly smaller association of churches, the National Association of Congregational Churches, and the minister of First Congregational Church in Salt Lake City, where a majority of people are part of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, I am still part of the majority religion of Americans. I do not have to worry too much about the kind of systemic discrimination described in the story about Egyptian Christians.

The stories in the NYT led to some questions for me. If we believe that religion is a personal matter, why does it bother us so much when someone holds a position emerging out of her religious views that is contrary to ours? Why do some believe that they must "take matters into their own hands" in order to protect the truth, religiously speaking, as they see it? Has religion become just another tribal designation, and do people believe they must "do battle" against the other tribes?