The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam (42 page)

On another table was a stack of what looked like orange kitchen bags printed in Korean. The words were Bible verses, and the bags were balloons, millions of which had been released over the North Korean border by the
Voice of the Martyrs since the 1960s. The North Korean government reportedly orders anyone who finds these balloons to deliver them to a police station.

Robert Brock, a mission representative for the Voice of the Martyrs, took the stage, and began the conference with prayers for North Korea’s president Kim Jong Il and Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. “We work mainly in the 10/40 Window,
the bastion of communism, Islam, and Hinduism,” he said. “It’s the hardest place to work, my friends. It could cost you your life.”

Not all martyrdom happens so far away. Tom Zurowski, a baby-faced preacher in his thirties from Albion, New York, with downy blond hair and eyebrows to match, looks like a newly hatched chick. When I’d met him that morning at breakfast, he’d given off an air of clear-hearted
innocence—a wide-eyed certainty I envied. He told me that one night, when he was nineteen, he sat at the end of his bed with a hunting knife, contemplating suicide. Christ had saved his life. A recovering alcoholic and drug addict, Zurowski started Global Response Network, an organization like the Voice of the Martyrs, that “aids suffering Christians as they take up their cross and follow
Jesus.” He’d had his first encounter with martyrdom more than a decade earlier when a Christian asked him if he would die to save the life of an unborn child. He had no answer. Not long after, during a protest outside an abortion clinic, he found himself on his knees, nose to bumper with an angry motorist. Zurowski knew, then, that he was not going to move, and that he had the answer to his friend’s
question: he
was willing to die to stop abortion. Now Zurowski had made more than forty trips overseas. From the stage, he told the story of one teenage boy he met in southern Sudan—an escaped slave. As a seven-year-old, the boy had sneaked out of his master’s house to go to church. When he came home, the irate master nailed the child’s knees together and his feet to a board, telling him to “be
like your Jesus.” Zurowski showed the audience a photograph of the boy: his maimed legs looked hinged like a stork’s.

I, too, had heard such stories in Sudan, when traveling with Franklin Graham in 2003, and along the north-south border in 2008. I didn’t doubt the story, and yet the boy’s suffering—Christian or not—was one aspect of a war in which race, oil, and power played as large a role as
religion. Zurowski wasn’t wrong by definition; he was telling the story as he saw it, and was teaching others to see the war through the same absolute lenses of good versus evil, Christian versus Muslim.

The most incendiary speaker was the Reverend Mujahid el-Masih—or “warrior for Christ” in Arabic. A former Muslim, he had fled Pakistan after converting other Muslims to evangelical Christianity.
But the threats on his life had followed him here to America. Two weeks earlier, while speaking in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, he had received anonymous letters warning that if he preached, he would be murdered and the church would be bombed. He ignored the ultimatum.

“Allah is not the same God as the God of the Bible,” he said. “We don’t need bombs to destroy terrorism, we need Bibles.” Mujahid
el-Masih was echoing what I’d heard time and again from Christian leaders in Nigeria, Sudan, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines: Islam was out to dominate the world. Shortly, they warned, the confrontations along the tenth parallel would find their way to America, as they were already exploding in Europe. And they believed that in a war Muslims were waging by demographics—by having multiple
wives and many children—they would inevitably turn our democracies against us.

“Love Muslims,” al-Masih said, “but don’t trust them.”

The crowd laughed. The crux of his rousing diatribe, however, was not the fight against Islam. It was the fight against liberalism, especially liberal, or nominal, Christianity: any form that did not espouse faith in Jesus Christ as the only path to salvation.
While Muslims wandered blindly in the dark, he argued, liberals knew the truth and turned against it anyway. They were the real hypocrites, refusing to acknowledge the battle at hand,
and weakening the faith with their moral relativism. This was the struggle within Christianity over who had the right to negotiate the faith. “Political correctness is more evil than Osama bin Laden!” he shouted.

He was talking about me, an opposing member of the unfolding culture wars, although he had no idea that the enemy was sitting in the audience. Gracia knew, however, that I was not a born-again Christian, but she did not flinch, so neither did I. I looked down at my clenched hands—their nails hard-bitten and ragged—then at Gracia’s weathered ones, calm in her lap beside me, and I recalled a phrase
from childhood: “Hands to work, hearts to God.” In my parents’ house—the rectory of a parish priest and his wife—this meant “be of unending service.” That’s how my mother lived it. And her hands looked like Gracia’s—tools of devotion building homes in Honduras, ladling chili in a North Philadelphia soup kitchen, making eighty cream puff swans by herself for a ladies’ summer luncheon while the ladies
sat waiting in the garden.

