The cover pamphlet on the Consultation on Evangelical Christian-Muslim Relations meeting,

By Tarek Hamdi, IOL Washington Correspondent

WASHINGTON, May 9 (IslamOnline.net) - Evangelical Christian leaders, who met in Washington Thursday, May 8, have denounced as "dangerous" and "unhelpful" the anti-Islam remarks made last year by leaders of their own movement and have proposed new guidelines for churches to follow in relating to Muslims.

While asking their colleagues to temper their public anti-Islam tirades, the 40 religious leaders attending the meeting reaffirmed their commitment to proselytizing.

In the same meeting, they castigated mainline Protestants and groups like the World Council of Churches of holding "naïve" dialogue sessions with Muslims that minimized theological and political differences”.

The meeting, convened by the National Association of Evangelicals, which represents
43,000 congregations, and the Institute on Religion and Democracy, a conservative Christian group in Washington that often critiques mainline Protestantism, came at a time when Christian leaders are deeply divided over whether their goal should be to coexist with Muslims or to convert them.

A survey, commissioned by the Web site Beliefnet (www.beliefnet.com) and the Washington-based EPPC, polled 350 members of the National Association of Evangelicals, as well as leaders of the 16-million-member Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), indicated that 77 percent said their view of Islam is "unfavorable"; 76 percent said "Islam opposes religious freedom"; and 97 percent said it is either "very important" or "somewhat important" to evangelize Muslims.

The latter point is key because evangelical Christian groups are among those lining up to provide ‘aid’ to postwar Iraq. The survey also showed that 79 percent of evangelicals do not believe that Muslims and Christians pray to the same God. Just 10 percent agreed that Islam is a "religion of peace."

Dr. Sayyid M. Syeed, secretary general of the Islamic Society of North America, told the New York Times that he welcomed the evangelicals' statements and encouragement of interfaith dialogue - even the emphasis on sharing the gospel with Muslims.

'Respect Each Other's Worldview'

"It's very dangerous to build more barriers when we're supposed to be following one who pulled the barriers down," Calver

"I don't have any problem with that because interfaith dialogue does not mean diluting the individual traditions of the different faiths," Syeed said. "All it means is that we respect each other's worldview." 

The evangelicals, especially after Sept. 11, have made a frontal attacks on Islam, Allah, Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), and Muslims.

Leaders like the Rev. Franklin Graham, the Rev. Jerry Falwell and the Rev. Jerry Vines, past president of the Southern Baptist Convention, began publicly branding Islam, or Prophet Muhammad, as inherently evil and violent.

Graham, son of the evangelist Billy Graham and head of a global missions agency, Samaritan's Purse, said last year that Islam was "a very evil and wicked religion." Vines described Prophet Muhammad as "a demon-possessed pedophile."

The evangelists’ worry was clearly that negative remarks will close doors to them in the Muslim world. The conference represented the first organized effort by fundamentalist Christian groups to rein in their rhetoric and agree on guidelines about what -- and what not -- to say about Islam.

The primary motivation, speakers made clear, is concern that remarks intended for a domestic constituency have reverberated through the Islamic world, inflamed Muslim governments, sparked riots, endangered Christian aid workers and made missionary efforts harder.

A consistent message at the four-hour session was that evangelical Christians should not sugarcoat their theological differences with Islam, but must make their dialogue more respectful.

Dr. Clive Calver, president of World Relief, the relief and development agency of the National Association of Evangelicals, told the group, "It's very dangerous to build more barriers when we're supposed to be following one who pulled the barriers down," a reference to Jesus.

"It's used to indict all Americans and used to indict all Christians," said Dr. Calver, who is British. "It obviously puts lives and livelihoods of people overseas at risk."

Jerry Falwell, who had told a CBS's "60 Minutes" interview last year that he had
concluded after reading books on Islam that "Muhammad was a terrorist," 

He also said that "in this media-sensitive world, we must be cautious that we walk a tightrope that does not allow offending others while at the same time never compromising what we believe. At the same time we cannot expect hundreds of thousands of evangelical church leaders to go silent when somebody asks what they think about any religion, just because those religions might kill their missionaries."

Ted Haggard, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, and pastor of New Life Church in Colorado Springs, cautioned, "Since we are in a global community, no doubt about it, we must temper our speech and we must communicate primarily through actions."

'Real Learning And Listening'

Egyptian-born author Mikhail Labib told the ultra-conservative Washington Timers: "On what grounds would we have dialogue with Muslims? We have to admit there's a great difference between Christianity and Islam."

None of the evangelical or Protestant leaders who were criticized attended the meeting.

Those present said that they did not want to undermine the missionary work of their fellow evangelicals and that they would soon convene a session with those they had
criticized.

Samaritan's Purse, Graham's Boone, N.C.-based relief organization, declined to send a representative to the summit. A spokesman for Graham said he was unhappy to learn about the event only through calls from reporters, but supported the evangelical leaders' call to temper the language on Islam.

Responding to the criticism in a telephone interview with New York Times, Dr. Robert Edgar, general secretary of the National Council of Churches, which represents mainline Protestants and Orthodox denominations and frequently engages in dialogue with Muslims, said: "We disagree that you can't have dialogue unless you talk about Jesus.

My belief is that dialogue is best built on relationships. People have to get to know each other, to trust each other, to like each other, and in some cases to even love each other before real learning and listening takes place."

The guidelines for churches proposed are notable for urging evangelicals, who have not made a priority of interfaith dialogue, to interact more with Muslims. But the guidelines promote a fundamentally different approach to interfaith relations than that used by mainline Protestant groups.

The evangelicals emphasize that Christians should use dialogue sessions with Muslims to "give testimony to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, because it is our duty to do so."

The guidelines also urge Christians to use dialogue to spell out the differences between Christianity and Islam, and to call Muslims to account for "the lack of religious freedom" in Muslim countries.

Alan F. H. Wisdom, vice president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, who drafted the guidelines, said that much of the dialogue that Christians carried on with
Muslims across the United States after Sept. 11, 2001, was motivated by "a genuine, perhaps naïve wish to be reassured that they don't all hate us."