The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam (19 page)

She picked me up at my hotel the next day and took me to their home, a dark, high-ceilinged place built by the British. As the redheaded boys wrestled in a corner of the living room, she offered me tea and chocolates. Her pale, tall husband explained that they were
missionaries who belonged to the Assemblies of God, the largest Pentecostal church in the world. He had grown up as a Pentecostal MK, or “missionary kid,” in East Africa, and had attended a Christian college in Missouri, where he’d met his wife.

“We love the Sudanese so much, it’s our driving passion to have as many as we can in heaven,” she said, and he agreed. “I felt this call to Sudan. I
love the Muslim people. In the Arab world there are so many millions who haven’t heard the word.” Here in Sudan, Christianity dated back to the first few years following Jesus’s death and resurrection, he explained, recounting the story of the royal eunuch’s baptism and his return to evangelize North Africa.

“It didn’t take,” he said ruefully. In 1964, less than a decade after independence, the
northern-led Muslim government expelled the remaining missionaries from the country. That didn’t really stop evangelization, however. “Since 1964, through creative ways, missionaries have been coming to Sudan.” To this couple, these creative ways have included teaching English and offering basic computer classes to Khartoum’s working-class Muslims.

“Our desire is to have a place ladies can feel
comfortable and that can be a blessing to them,” the husband said. In a male-dominated Arab culture, where many young women had to be escorted almost everywhere by one male relative or another, an all-female café was a radical idea. Although some might argue that the couple were creating conditions conducive to reaching the women for their own purpose of evangelizing, they saw their café as a form
of cultural empowerment—and, quite simply, as a pleasant place to be. “We’re also looking for treadmills and a real cappuccino machine,” his wife added. I found it difficult to fathom how it could be worth evangelizing a woman who could be killed by her family for converting to Christianity. For nonbelievers, this was hard to understand, her husband said, but not for those who had the confidence
of faith. For them, the effort of conversion was an act of love and service
designed to help others reach heaven, or at least to have a chance at heaven. In their eyes, they were simply providing a doorway; whether to walk through or turn away was an individual’s choice.

“We love Jesus very much and we want others to know that love as well. We don’t ram that down anyone’s throats,” he said, with
the gentle matter-of-factness of one used to explaining his beliefs.

“How many people have you saved?” I asked.

“None,” he answered.

Franklin Graham held a final prayer meeting with Sudanese Christian leaders before piloting his plane from Khartoum back to Boone, North Carolina. These leaders represented an array of denominations—from Roman Catholics, to Anglicans, to charismatic Protestant
revivalists. Many were black southern Sudanese who had lost everything but their lives while leading their people on an exodus from the battlefields of the south to the relative safety of the Khartoum slums. This was the paradox: the two million southerners living in the north were safer in exile than they were at home. In the guesthouse parlor, these Sudanese Christians beamed as they prayed with
Graham. After all, they had survived. And although few bought into Khartoum’s invitation to Graham as anything more than an act of political self-preservation, they were still pleased to meet this famous American pastor. After so much persecution, they saw his visit as a sign that America and President Bush had not forgotten them. Yet politics fell quickly by the wayside. This was a religious experience:
reliving the suffering of the first Christians, who died as minority believers at risk in a hostile land. Many of the pastors saw Graham as a hero for trying to protect fellow Christians from an Islamic onslaught. He seemed to see himself in terms of his heroes Livingstone and Gordon, furthering the work of the Great Commission.

In the hallway a few minutes later, Ken Isaacs, Graham’s second-in-command—a
tall, hard-jawed North Carolinian who would go on to head the Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance under President Bush—approached me and asked, “What’s your background?” Originally, I came from Philadelphia, I told him. “That’s not what I meant,” he said. Was I a believer or not? Salvation was absolute. Saved or damned. There was no in-between. Which was I?

