What’s religion got to do with it?

Hajj photo by Ali Mansuri (Creative Commons)

The plan of salvation also includes . . . the Muslims; these profess to hold the faith of Abraham, and together with us they adore the one, merciful God . . . (CCC, p1s2c3p4)

Today marks the ninety-first anniversary of the first apparition in the series of alleged supernatural apparitions at Fatima, Portugal in 1917, and on this day twenty-seven years ago Pope John Paul II was shot in Vatican Square by the would-be assassin Mehmet Ali Acga, a Turkish Muslim who later claimed the assassination attempt had something to do with the “third secret” of Fatima, which wasn’t released or even openly discussed much by the Vatican (in fact, no pope had ever even acknowledged the mysterious secret) until much later. The gravely wounded pontiff convalesced in the hospital for a full year, and then astonishingly his first public act on May 13th was to travel in his weakened state from Rome to the tiny village of Fatima, of all places, for the anniversary celebration of the famous apparitions at the Cova da Iria. Not coincidentally, I might add, Fatima is the name of the daughter of Mohammed, the seventh- century Arabian warlord and founder of Islam, historically the avowed enemy of the Church.

What does this have to do with anything, especially as regards defending ourselves from the global jihad? Well, that’s a fascinating (terrifying may be a better word) story if you are so inclined, but I will not elaborate on it here. In a broader sense, though, we might ask what benefit to us is a religious perspective in this ongoing war against radical Islam? I know that many of those who speak out courageously against the Islamic threat will not agree, but in my mind the short answer to that question and the question in the title of this essay is, “Quite a lot, actually.” For a long time I’ve avoided coming to this conclusion, but it’s almost inescapable, really. Admittedly some of the most illustrious voices condemning Islamic militancy and the global jihad are owned by atheists and agnostics, and all of us religionists count them as friends in opposing the Mohammedan menace. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Ibn Warraq, Ali Sina, Hugh Fitzgerald, Wafa Sultan, and many others—even the entertaining eccentric Pat Condell of YouTube fame comes to mind—are all without faith in God. It would seem that a religious perspective is effectively unnecessary in order to criticize aspects not only of Islamic law and culture, but even of Islamic theology and scripture. Indeed, when for example canonical texts and traditional doctrine call for the forced conversion, subjugation, or slaughter of unbelievers, garden-variety secular humanism is sufficient to condemn such scriptures and doctrine out of hand without pointlessly bringing God into it. In this sense and in this regard, religion has absolutely nothing to do with it.

Now it is also true that many of those actively engaged in the counter-jihad are religious persons, but as a general rule they meticulously avoid reference to their own religious beliefs. Jihad Watch director Robert Spencer, whose Catholic faith is a matter of public record, is a good example. Although some years ago he did co-author the book Inside Islam: A Guide for Catholics, he has seldom made reference to his own faith—and he has authored several best-selling books, thousands of blog posts, and hundreds of guest articles and features, so he’s had ample opportunity. I have read and am conversant with a sizable percentage of Mr. Spencer’s textual work. I’ve seen him on TV, and I’ve watched his videos on Hot Air. I’ve listened to him on the radio. I’ve blogged the Koran with him, and I’ve wasted so much time on Jihad Watch that I’ll no doubt have to answer for it on Judgment Day. But I have almost no idea what Spencer believes, theologically speaking.

What’s a Catholic? John Kerry and Nancy Pelosi are Catholics. At the other end of the spectrum Mel Gibson and his father are Catholics. A guy in Montana called Pius XIII is a Catholic. So is a former nun I know who rubs crystals and body parts with another New Age former nun, and together they loudly replace every single “He” and “Him” and “His” in the Mass liturgy with a gender-neutral substitute. So Robert Spencer is a professed Catholic, which means he’s neither an agnostic nor a Southern Baptist. Beyond that, I haven’t a clue about his religious beliefs. Now as a critic of Islam who specializes in elucidating the scriptural basis of the jihad ideology, Robert Spencer—who lets on so little about his own faith that his Muslim naysayers often presume him Jewish—has in my opinion no superior and few equals, and his preeminence in the field is secured without recourse to the moral high ground of doctrine or theology. So even for openly religious anti-jihadists, it can seem religion has nothing whatever to do with it.

