Faithwashing (faith + whitewashing)
“Faithwashing” (faith + whitewashing) is when someone uses faith as a justification to whitewash his or her objectionable actions. “Oooh. ‘faithwashing’ (I like that)” was cited on Twitter on April 23, 2013. “Stop faithwashing the occupation” was cited on Twitter on December 23, 2013.
Sana Saeed popularized the term with her article, “An Interfaith Trojan Horse: Faithwashing Apartheid and Occupation,” published in The Islamic Monthly on July 1, 2014.
Twitter
#lastAtheist™˼
@lastAtheist
.@TheBevForce oooh. ‘faithwashing’ (I like that)
3:56 PM - 23 Apr 2013
Twitter
Labour 2 Palestine
@Lab2Palestine
@BritainIsrael @cfi_uk such a shame apartheid will prevent Christians from the West Bank from seeing them. Stop faithwashing the occupation.
8:54 AM - 23 Dec 2013
Twitter
Sana Saeed
@SanaSaeed
Faithwashing Apartheid: making the occupation & ethnic cleansing of Palestinians about religious misunderstandings.
5:04 PM - 24 Jun 2014
The Islamic Monthly
An Interfaith Trojan Horse: Faithwashing Apartheid and Occupation
JULY 1, 2014 8:15 AM
by: Sana Saeed
(...)
And this where what I will refer to as ‘Faithwashing’ comes in. Faithwashing is about changing the cause of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (or, rather, Israeli occupation and ethnic cleansing of Palestine) from a mid-20th century Euro-American settler-colonialist project (that brought anti-semitism to the Muslim world) to a non-existent centuries long enmity between Jews and Muslims.
Using religion to whitewash Israeli crimes and dilute the occupation is nothing new. It’s relatively well known that Christian (Evangelical and others) often travel to Israel to visit holy sites as well as pledge support for the state of Israel – although not really in the interest of the world’s Jewry. What’s not as well known is that these trips are often, albeit not always, funded by Zionist groups interested in propping up support for Zionism and Israeli policies.
The Post Calvin
Faithwashing
by Robert Zandstra | Jul 22, 2014
(...)
The term for this is greenwashing. Recently I’ve been thinking about faithwashing, greenwashing’s religious parallel.
The concept of religious whitewashing (and its condemnation) goes back at least to the Biblical prophetic tradition, for example Matthew 23:27: “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean.”
(...)
Faithwashing gives the veneer of purity from involvement in objectionable practices (including, for Hobby Lobby, paying for contraception in insurance plans), but systemic involvement in evil is unavoidable even for those who believe they have been cleansed by Christ to the core.
The rhetoric of faithwashing cheapens faith by reducing faith to rhetoric. I use the economic metaphor intentionally.
Boycott Muslim Leadership Initiative
Say No to Faithwashing: Boycott Muslim Leadership Initiative
January 14, 2015
We as organizations, groups, and individuals committed to Palestinian self-determination call on the Muslim community in North America to eschew any and all participation, facilitation, or any form of legitimization for the Muslim Leadership Initiative of the Shalom Hartman Institute and its representatives or advocates.
al-Araby (UK)
Faithwashing: A reflection on the Muslim Leadership Initiative
By: Sa’ed Atshan Date of publication: 7 April, 2015
Comment: The Israeli initiative to bring young Muslim-Americans to Israel is deeply troubling. It conflates Zionism with Judaism and violates the moral imperative to act against a profoundly racist state.
WIRED
OMAR MOUALLEM 12.03.15. 11:00 AM.
5 WOMEN QUASHING PRECONCEPTIONS ABOUT ISLAM ON SOCIAL MEDIA
(...)
Sana Saeed | @sanasaeed
A producer at AJ+, Al Jazeera’s all-digital, Facebook-centric channel, she coined the term “faithwashing”: when people say conflicts like Israel and Palestine’s are merely religious. Social media, she says, “allows all of us Muslim women—who veil, don’t veil, veil sometimes, veil everything, veil very little—to critique popular representations.”