Croppers, Ego Quoque, Utraquism, Theocracy and Neutrocracy.

Readers of my two blogs—this one and my other one, Jihad Watch Watch—will know where I stand on the preposterous logic of the Tu Quoque fallacy (which is also an Ego Quoque fallacy).

By means of this fallacy, many a Muslim apologist deflects criticism of Islam by simply turning the tables on the critic and criticizing the West (or anything within the Western orbit, such as Christianity), thereby hoping to avoid the more responsible and difficult task of presenting an actual counter-argument to the criticism.

Nevertheless, I thought at least one essay should be devoted to another fallacy, one of hardly less preposterous merits—this one employed not by the Muslim apologist, but rather by a certain number of anti-Islam critics.

This other fallacy is purveyed by those so anxious to make clear the qualitative differences between Islam and Christianity, that they end up adopting the position that Christians have never pursued violence in the name of Christianity. This position flies so much in the face of a mountain of historical facts that it simply must be repudiated. It does no good to the anti-Islam movement when its members purvey blatant and massive falsehoods such as this one.

Clarification of a couple of key points is in order at this juncture, for those anti-Islam readers who might be seething with a slowly rising boil of indignation at my impertinence here:

1) We are not here speaking of the essence of Christianity as that is manifested centrally in the New Testament, and less centrally but still importantly in the writings of the Patres, as well as in the daily practice, expressions and behaviors of the vast majority of Christians today: all of this demonstrates clearly that Christianity has a peaceful, kind and benevolent heart, which has the effective capacity for bearing copious fruit with those same qualities in society (tempered, as everything in life is, by unavoidable imperfections in human nature). It is evident to the intelligent observer and student of Islam that Islam’s essence, on the contrary, manifested in its texts, traditions and sociology, is in fact evil and dangerous.

2) However, “essence” does not sum up what a religion is. To a great extent, a religion is also what its practitioners say and do. The overarching axiom of the “Croppers” (the “Christianity is a Religion of Peace” crowd) is that only the essence of Christianity should be considered, when we are assessing the merits of Christianity and Christians. When, therefore, we see Christians in history doing all sorts of nasty stuff—waging wars, perpetrating pogroms, deploying lynch mobs, and using all manner of dreadful corporal punishments on putative criminals and heretics—we are supposed to unfailingly detach Christianity from any and all such nasty stuff. “When those Christians did those things, they were doing so not because of Christianity, but in spite of Christianity!” This has become the mantra of the Croppers. But in repeating this mantra, they seem unaware of the irony that this is the same defense Muslim apologists use when defending Islam.

3) Now, what complicates this problem is that, in the case of Christianity, this mantra is, in terms of essence, true; while in the case of Islam, the logic of the mantra used to defend Muslims would be, in terms of essence, false. But as we intimated in #1 above, what matters on a pragmatic level—particularly in a world where non-Christians must live with Christians in a variety of circumstances and sociopolitical milieus—is also how Christians behave, not merely how their abstract principles dictate they should behave.

4) This, however, does not exhaust our problem. For, there is another dimension to the expressions and behaviors of Christians in history: a third dimension, so to speak. So far, we have been describing this problem with regard to two dimensions of the nature of religion:

a) essence of a religion

b) outward expressions and behaviors of a religion’s followers—

where (b) is usually argued, both by the Croppers and by the Muslim apologists, to be sufficiently tangential, if not virtually unrelated, to (a)—the essence—as to render most or all of those outward expressions and behaviors irrelevant to the problem: i.e., when given Muslims (or given Christians) do some nasty stuff, they are just being nasty humans, engaging in general criminal activities—they are not following their religion, and therefore their expressions and activities are not representative of that religion, and so the religion is absolved of causation and blame for most if not all of the nasty stuff.

The third dimension, however, lies somewhere in between:

c) when followers of a religion engage in violence for religious reasons.

When looking at the history of Christianity—even from a fairly casual survey—it becomes clear that the nasty stuff that many Christians have done over the centuries cannot all be chalked up to mere criminality unrelated to their religiosity.

Consider the following example—an example from the history of Christianity sampled from among thousands of similar ones. It concerns the heterodox idea called Utraquism, an idea developed by the heterodox movement of the Hussites beginning in the 15th century, which caused a great deal of discussion, argument, disputes and outbreaks of violence.

In a nutshell, Utraquism was a conception of the proper function of the eucharist in opposition to the orthodox understanding: according to Utraquism, both the bread and the wine had to be received by the partaker of Holy Communion, or his salvation would be in jeopardy. In the orthodox understanding, either the wine or the bread was sufficient, for the entirety of the “real presence” of Jesus Christ was stipulated to be in either, and the Utraquist position was deemed a heretical division of that real presence into parts. Both sides of this controversy refused to compromise or to change. The result was the Hussite wars, in which people fought and killed.

Certainly, other non-religious factors—sociopolitical and economic—figured into this conflict. But to reduce it to those other factors would be to indulge tendentiously in the either/or fallacy, when clearly it was a both/and situation. Just as with Islam, the sociopolitico-economic spheres of life during those centuries when Christianity ruled theocratically were inextricably bound up with the religious, specifically the Christian, sphere. And it often led to violence.

The Utraquist conflict was hardly an anomaly; and it was hardly the worst. Far worse and bloodier conflicts, revolving around a variety of religious concerns, broke out over the centuries when the West took its Christianity too seriously, yea at times obsessively.

And lest any modern Protestants (usually of the Evangelical and “non-denominational” flavor) think to get the bright idea that all that historical Christian violence can be chalked up to those nasty Roman Catholics—who are not “true Christians” anyway—it is not difficult to find plenty of horrific violence perpetrated by Protestants as well, going right back to the beginning of the Reformation (the early 16th century), and manifesting not only in clashes between them and Catholic forces, but also in intra-sectarian strife as well. This went on in fits and starts for a century, spending itself finally in the mid 17th century with the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48); though religious violence and intolerance would persist for another century at least, in forms lesser than outright warfare in various parts of the West.

