Why Paris Matters

Yet again the world is in mourning for the City of Lights. First, there was the assault on the Charlie Hebdo offices by radical Islamists who killed 12 in Paris this past January. Now, on Friday the thirteenth no less, over a hundred men and women were slaughtered by those claimed by ISIS, a Muslim terrorist state with dreams of global outreach. Once again social media has erupted in support, even out in the normally Franco-phobic US and UK.

Nobody says that we should not mourn this day. How could they? People attending a concert and going to the café were gunned down or blown up for the offense of being free. Image bearers of God were butchered, all in the name of serving an imaginary God.

There have been, however, those who have offered quiet criticism of the outpouring of grief for France. Not unreasonably they ask why the world is so distraught about this tragedy when the other places are filled with many other events of equal or greater horror? Every other Facebook photo is emblazoned with the Tricolor of France within hours of this Parisian massacre when few in the West made similar symbolic tokens when terrorists attacked African or Near Eastern targets. Though not always explicit, there is the tacit accusation that the West cares less about the dark-skinned victims of Islamic terror than the fair-skinned denizens of Paris. While this is in many ways an understandable reaction, there is good reason for us all to cry, “Vive la France!”

We care more about France for the same reason we are more shaken by a loved one’s death than we are by the loss of a complete stranger. Crying over a friend’s death doesn’t mean that we think the stranger’s life didn’t matter. The stranger was just as much made in God’s image as our friend. It does means that the personal connection we have with our friend leaves a gaping hole in our hearts while the stranger’s tragedy brings us only a sympathetic sigh.

Despite our familial squabbles, France stood shoulder to shoulder with the United States and Britain against German Fascists and Russian Communists throughout the 1900s. We don’t always agree with those “cheese eating surrender monkeys,” but they have been a beacon and inspiration for human dignity and liberty since the end of the 1700s. Like anyone else their witness for freedom has been flickering at times, but French writers and thinkers have been the source of many great movements around the world for the general welfare of humanity as a whole. An attack on France is symbolically an attack on the liberty, equality, and fraternity of us all.

For Americans and those in the West in general, France is no stranger. We cannot keep their pains at an arm’s length the way we do with others. We are forced to see that in them the horror which could just as easily be ours. We share a culture heritage and mythic imagination with France in a way that we do not with others around the world. When we see terrorism in Paris or London, we are forced to see the reality of this war in the same way that a death of a loved shocks us the way a stranger’s death does not.

We are personal beings who have emotional attachments to everything our lives touch. To ask people to mourn for everyone’s death the same does not increase our humanity. It demeans it. If I were to tell you that I do not care for my own children any more than I care for a complete stranger, you would hardly compliment me on my great love for all humanity. In fact, you would wonder what kind of person could say such a thing.

Should we remember that death and destruction are unwelcome and all too common visitors to those outside the Shire of the West? By all means! We should all work to make ourselves more aware of the indignities which are tragically ordinary in our supposedly progressive age. The world is still with darkness filled, and the pain of God’s image bearers does not change by its association with us. Their deaths mattered. But, please, let us have no shaming of others for their pain for this shadow of darkness in the City of Lights. We take this attack personally because the people attacked matter to us personally. Our love of loved ones is not hatred of others.