This isn’t a sectarian site, so let me reassure the readers that I don’t intend to keep on indefinitely discussing the particulars of various Christian churches’ attitudes toward religious toleration. Indeed, there have been a few complaints that I am giving aid and comfort to some dhimmis who wish to make an argument of moral equivalence between the intolerance practiced by Christians at various points in the past, and that prescribed by Muslims always and everywhere. Guilty as charged. I think that such arguments are extremely important to address, because they strike at the heart of one of the most vexing issues in the fight against Islamic supremacism: The resistance of conservative Christians to enlist in our ranks. We needn’t spend much time wondering why we can’t win over lax, worldly leftist believers who have internalized the suicidal, anti-Western ideology of Multiculturalism (brilliantly summed up by Robert Spencer in his contribution to a new book of essays aimed at college students, Disorientation). These people have so overreacted against the vice of Anger that they have blown right past the virtue of Patience, stumbling straight into the opposing vice, Servility. It’s like fighting off Gluttony by turning into an anorexic--only here the good thing you’re trying to enjoy in moderation isn’t food, but self-respect. Modern liberal Christians have made themselves the prison-bitches of Islamic thugs, and now they congratulate themselves for turning the other butt-cheek. Perhaps, through the Stockholm Syndrome, they’ve come to enjoy it.
Such people are past persuasion. If the Ground Zero mosque is built--and some outraged 9/11 family member doesn’t get a pilot’s license and fly a private jet into the thing--these pallid Uniting Methodists will troop into the Park 51 “community center” for lectures about Sufi mysticism, and pick up paperbacks of Rumi’s verse from the hijabbed sale girls in the gift shop. When the next Islam-sponsored atrocity occurs on American soil, they will act like most Swedes, and fret about its potential for threatening “diversity.” Which is, as we all know, our strength.
No, the thing that troubles me is the slowness of solid, doctrinally serious Christians to wake up to the civilizational, existential threat posed by the presence in our midst of highly fertile, politically committed devotees of the World’s Most Intolerant Religion™. Surely, to some degree, they have simply been beaten down, by 40 years of elite and pop cultural catechesis about the evils of the Christian past. Just as Communist dupesin the West played down the brutalities of the Soviet Union--where commissars bragged about how they killed more dissenters in a single day than the Inquisition did in 300 years--so multiculturalists habitually exaggerate the crimes of the Christian West, and whitewash those of other cultures. I challenge anyone to find accounts of the Islamic conquests of the Mediterranean or the Balkans that are as candid and critical as every recent text on the conquests of Mexico or Peru.
But I think there’s something deeper going on, something internal, and that’s why I want to address the issue of just how much secularism and religious neutrality we really seek in the modern West--why I’m more than willing to take on the “moral equivalence” tar baby, and I’m sure that (unlike Bre’r Rabbit) I can lick it. Now, I do not pretend to speak for JihadWatch or the David Horowitz Freedom Center here; I am an occasional columnist, giving my own view. But it’s the view of the vast majority of Americans who are liable to ever prove reliable allies in the struggle against jihad. It may be that in the Netherlands, the fight for freedom can thrive on the efforts of terrified gays and feminists. But that’s not the constituency for resistance in America. The Americans who will fight against jihad will primarily be conservative Christians, allied to pro-Zionist Jews. If there are quasi-intellectual, sub-rational or unexamined barriers to our full engagement in this vital struggle, we need to examine and dispose of them.
What is the unacknowledged road block to our full engagement in the fight against jihad? It is, precisely, the fear that in doing so we are accepting a pig in a poke--a purely secular society governed only by a modern, relativistic and utilitarian morality, which regards our own core values with as much (or more) disdain than Muslims do. If the formal barrier to the establishment of a state church (rightly) included in the U.S. Constitution will indeed be interpreted as modern jurists seem to be reading it--as ruling out of court any legislation or activism which is grounded in Christian faith--then we cannot live with it. Such a system is ultimately intolerant of Christians, reducing us to another, subtler form of dhimmitude.
Secular or anti-religious values may be promoted, but ours may not. Atheists may act on their ethics and metaphysics, but ours are merely to be tolerated, so long as they remain our private, eccentric opinions. The nature of marriage must be redefined along purely secular, contractual lines. Public education will be lavishly funded by our taxes, but we may not grab back some of our tax money in the form of vouchers, to pass along our own values to our children. Home-schooling (often the only alternative to secular, sexually explicit education) will be restricted or outright forbidden (as it was in many states before Christians fought back). Human life itself will be defined according to the utilitarian convenience of sexually liberated secularists, to keep abortion as back-up birth control. In place of the tolerant Christianity that gave moral support to our founding and growth as a nation, multiculturalism will serve as the new state religion; racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of intolerance will be repressed as pornography once was.
If this is the nature of “the West” we are called to defend, we will indeed have little reason to stir ourselves in its defense. We will, in effect, be janissaries fighting for one sultan against another. You might as well ask us to enlist in the military to fight for the Shiites against the Sunnis. Oh wait--we’re already doing that in Iraq....
In my next and final column on this subject, I will examine the real extent of religious tolerance and neutrality compatible with the Catholic tradition, and its limits, in direct response to the persistent comments that have appeared on that subject here--inviting members of other Christian communions to offer their own informed opinions on the proper role of religious faith in a free and tolerant West.