To me, the question required
a more complex answer. I was raised as
the daughter of an Episcopal priest, and I grew up in a rectory in suburban Philadelphia during the seventies and eighties—a particularly progressive moment for the church. Worship included Passover Seders,
Jesus Christ Superstar,
and doing the Crop Hunger Walk, as well as gathering around an altar and eating homemade organic wheat bread at the Eucharist.
This was the bustling, clamorous world of public religion. Talking and listening to God involved a quiet conversation, and words, I was sure, were the way to reach his ear. For me as a six-year-old girl, going out to play often meant sneaking next door to the dark, cool church. I learned to read by standing at the pulpit and practicing the Bible’s cadences out over the empty pews. I saw the Bible—sitting
open on the brass lectern, a red satin ribbon marking the page—as a book of spells, one whose extravagant metaphors, whose terrible and powerful parables were ways to call God down to earth. In college fifteen years later, I read the work of the twentieth-century Romanian historian and theologian Mircea Eliade. When I came across his concept of hierophany—the spaces where the sacred and secular
worlds meet and people’s attempt to create them through ceremony—I understood what I had been up to as a child.

At Sunday school, a boy my age once asked me if my father was God. “No, he’s God’s best friend,” I replied. I saw my loving, distant, distractible father caught between two worlds. One was a place of worldly decisions and unexpected telephone calls; once I watched him rip the rectory’s
black rotary phone right off the wall. The other was a sacred realm in which he was a servant, not a leader. When I was twelve, he was elected the Episcopal bishop of Chicago, and so we moved from a Philadelphia suburb to the urban shore of Lake Michigan. At his consecration—the rite in which a person formally offers himself to God as a bishop—my father, following long tradition, lay facedown
on the cathedral floor with his legs extended and arms outstretched, his body forming the shape of a cross. There was something about this act of utter surrender that terrified and angered me. What right had God, and the several thousand midwestern strangers in the pews, to demand my father’s life?

“When are they going to let Dad up?” I asked my mother. Although I feared for my father, I also
feared for myself. What did God want from us, anyway? As a teenager, I grew petrified of God’s will: What if He were to swoop down and ask me to submit also? What could faith cost me? It could cost me myself, I concluded. Frankly, I was afraid God would ask me to be a nun. My father’s uncompromising commitment to the articles
of his faith proved difficult for me to reconcile with his progressive
values and his critical intelligence. I spent those years wondering how it was that smart people could believe in God.

When I traveled with Franklin Graham to Sudan sixteen years later, my father was serving as the presiding bishop. The consecration of Gene V. Robinson had just taken place, upsetting not only African bishops such as Akinola but also conservative American evangelicals such as
Graham, with the blessing it obviously conferred on homosexuality. This was evidence to them of the lethal moral lassitude of the West, where whole churches were bent on denying God’s will as revealed by scripture.

For Graham, the contemporary confrontation with Islam was sharpening the Christian faith, giving it moral fortitude. Western sinfulness and moral slackness were weakening the faith
worldwide, and Christianity needed the West to shape up if it was going to win the fight. But for Graham, as for others, the consecration of Gene Robinson as the bishop of New Hampshire was not just a sign of weakness, a falling away from the old true faith. It was a full-on repudiation of the sexual morality that some Christian evangelicals believed set them apart from others. As such, it marked
a divide among Protestants worldwide over what it meant to be a Christian—over whether progressives or conservatives had the right to speak in the name of God. The Reverend Franklin Graham and Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold stood on opposite sides of this divide, and the gap between them was widening.

And I was the presiding bishop’s daughter. “You have thirty seconds to tell Franklin,” Isaacs
said. Graham was in the dining room eating a lunch of oxtail soup with twelve members of his entourage. In the doorway, I hesitated.

“Thirteen seconds,” Isaacs said, standing behind me. I sat down at the table and told Graham who my father was. Graham listened, then looked at me and flashed a smile: not the familiar high-watt public beam, but a private and mischievous grin. He and I were kin.
For although we were raised with very different understandings of what it meant to be a Christian, we were also fellow PKs, or “preacher’s kids”—mottled sheep who had grown up caught between religious parents and private rebellion.

But that’s where our similarity ended. As far as he was concerned, the fact that I had not accepted Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior meant I was going to
hell.