Mine looked like the hands of a judge nibbling away at the cuticles while the brain churned in assessment. I, too, have found solace by living in motion. Since kneeling with Franklin Graham on a Persian rug in Khartoum five years earlier, I had stood among throngs of swaying Christians in an Indonesian Chinese restaurant, said grace in the Malaysian jungle with an aboriginal
priest, observed jihadis pray in a Jakarta vitamin shop, danced awkwardly with Sufis to an electronic steel drum in a Nigerian slum, and been serenaded by a fakir in a Mogadishu refugee camp. Worship often took the form of celebration, and for all I had seen of religion’s divisive power, for most people, their faith was, above all, about finding joy. Even in the midst of war and catastrophe,
I had watched time and again how people were able to undertake the extraordinary tasks of daily life—to keep going—based on their absolute belief in God’s Divine Plan.

When Gracia Burnham climbed onto the church stage, she seemed untouched by the provocative rhetoric of the previous speakers. “People have called Martin a martyr,” she said. “That has always bothered me.” The three-hundred-odd
nodding heads before her stopped nodding, but she continued. For Gracia, losing Martin in the jungle was not about heroic martyrdom. His death was merely something all Christians need to be prepared to do: to “give up everything for the Lord and be willing to die for him if need be,” she said. “There’s no safe or easy way to be a follower of Christ.”

She had survived her tribulation, in part
by loving her captors and
herself enough to forgive both their petty mortal failings. She’d focused on their shared humanity.

At the break, three teenage Mennonite girls approached Gracia, who was signing copies of her books. The girls wore matching gingham dresses with puffy sleeves and three-button vests. Mercy Grace, fifteen, also wore a small white veil, her dishwater blond hair pulled tightly
back under it. When she was twelve, Mercy Grace had read Elisabeth Elliot’s book
Shadow of the Almighty
, which tells the story of her husband, Jim, one of the most famous twentieth-century martyrs, killed by the Auca people when he went to Ecuador as a missionary. (I’d first heard of Elliot and seen an Auca spear in Franklin Graham’s Boone, North Carolina, home. Graham’s wife, Jane Austin, told
me the story.) Mercy Grace had been so moved by Elliot’s book that she decided to become a missionary. Now she’d fallen in love with Gracia and her account, too. So her family had piled into their car and driven from Bagdad, Kentucky, five hours away, so that Mercy Grace could attend the conference and meet Gracia. As a missionary, Mercy Grace didn’t know yet where she’d be called. “I’d like her
to go to a closed Muslim country,” her mother said, “because people have the idea that Muslims are a lost cause.” Mercy Grace did not fear martyrdom. “It would be neat!” she said, grinning widely enough to show her braces. Her mother nudged her, and she closed her mouth. “It would be a privilege,” she corrected herself.

The next morning, Gracia taught a senior citizen Bible study class at the
First Baptist Church in Mount Juliet, Tennessee. Fifteen well-coiffed ladies, some wearing sweaters decorated with hollyhocks, watched Gracia open a white plastic Voice of the Martyrs shopping bag and pull out a piece of stiff batik fabric. Using her teeth, Gracia showed the class how she’d wrapped the fabric around her waist to make a changing room, and a bathroom. “The first few times I made a
mess of it and had to wait until I got to the next river to wash it,” she said. The women looked stunned. “You’ve washed it since then,” one said. Gracia shook her head no. “If I did, it would fall apart,” she said, then demonstrated how the fabric served as a blanket, a backpack, and even, on one occasion, a stretcher for one of her captors, a fourteen-year-old Abu Sayyaf member named Ahmed who
had been injured in a firefight. They carried him wounded through the jungle in this fabric, called a
malong
. She told how she had loathed Ahmed before he was injured for hoarding food when she had none, and for throwing stones at her while she bathed—fully clothed—in the river. But she had prayed to find a way to love him, even as she and Martin slowly starved.

The last time Gracia saw Ahmed,
his mind had gone mad from infection, or simply pain. He was tied by the hands and feet to the walls of a hut, and someone had stuffed a sock in his mouth to keep him from screaming. She wondered aloud to the Bible study class where Ahmed was now—still crazy, perhaps, or pushing another hostage up another steep mountain path. Or, most likely, he had died and gone to hell.

