Dear Zohran Mamdani and Muslims in America,

Witnessing the simply staggering hatred directed at you during the New York City Mayoral campaign, and one hundredfold now in the wake of the Mayor-Elect’s victory, as an American Christian, I wanted to apologize.

I’m sorry that the loudest voices representing my faith tradition right now seem to be the most hateful ones, the ones least like Jesus.

I’m sorry that these voices are making you feel unwelcome and unloved in this country, that they are magnifying fear, that they are causing you to experience unmerited discrimination and undeserved animosity in the places you worship and raise your families and make your livings.

I’m sorry that you are being unfairly penalized and unceasingly demonized for a handful of twisted, violent people who share little more than simply the name of your faith. (I understand a small fraction of what that is like.)

I need you to know that those angry bullies spreading ignorance and fear and bigotry and claiming to speak for Christians do not represent me, no matter how high a platform they have or how recognizable their names are or how much money they have.

They certainly don’t represent Jesus, and they don’t represent most of the Christians I know, either.

You see, we fully realize that these professed religious people are extremists as dangerous as any they point to. They are terrorists, too, only their weapons are pulpits and podcasts and Senate seats and presidential power. It’s all the same vile stuff in a different package, and it is all the enemy of Life.

There is little difference between them and those they so vehemently condemn, and we know this. We recognize contempt and malice and bitterness, even when it is camouflaged in faith and wrapped in religion, and we are having none of it, either in our name or in Jesus’.

We understand well that hatred is not the sole property of any faith tradition, and we reject the broad and damaging brush they paint you with because you deserve to be fully seen and fully heard, and fully known. We all do.

We know that so many of you, like so many of us, choose goodness and default to gentleness. We know that you, too, believe in the inherent value of all people and genuinely seek peace with those who live alongside you. We believe that you agree with us that love and compassion and kindness and mercy are universal values, and that in so many fundamental ways we are the same.

We are together in this, living shoulder to shoulder in the kindhearted middle of true Humanity, stuck wedged between warring factions who don’t realize they are so very much alike. We are all their collateral damage.

I apologize for those who are misrepresenting our Christian faith tradition and the way they have caused you such pain. I am sorry that they are perpetuating violence with every comment, every sermon, every stump speech, every social media post—and that they show little remorse and great cruelty as they do so.

But more than that, I am sorry that so many of us have been so silent in the face of it all. Most people don’t have the power or the reach or the influence that they have, but that can no longer be an excuse. We will work to do better than we have by finding the moral courage to stand against Christians who traffic in hatred.

Right now, please accept these words as a beginning; as confirmation that we are fully disgusted with our misguided brothers and sisters, that we condemn their continuing, narrow-minded, unprovoked attacks on you and your faith tradition, and that we are fully committed to finding a better response to violence than more violence.

We will not meet fear with fear.We will not respond to bigotry with more of the same.We will not be drafted into their manufactured holy war.

So until we can wrestle the microphone from those warmongers in the Church who have commandeered it, and until we can make sure that the voice of Jesus is the one most loudly representing us, please know that we are sorry.

We are called by our tradition to be forgivers, to be cheek turners, to be healers, to be peacemakers.

Many of us remember this.

Many of us desire this.

May this peace be in us.

And may this peace be with you.

P.S. And as someone on the Left, I’d also like to apologize for the vicious attacks that have come from supposed progressives. It’s equally sickening.

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