To be fair, the same can be said of most prominent atheists and agnostics in the counter-jihad. As a rule they do not proselytize for or promote an atheistic perspective by railing against religion or faith in general. That is, they don’t criticize Islam by advocating their own religious (or in this case, nonreligious) beliefs, even if they think all religions are equally absurd. There are exceptions, of course, even aside from the likes of part-time Islam bashers (but full-time religion bashers) Christopher Hitchens and Pat Condell. As far as fully committed and full-time anti-jihadists go, the venerable Ali Sina of Faith Freedom International (FFI) is illustrative. Ali Sina indeed rages against religion in general, at least insofar as regularly attempting to show theism and religiosity as irrational and illogical, and oftentimes in debates with Muslims he will argue the very concept of a deity forthrightly. But he never rails against Christianity as such, nor against any other specific religion except Islam, and in fact he has explicitly confirmed the goodness of Christ, for one, in pointing up the evil barbarity of Mohammed. He and most other atheists or agnostics in the counter-jihad laugh at Rosie O’Donnell’s infamous insight that “radical Christianity,” whatever that is, is as much a threat to our way of life as radical Islam. On the contrary, they see radical Islam as an especially grave and singularly menacing threat to our survival—and not at all because of its theistic nature, but simply because of its barbarism and its inherent bellicosity. As Ali Sina says in his FFI mission statement, “We are against hate, not faith.” Or as Muslim apostate Wafa Sultan says, “Brother, I don’t care if you believe in stones, just so you don’t throw them at me.” Religion, again, has nothing to do with it.

Fact is, most of us don’t much care if others—even a billion screaming nut balls—believe in the tooth fairy, so long as the fairy isn’t trying to conquer or kill us. What concerns us about Islam is not that it’s a false religion but that it’s a supremacist ideology that has the capacity to inspire its followers to overwhelm and destroy us. That religion plays virtually no role in opposing the Islamist agenda is therefore in one respect almost certainly a factor of our common plight in the face of the global jihad. Catholics, Evangelicals, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, atheists, in fact all non-Muslims, and even, for that matter, innocent and peaceful Muslims themselves—not to mention women and homosexuals, Muslim or not—are all in the same boat vis-à-vis resurgent Islamic militancy. We all stand to lose equally—that is, we all stand to lose everything—if we lose the fight against the Mohammedan onslaught, and so it is that strange bedfellows have come to characterize the anti-jihad alliance. We band together to survive, and should we do so, we’ll have ample time and opportunity to sort out our appreciable differences later on. Problem is, not enough of us may survive to make much ado about what we now count for nothing. Unless as a people we come finally to share a worldview that binds us beyond our common resistance to Islamic hegemony or our common duty in defense of western freedoms, it is bound to be a very rough ride indeed.

As Pope Benedict has criticized Islamic piety by hammering on the need to temper faith with reason, Ali Sina has similarly insisted that the edifice of radical Islam cannot sustain itself in the modern light of reason. Mighty Islam’s awakening in our time, after centuries of dormancy, is at least partly a result of global communications and information technologies that served to revive endemic Islamic tendencies toward unity and globalization, but these same information-age realities are Islam’s worst nightmare. For centuries, any criticism of Islam, whether internal or external, has been immediately eliminated by force. Now everywhere the word is out about what Winston Churchill once described as the foremost “retrograde force” in existence, and it is certain that Islam cannot stand this heat coming from all quarters, which is why we so often hear Islamists decry the West’s “war on Islam.” What they mean is we infidels have once again weighed Islamic belief and practice on the scale of reason and have found it wanting. Today we truly have an unprecedented opportunity to show reasonable Muslims that there is a better way. Ali Sina has predicted that the great edifice of Islam will fall in our lifetime, but although high-profile apostates from Islam like Ali Sina and Ayaan Hirsi Ali have rejected faith entirely, I think it would be wrong to presume that if Islamic militancy is to decline it will be due to mass conversions to agnosticism or atheism. No, whatever else may be said about them, Muslims are deeply religious people in ways profoundly in harmony with the Judeo-Christian tradition from which Islam sprang really as a destructive heresy, as Hilaire Belloc treated Islam in his work.

I will not flesh out these ideas now, but suffice it to say that I have become comfortable with the passage from the Catholic catechism quoted above. I don’t blame anyone who rejects the notion that Christians and Muslims alike worship the one, true God. Certainly Allah bears no resemblance to God the Father, but the Muslim belief in one Creator, who ultimately controls and even comprises our eternal destiny, is the same as ours in demonstrably meaningful ways. And while we must fear the establishment of sharia and an Islamic state in our midst, we would be wrong to claim that Muslim criticism of out-of-control western freedoms is without any merit whatever. I will argue that a societal revival of Christendom and of traditional social mores is our only hope to avoid near total annihilation by the forces of Islamic fascism.

I just won’t argue it here and now. I conceived this essay as more a manifesto than a polemic, for I have decided I will make these concerns a regular focus of this blog despite its potential to put off many readers, because I simply can no longer pretend religion has nothing to do with it. It has everything to do with it, because we will not survive with only the goal of surviving. Increasing faithlessness in western society is precisely why our civilization—born from the triumph of Christendom over pagan barbarism—is dying, and at least the Muslims are reproducing themselves in order to have someone to whom they can hand over the future. In this great struggle, the better culture wins, and so we will be required to reform ourselves, to create a better and more just world, the world we hope for our children, such precious few as there are of them. In short, we will need to become the great civilization we champion and already valiantly defend.

Of course if you are a Christian, you also know that we will require God’s grace, which will not be earned by defending western freedoms alone. Divine blessings will come through defending and preserving all that is good and right and true.

Before we can convert the Muslims, we will need to convert ourselves.