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1. Compulsion in religion
"There is no compulsion in religion," says the Qur'an. "We were forced to convert to Islam at gunpoint," says Steve Centanni, the Fox News correspondent who was kidnapped with cameraman Olaf Wiig. "Don't get me wrong here. I have the highest respect for Islam, and I learned a lot of good things about it, but it was something we felt we had to do because they had the guns, and we didn't know what the hell was going on," he said.

Hard news coverage of the forced conversion—which echoes the Jill Carroll kidnapping—has been limited. Discussion has been mostly limited to conservative columnists, op-ed writers, and bloggers. That's unfortunate, since it places the debate in a "neo-conservatives" vs. "Islamofascists" narrative instead of a larger discussion of human rights.

Perhaps the reporters already feel defensive on the subject—The New York Times, among others, took much criticism for its initial headline, "2 Kidnapped Journalists in Gaza Freed Unharmed," before it changed it to "Fox News Journalists Free After Declaring Conversion on Tape." And perhaps the wind was taken out of reporters' sails by Centanni's apparent enthusiasm for Islam (leading some to accuse him of Stockholm Syndrome) and his shrugging the conversion off as a minor inconvenience on the way to freedom.

But the compelled conversion story has moved on and grown beyond kidnapped reporters. Almost every day, of course, religious liberty watchdogs like Compass Direct and AsiaNews.it report stories of Christians forced to convert to Islam or punished for converting out of it. For whatever reason, those rarely attract mainstream news attention. But politics stories do attract mainstream news attention, so it's a wonder that few reporters have tied the forced conversions to the new Al Qaeda video calling for Bush and non-Muslims in the United States to convert to Islam or "suffer the consequences."

"If the Zionist crusader missionaries of hate and counter-Islam consultants like … the crusader-in-chief George W. Bush were to abandon their unbelief and repent and enter into the light of Islam and turn their swords against the enemies of God, it would be accepted of them and they would be our brothers in Islam," Californian Adam Yahiye Gadahn said in the video (which identified him as "Azzam the American"). "To Americans and the rest of Christendom we say, either repent (your) misguided ways and enter into the light of truth or keep your poison to yourself and suffer the consequences in this world and the next."

But, you know. No compulsion and all that.

How about some real reporting on forced conversions? Nationalist Hindus in much of India claim that Christians are "enticing" or forcing people to convert, and they have passed anti-conversion laws in four states. Indian Christians respond that the allegations are baseless, and that it's the Hindu nationalists who are forcing their religion on others, often violently so. The U.S. government's religious freedom reports tend to agree with the Christians, but some serious reporting is needed to clarify the reality.

And what can we learn about forced conversions to Islam? Some of them do "stick," but how many? How do moderate Muslims respond when conversion is professed at the point of a gun? What about Muslim political leaders? What does "moderate" Muslim evangelism look like?

And how about a historical perspective on forced Christian conversion? Does Scandinavia's current lack of enthusiasm for Christianity have anything to do with how the faith came to the country a millennium ago, with King Olaf Trygvesson's command, "Be Christian or die"?

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September (Web-only) 2006, Vol. 50