Indeed, it was the nauseating experience of incessant internecine violence among Christians that helped set the gears in motion for a major paradigm shift in the Western mind, whereby an antipathy to religion and an inchoate development of some kind of non-religious or at least para-religious humanism on the basis of reason slowly transformed the psychological, philosophical, sociological and political landscape.

This paradigm shift—its formation spanning approximately from the European Enlightenment beginning in the late 17th century to the definitive reconfiguration of the sociopolitical structures of the West in the 19th century—resulted in a new West by the beginning of the 20th century. Further cataclysms—such as the World Wars, the catastrophic bouts of murderous ideologies in Communism, Fascism and Nazism—further undermined whatever remnants of the ancien regime persisted. By the end of World War II, the paradigm shift that had been painfully giving birth to itself for over a century and a half finally became the new parent: it finally became the dominant and mainstream paradigm. The 60s Revolution was not so much a new and opposing worldview, as it was simply the logical flower of the massive change that had already happened by the end of the War in the late 1940s.

I am not uncritically eulogizing the paradigm shift that has transformed the West over the course of two spectacular yet agonizing centuries from the old order of a Christendom to a new order of a decidedly agnostic secularism. This paradigm shift has brought with it many flaws, some more or less minor, some horrible and tragic. Nevertheless, human beings and their cultures cannot avoid change, any more than they can avoid imperfection, or the fundamental mystery of existence that is an ongoing tension between perfection-imperfection. And the miracle of the West remains, in the amazing fact that this colossal paradigm shift has also brought much good to us and to the world, beneficence in many ways better than all that has come before, in no small measure by unfolding implications latent in the old order.

While the paradigm shift has had its major flaws, it has also brought about important improvements. One of those improvements has been the secularization of the sociopolitical realm of existence, and the consequent relegation of religion largely to the spheres of the individual’s heart and his subcultural community of like-minded souls who enjoy, comparatively speaking, more respect, freedom and legal protections than have minorities—for that is what any religion must be under the aegis of the secular order—ever experienced in any other culture in history.

This process of secularization has also brought about more respect, freedom and solicitousness for the individual—differentiated out of the culture, the tribe, the family—than ever before in world history. Again, while this is not wholly beneficial—there are some good things about the family and about enmeshment with one’s surrounding society that have tended to get lost or obscured along the way—nevertheless, it has brought benefits that are worth keeping and treasuring and protecting. These benefits, furthermore, can be seen to be the fruit or flower of seeds latent in the respect for the individual under Israel, Graeco-Roman culture, and Christendom.

The implicit wisdom of the Founding Fathers of America was the recognition that religion—including most patently Christianity—is not a monolithic unity to whose truths everyone assents in harmonious agreement, but is, rather, a diversified field of multiple truths whose representatives (particularly in the recent historical memory of the late 18th century) have too often fomented discord and violence. The new vision implicit in various moments of history—the Glorious Revolution in England in the 17th century, the European Enlightenment of the late 17th and 18th centuries, the founding and unfolding of America at the turn of the 19th century—is that sociopolitical existence needs to be organized and managed under an overarching principle that is neutral with regard to religion, while at the same time taking care not to hamper or disrespect religion.

This delicate balance has not always been maintained perfectly, of course; and oftentimes it seems to certain religious people that the balance has been maintained with a bias against religion. Perhaps that is an unavoidable aspect to the dynamic of the balance itself. The goal is not to supplant religiosity with a new ersatz religion of Atheism and to lord it over all the religious people (much less to oppress them). The goal is to maintain an overall neutrality, which perforce is officially, publically and institutionally agnostic, but which makes no claims or pretensions as to personal, existential and spiritual truths—leaving this up to the individual and his community of like-minded souls to cultivate in freedom, respect and legal protection.

There seems, therefore, to be no real pragmatic alternative to our ongoing commitment and adventure that continues to try to maintain that balance. Unless one of the many flavors of religion attains sociopolitical dominance under some form of theocracy and thereby begins to encroach upon the liberties of the other flavors of religion (and of non-religion), then the only reasonable alternative is to accord all flavors with a minimum amount of liberty, respect and privilege—as a necessary consequence delimiting the overarching power each one of them would like to possess at the expense of others.

Upshot:

While, if I were forced to make a choice, I would easily prefer to live under a Christian theocracy as opposed to an Islamic theocracy, I decidedly prefer, beyond that, the modern paradigm of an overarching system of secular neutrality under whose umbrella all the manifold religions and groups who claim to know the meaning of life can co-exist with a maximum degree of respect, equality and freedom under the law, limited only by the degree of the intolerance of other views any one of them practices. Since Islam’s intolerance rises above the threshhold permissible for co-existence, it cannot reasonably be included in the diverse family of worldviews that is the modern world under the aegis of the secular West.

In place of the Theocracy of the older order, therefore, I prefer the Neutrocracy of the modern order. There is no workable third alternative to these two ways of organizing civilization.

And I hope, and trust, that Christians who join us in the anti-Islam movement know that if and when we dismantle Islam as a global menace, there will not be a re-Christianization of the West as their reward—at least not one that goes beyond the voluntary conversion of more individuals. Perhaps more and more of them will come to thank the Neutrocrats for this reorientation of priorities away from this life to the eschaton, where too often the Theocrats have sought to make the former into the latter, ironically mirroring not only the pathological utopianism of the anti-Christian ideologies of the 20th century—Communism, Fascism and Nazism—but so too that grander pathology of the last fourteen centuries, Islam.