I’ve always dreamed of going to Marrakesh, but for this? An open space alongside the Royal Palace in Marrakesh, Morocco was transformed into a three-day “Rock ‘n’ Roll Worship Circus” that attracted thousands of young Moroccans. Most didn’t realize they were attending a Christian rock festival:
But [Salahe] Boudde [at his first-ever rock concert] had a question: “What are ‘evangelicals’?”
… More below …
At the official site for “Rock ‘n’ Roll Worship Circus,” the band members describe their origins at a small church in Longview, Wash. where “God just kind of apprehended the three of us.”
“[W]e noticed that every time we led worship,” say band members, “that lives were changed. Every time we played in these other (non-worship) bands people thought that we rocked. That’s a huge difference. So we just decided to hunker down and serve our church.”
Tomorrow’s New York Times reports:
The concert was about more than power chords for Jesus. From the evangelists’ perspective, it was an opportunity to gain a foothold in a relatively liberal Muslim country and give religious priorities a more central role into American foreign policy.
“We see ourselves as doing important foreign policy work that the Bush Administration is not doing,” said the Rev. Richard Cizik of the National Association of Evangelicals, a Christian-values lobbying group in Washington and one of the organizers of the festival.
“As followers of Jesus, we should, in our civic capacity, work to reduce conflict by promoting international understanding,” he said.
From the Moroccan government’s point of view, it was a chance to interact with what is perceived to be a politically influential group in American politics at a time when the country has been criticized on its human rights record and continues to grapple with a longstanding dispute over the status of Western Sahara.
Some media commentators in Morocco said that by befriending the evangelicals, the government was attempting to curry favor with American political leaders. The magazine Telquel said the government’s embrace of the festival was intended to “sell the image of Morocco to the neo-conservative lobby in America.”
[………………………]
For Morocco, a pressing issue is Western Sahara, former Spanish territory that has been under Moroccan control for much of the past three decades. More than 150,000 former nomads from the region, the Sahrawi, have been in refugee camps in Algeria since fleeing the invading Moroccan army in 1975. Several American evangelical groups have provided assistance to the refugees and backed calls for a referendum to resolve the region’s status. Some here say the government’s welcome to the evangelicals was an attempt to co-opt their support.
In fact, one of the evangelical leaders who was behind the Christian rock festival, the Rev. Rob Schenck, who leads the conservative Christian lobbying group Faith and Action in Washington, said that after what he had seen in his meetings with Moroccan officials he would now seek to get evangelicals to reassess their position on Western Sahara and the Sahwaris’ political leadership, the Polisario Front. “Evangelical Christians have to be extremely cautious about supporting any group that would sympathize with a socialist or Communist philosophy or world view, which is completely in conflict with an evangelical or Christian worldview,” Mr. Schenck said in an interview. He said Moroccan officials had told the evangelical leaders that the Polisario had received Cuban training and aid.
Silly Moroccans. The things they worry about:
One of the country’s main opposition parties, Istiqlal, said the evangelicals were trying to use the events as a covert means of conversion to Christianity.
