TIME magazine has a cover story this week called "Should Christians Convert Muslims?" (Incidentally, the truthful answer to that question is, of course, "yes." Any sane American, Christian or not, ought to support such an effort. Aside from the issue of eternal destinies, the indisputable fact is that evangelical Christians do not fly passenger airliners into skyscrapers, while some Muslims do. Just for safety's sake, you're a lot better off in a room full of evangelical Christians than you are a room full of Saudi Muslims, and everybody in the world knows it.)

TIME apparently sees this packet of stories as a necessary warning to the world about the ominous specter of Christians sharing their faith in the newly liberated Iraq and other Muslim countries. As Ann Coulter so aptly pointed out a month or two ago:

Liberals learned to live with Iraqi citizens being fed into plastic shredders, summary executions, maimings and unanesthetized ear-loppings. Only now have they found something truly fiendish going on in Iraq: Christian missionaries are proselytizing!

The author of the main story, TIME's "religion" writer David Van Biema, signals where the magazine might be coming from in one of the early paragraphs:

For 21 months now, Americans have been engaged in a crash course on Islam, its geography and its followers. It is not a subject we were previously interested in, but 9/11 left no choice, and the U.S. military in two countries continues its on-the-job training in sheiks and ayatullahs, Sunni customs and Shi'ite factionalism. Yet there is one group that has been thinking—passionately—about Muslims for more than a decade. Its army is weaponless, its soldiers often unpaid, its boot camps places like the Queens classroom. It has no actual connection with the U.S. government (except possibly to unintentionally muddy America's image).

I'm curious--which part of the missionary enterprise seems to be sullying America's sterling reputation? Is it the food relief brought into areas plagued by famine and government misanthropy? Or perhaps it's those insidious deliveries of medical supplies to poor and dying people? Of course, we're well aware of the high esteem and admiration with which the United States government and people are normally viewed by repressive Islamic theocracies, and you'd have to be nuts to want to jeapordize that.

The story also includes the obligatory quotes from liberal Christian groups who believe that the missionaries should simply dole out food and shut up about Christ. A sidebar story glowingly cites a Mennonite missionary who says, "You have to realize that Christianity has been part of the Middle East for 2,000 years. People here know all about my religion and don't need me to explain it. I don't feel I have anything more to teach the Muslims than they have to teach me."

Van Biema goes on to paint the evangelicals as radical, possibly violent maniacs (though again it's worth pointing out that an evangelical Christian has never detonated himself on a bus full of people):

In 1989 Argentine-born evangelist Luis Bush pointed out that 97% of the unevangelized lived in a "window" between the 10th and 40th latitudes. This immense global slice, he explained, was disproportionately poor; the majority of its inhabitants "enslaved" by Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism and, ultimately, by Satan.

In a later paper, Bush urged Christians, "Put on the full armor of God and fight with the weapons of spiritual warfare." (He has emphasized to TIME that he did not mean military action.)

One might think that the "religion" writer for the nation's largest news magazine might have at least a passing familiarity with the Bible, the Scriptures of the largest religion in a country founded almost exclusively by adherents of that religion. One would be wrong.

Instead, Van Biema finds something potentially threatening in Luis Bush's quote, when even a superficial familiarity with the Bible would rule out anything but a non-military interpretation of that statement. Van Biema includes Bush's explanation in parentheses, indicating that while this evangelist claims that he didn't mean military action, we ought to be skeptical about his assertion. Again, the religion writer for TIME magazine apparently has such a deep understanding of evangelical Christendom that he's never heard the phrase "full armor of God," a passage from the Bible that one will hear after no more than about two minutes of exposure to any evangelical church.

TIME also helpfully points out that evangelical missionaries are also liars, since they often travel undercover to avoid being killed by opressive Islamic theocracies:

...a classroom scene at Columbia International University in South Carolina reported last year by Mother Jones magazine demonstrates an unnerving ethical elasticity. "Did Jesus ever lie?" asks a lecturer. His class replies, "No." "But did Jesus raise his hand and say, 'I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?'" Again, 20 voices call out, "No!" (The instructor confirms the quote but says that it was taken out of context.)

While it's nice to see TIME suddenly taking a stand for truth-telling, I can't recall them ever being "unnerved" at the "ethical elasticity" of, say, the Clinton family. In fact, the same magazine printed lengthy excerpts from Senator Hillary Clinton's recent memoir only two weeks ago, never once referring to her long history of prevaricating (or the failure of her written account to accord with the documented history of the events she describes) as "unnerving." Nor is there apparently anything "unnerving" about a religion that encourages its adherents to drive trucks filled with explosives into heavily-populated buildings and kills its own people who convert to other faiths.

No, TIME is "unnerved" by Christians who fail to tell Islamic customs agents "I'm here to illegally share the good news of Christ with people who are not allowed to hear it." Perhaps if it were framed as a diversity issue (since in many of these countries, one will be killed if he doesn't adhere to the one state religion, Islam), TIME would be more amenable.

Of course, the magazine grudgingly tosses a few compliments to the evangelicals. It admits that they seem to genuinely care about Muslims in the Middle East and that they are far more well-informed about Islam and its people then most Americans. But the portrait it paints of the missionary effort is mixed at best, and sinister at worst. It's interesting that in a time when most people no longer believe in absolute truth, they still believe it's absolutely true that those who do believe in absolute truth are wrong and dangerous.