In the aftermath, the Lorenzes have lost their jobs. (Their church board took issue with the Lorenzes breaking the law by harboring a runaway child without notifying the proper authorities.) Her parents have lost their privacy and a great deal of their reputation. (Law enforcement investigations found the parents posed no threat to their daughter’s safety, but Bary’s anti-Islam fans still trumpet that the girl’s life was in danger.) And Bary will likely end up with a new identity as a “persecuted Christian” who escaped the clutches of Islam — a newly minted spokeswoman for the Religious Fear-mongering Right.

You wait. There’s bound to be a book or movie deal waiting in the wings. And the obligatory appearance on Oprah.

Bary, 17, fled her Columbus home last summer with the assistance of conservative Christians, who bought her a bus ticket to Orlando, where she lived for two weeks with Christian crusaders Blake and Beverly Lorenz. Several days later, the Lorenzes reported Bary’s arrival to Florida’s child protection services.

The immigrant girl from Sri Lanka has become a poster child for those Christians who believe the world is heading for a showdown between the forces of good (Christians) and the forces of evil (Muslims). Feeding on apparently false accusations that Bary’s parents will kill her for leaving her faith, rabid Christians have flocked to her cause like bears to honey.

An Ohio judge has wisely restricted the impressionable girl’s access to the Internet and her cell phone, which has led one anti-Islam nutjob to accuse the Ohio judge of enforcing Muslim sharia law.

Last month, while under foster care in Florida, Bary appeared on a telephone conference call prayer meeting, during which she manically prayed to Jesus, then abruptly stopped, leaving her handlers fellow Christians at a temporary loss for words. The conference call was scheduled to counter the sinister and cosmic influence of the Muslim Prayer Rally in Washington, D.C.

Florida’s child protection service officials have still not explained how Bary was allowed to participate in the event. The Ohio judge seems to have learned something from Florida’s cluelessness.

Bary has fallen in with an extremist set of believers, who even mainstream Christians distrust, according to the website Loonwatch. These folks variously believe that Christians — led by a “Joel’s Army” of young evangelical “soldiers” — are divinely appointed to rule the world, and that Christians must first deal with the Muslim problem. According to these kooks, Islam is a product of the devil, and Bary must be protected from the evil clutches of her parents, who by all rational accounts are loving, Americanized — and very puzzled — parents.

There are a lot of disturbing aspects to the case of Rifqa Bary, but Islam is not one of them. Her fragile understanding of her faiths (old and new), her manipulation at the hands of religious crusaders, and the unwarranted intrusion of Internet demagogues like Pam Geller are a much bigger problem.

According to Right Wing Watch, the National Day of Prayer Task Force, a Christian group, organized the conference call to counter the Muslim prayer rally in Washington, D.C., last Friday. It seems the task force was quaking in its boots about the possibility of 50,000 Muslims gathering near the Capitol Building.

(Actually, only about 3,000 showed up. They had to put up with Christian hecklers. Welcome to America.)

Part of their fears stems from their mistaken impression that President Barack Obama is secretly Muslim, and his friendly and conciliatory gestures to the world’s Muslims signal a Muslim takeover of the USA. (Incidentally, in case you missed it, the new America will also be simultaneously Marxist, communist, socialist and fascist, as well as an Islamic state. Just so we’re clear.)

From OneNewsNow.com, a wingnut website:

Associated Press says Christian leaders in last night's conference call were unconvinced the gathering will be a time for Muslims to pray together, read the Quran, and celebrate America's religious freedom -- as its organizers insist. Family Research Council president Tony Perkins wondered if the Muslims would be "praying for the well-being of our nation."

Perkins called the Muslim gathering "a wake-up call for the church" and a warning that if Christians do not "fill the void that's in this nation with the truth, it will be filled with something else."

It was Perkins and Shirley Dobson, the head of the task force, who were on the conference call with Bary I highlighted in the last post. As a presumed convert from Islam to Christianity, she was a convenient and suitable “prayer warrior” to inspire the Christians on the conference call to pray against the horrible scourge of 50,000 3,000 Muslims converging on Capitol Hill.

The poor girl is a puppet in the religious right’s campaign against Islam.

Bary was supposed to be under the protection of her foster parents in Orlando, and presumably kept separate from the church people who apparently orchestrated her trip to Florida. According to law enforcement investigations, a pastor, Brian Williams, drove her to the Greyhound bus station in Columbus, Ohio, despite Bary’s own testimony she hitchhiked there. The bus ticket was bought in Orlando under a false name by someone. Bary said she bought the ticket herself. When she arrived in Orlando, she lived in the home of Blake and Beverley Lorenz for two weeks before authorities finally removed her into foster care.

Blake Lorenz is pastor of Global Revolution Church, an independent fundamentalist church in Orlando.

This whole story makes me sick to my stomach. It smacks of fundamentalist Christians using a confused teenage girl as a figurehead for their bigoted campaign against Islam. Despite Bary’s testimony in court that she would be killed if she is sent back home, the Bary family seems to be far from the extremist Muslims the wingnuts allege they are. Her father attended a Catholic school in his native Sri Lanka, and the family attends a mosque in Columbus that is as part of the local community as the local synagogues and churches.

There are also suggestions that Bary’s understanding of honor killings is flawed, that she is parroting an incorrect definition of the practice fed to her by her captors Christian benefactors.

Right Wing Watch has more commentary about what Bary means to the fundies here.. This writer, a Muslim, has even more disturbing background about the Christian group Bary fell in with in Columbus a few years ago — the Xenos Christian Fellowship. Even Christians think Xenos is a cult, apparently.

Further background: there is a small, but influential group of conservative Christians who believe the only way Christ will come again is to convert everyone on Earth to Christianity. This motivation is what drives groups like Youth With A Mission, Campus Crusade for Christ and others, and convinces US servicemen and servicewomen to proselytize Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan — against orders. Talk to Action has a lot of information about this movement (of which Sarah Palin is part). Go visit their site and be suitably aghast.