When we left the classroom
together, she seemed more subdued, as if her bubbliness had been a mode of translation, a physical dialect that allowed the women listening to actually hear her. She could hold up her soiled
malong
, talk about blood and shit with a smile, force them to listen to the story of a boy with a gangrenous body chained to a bed. In the hallway, she told me that two of her former captors had been baptized
as born-again Christians. This heartened her. Maybe Martin’s bearing witness had made the difference in saving their souls for eternal life. When I brought up the fact that several days earlier, Abu Sayyaf had beheaded seven more hostages, Christian construction workers on the island of Jolo, Gracia’s shoulders rounded forward and her violet eyes dulled. She hadn’t heard.

“Everyone told me Abu
Sayyaf was dying out, but I knew they were wrong, because the economy in that area is so bad. There’s nothing else for the Muslims to do.” She understood the economic realities of life in the Torrid Zone’s jungles. Jihad was a “career move,” she said. The only other job besides kidnapping was fishing. And fishing required a boat.

“If they couldn’t die in jihad, their next choice was to go to
America and get a good job,” she said. The gap between the poverty she had lived through with the Muslim Filipinos and the relative wealth of the women in the First Baptist Church classroom seemed difficult for Burnham to accept, as if she didn’t want to be here among the SUVs and hollyhock sweaters. Gracia kept returning to where small things mattered more, and had even traveled to the Philippines,
in disguise. She missed the place that much. Yet her duty was to fulfill the Great Commission, and there were a multitude of souls to save here in America, she said, tactfully implying
that mine was one of them. “You know, I don’t believe that only Abu Sayyaf is going to hell.” I nodded, feeling no resentment. Perhaps this was the tender way in which she approached those young thugs, witnessing
to them in vulnerable moments when they had shed the bandanas tied over their faces, shaking from a bout of bad diarrhea, homesick.

If Franklin Graham is a warrior for his faith, then Gracia Burnham is the very thing she refused to call her husband: a martyr. She is alive, but the life she had loved the most was lost to her, and so was her husband. Wounded, she came home, accepted the suburban
house and the minivan. She wrote her books, drove the carpool, let the kids’ fast-food wrappers pile up in the backseat’s foot well. In this paler, tempered version of her once-Technicolor life, she spent her days bearing witness in a carpeted church hallway to people like me. A soul is a soul, as she saw it, and each deserved a chance at heaven.

This is what I see: my muddy green flip-flops and, a few steps ahead along the slippery hedgerow, a pair of darker-skinned feet in leather sandals. The man in front is speaking to me, but his French is hard to understand. He talks as if there’s gravel in his mouth. As we trudge along the raised dirt hump that marks the edge of a cornfield, I run my eyes along his narrow back, clad in
a white robe. A nylon backpack swings awkwardly from his prominent shoulder blades. He calls himself Reverend Abdu. I don’t know how old he is—he could be forty or sixty—and neither does he.

I am dragging myself along the tenth parallel in Nigeria, and I am nearly asleep on my sore, crusty feet. One village has begun to bleed into another, thanks to the steep angle of the light, a grueling gray
light that is the same from here to Sudan to Indonesia to the Philippines. The air is so humid it’s impossible to tell where the moisture ends and my neck’s sweat begins. The crickets drone, a tone lower than that of the endless trudge of our feet, as we go to meet people who do not want to be met—people who have left the road behind on purpose.

A child’s cry of horror goes up from within the
cornstalks, and Reverend Abdu stops walking and turns to me. The child cried out when he spotted me, the reverend explains: the people we are going to see have never seen a white person before. “They think you are the devil, because their devil is white,” he says. “They are afraid you will curse them and turn them white, too.”

Reverend Abdu lives only a few miles away from these fields, but he
is an outsider, a native of the northern, French-speaking country of Niger. Born in a village called Adunu, he began his life as Abdullah Ahmadu, a Muslim nomad. When he was a small child—perhaps five years old, he thinks—the village was visited by evangelical Christians from the Sudan
Interior Mission (founded a century earlier to bring the Gospel to “the 60 million souls of the Soudan”). As
he tells it, after hearing the message that Jesus had come to redeem the world, the villagers decided to convert en masse to Christianity, and he was born again. The notion of describing the childhood experience makes no sense to him. “I met Jesus and he saved me,” is all he will say. In 1981 he left Niger and came south to Nigeria to teach his former kinsmen, ethnic Fulani Muslim herders, about salvation
through Jesus Christ. At some point he began introducing himself as Reverend Abdu, consecrating himself with the name.