“There is no middle ground: salvation is black and white,” Graham told me. He had made this choice for Christ himself. Why hadn’t I?

I asked him to clarify. What did he mean by praying to Jesus? How was that different from praying to God? The clatter of soup spoons ceased. Graham looked at me and said, “Jesus is the only one who died for our sins. Mohammed didn’t do that. Buddha died still
searching for truth.” He quoted what I later learned was the Gospel According to John 14:6—“I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” There was only one way to be saved and to be assured a place in heaven: through faith in Jesus Christ. “If your plane crashes tomorrow,” he asked, “are you absolutely sure you’ll go to heaven?”

I thought for a moment.
“No.”

“Would you be willing to pray with me now?”

I had wondered, before coming to Sudan with Graham, if the question of prayer would arise. I had prayed with believers of all kinds—Sufis, a Sunni friend in Pakistan—so why not with Graham?

“Yes,” I told him. We proceeded upstairs and knelt together, prayed a version of the Lord’s Prayer together, and asked for the forgiveness of our sins together.

“I know you think you came to Sudan to interview me,” Graham said, as we rose. “But I believe the Lord brought you here to pray with me.”

That afternoon, vertiginous and queasy, I stood on the tarmac and watched Graham’s Gulfstream rise from Khartoum, glinting like a lure against the cloudless sky. What had I done? Had I handed over my soul to his version of God? Had I prayed to please him, or
had I broken a professional code by sharing such an intimate act with a person I was writing about? Right or wrong? Open-minded or a sucker? My mind spun; I was searching for a place to come down on one side or the other. But I could not. Meeting believers along the tenth parallel, I tried to parse their distinct identities as Muslims or Christians, northerners or southerners; but like them, I suddenly
understood, I was a compound of multiple identities, observer and questioner and believer all in one.

What about him? Was he playing me in the hope of favorable coverage? No, I decided, he was just doing what he does. For Graham, there was little difference between Nada and Shirain, the mother and child in the pediatric hospital, and me: lacking Christ the Lord, we were all lost souls. Offering
us a chance at salvation was the most loving thing he could do for us.

Yet his work was not really about us, not us as people; it was about fulfilling his own duty to God. In this, he resembled my father spread-eagled on the cathedral floor, a man who sought to give himself over to a greater power.

It was one thing to offer your own life to God, though, and quite another to offer someone else’s.
My family would not kill me for kneeling on that rug. Graham did not risk my life in the hope of saving my soul, as he did for many thousands of would-be Christians in Sudan.

Later that December, a few days before Christmas, I went to see Graham at his home and headquarters in Boone, North Carolina. On the wall of his personal office in the sprawling compound hung a framed letter from a woman
named Ada, who had sent Graham a penny and a nickel, along with a note: “Dear Franklin, I have prayed that you will receive all the money you need for your mission for God. This is all the money I have and I will pray that God will make it possible for me to mail this letter.”

I asked Graham about the human cost of evangelizing in the restricted Muslim countries of the 10/40 Window. Didn’t he
worry that trying to save people could actually kill them? In reply, he framed a dilemma. “So I keep my mouth shut,” he said, “don’t tell them about what God has done for them, keep them in spiritual darkness, they’ll live out their life, and they’ll die and go to hell. Or I tell them about God’s son, and if they receive Christ, then I know that their soul is in his hands. Now could their life come
to an end? Yes. All of our lives are going to come to an end. Some of us just a little sooner than others.”

A package from Graham awaited me when I returned to New York. Inside was the black leather-bound New King James Bible, with Jesus’s words printed in red ink. In the Gospel According to John, Graham had bracketed with a pen: “And I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; neither
shall anyone snatch them out of My hand. My Father, who has given them to Me, is greater than all; no one can snatch them out of My Father’s hand. I and My Father are one” (John 10:28–30). For much of the next seven years, I used the red-letter version Graham had sent me to look up the biblical verses Christians cited to me during my travels between the equator and the tenth parallel—some of
them, words by which they had watched their families die; others, words in which they found a license to kill—until one day, absentminded on a train from Boston to New York, I left it behind.