Lawrence Auster in an article on his blog uncritically (unsurprisingly) quotes a reader's praise of an Arab Christian (Father Botros) who is currently fighting a spiritual-theological war (mostly, apparently, through the media of television and the Internet) against Muslims. Botros and his fans claim, without sufficient substantiation, to have converted significant numbers of Muslims to Christianity, thus attempting to beef up that particular tactic of defending the West against Islam -- not that Father Botros in his eschatological zeal cares about defending the West per se; but that's another story.
Auster then adds:
As much as the problem with Islam is political, social, and religious, it is fundamentally a spiritual problem. As St. Paul said, our struggle is ultimately not against flesh and blood, but against spiritual evil. It is from spiritual evil that political, social, religious, and other worldly evils arise. This is something important for defenders of the remnants of Christendom to remember.
Funny how Martin Luther saw this exact same situation (for the more Islam changes, the more it stays the same), and came to a markedly, and dangerously, different conclusion, as we see in this quote:
The Pope, with his followers, commits a greater sin than the Turk [i.e., the Muslim] and all the Heathen... Though he [the Turk] rages most intensely by murdering Christians in the body -- he, after all, does nothing by this but fill heaven with saints...
...the Pope fills hell with nothing but 'Christians'... this is committing real spiritual murder, and is every bit as bad as the teaching and blasphemy of Mohammed and the Turks. But whenever men do not allow him [the Pope] to practice this infernal diabolical seduction, he adopts the way of the Turk and commits bodily murder too...
The Turk is an avowed enemy of Christ. But the Pope is not. He is a secret enemy and persecutor, a false friend. For this reason, he is all the worse!
Thus, for Luther, this is indeed a spiritual war -- against the Papacy and the Catholic Church, who pervert the soul and eternally murder those who are thus deceived. The fight against Islam, on the other hand, for Luther, is merely a physical struggle against those who merely "murder the body".
Conclusion:
My title alludes to "one problem" with Christian opposition to Islam. This problem may be termed the "conservative" problem. More Leftwards of this, we have the broader problem of innumerable Christians throughout the West infected with the PC MC virus, who would find such talk of any kind of fight against Islam -- whether bodily or spiritual -- as not only antiquated, but downright bigoted and "racist". We should be building bridges with Islam and respecting their cultural "diversity". The real fight, for such Christians, is against Western "bigots" who dare to condemn Muslims for following Islam.
I say we do not hamstring ourselves with a Christian framework, whether traditionalist (and which tradition would we follow -- the one that deems the Pope a spiritual evil, or the one that follows the Pope, or the one that bickers Orthodoxly between?) or PC MC. I say instead we keep a level head, and just:
a) recognize that Muslims through following their Islam pose a mortal danger to our physical lives and infrastructures;
b) come to a rational assessment of the actual nature and dimensions of that danger; and
c) figure out the most rational means by which to minimize and manage that danger.
We can save the spiritual salvation for later, after we've attended to the house on fire.
Too many in the "Counter Jihad" (which I would rather call the A.I.M. -- the Anti-Islam Movement) have a spasmodic reflex they cannot seem to control that moves them to put the cart before the camel, thus broadening the problem beyond its appropriate proportions. Or maybe, one suspects, they had other grandiose fish to fry long before Islam came on their radar, and they are just using the problem of Islam as a vehicle or springboard by which to push their hobbyhorse-cum-agenda. If so, they are being reckless at best or, at worst, positively inimical to our pragmatic concerns about this metastasizing emergency.
3 comments:
In your post, Luther reminds me of the multikult types who would rather "turn the other cheek" unto death than raise a hand to defend themselves, since actual self-defense would be "lower ourselves down to the level of the terrorists". By allowing ourselves to be slaughtered passively, we at least die holy...? Which of course is extra-tragic since the multikults don't believe in much of an afterlife, "good-looking corpse" [ewww] notwithstanding.
Since Islam leaves no room for any other religion, it would make sense to view the AIM as the future means of mental self-defense for pretty much everyone outside of Islam. Moreover, Christians are slightly less threatened by Islam than polytheists, atheists, Buddhists, etc.
Which is a long way of saying, I agree.
Olave,
Actually, in another writing (or another place in that same writing) Luther advises German princes to fight against "the Turk". He's just trying to argue that the Pope (and all those who support him) are worse than Muslims. I would thus put him in the camp of the "conservative" or "traditionalist" Christians who are not PC MC but tend to be fractious among other Christians who don't have the right Absolute Truth about the Gospel.
Many may not admit it outright, but I believe this anti-Papal view is still fairly common among Protestants -- at least conservative or traditionalist Protestants. They are more apt to condemn Islam than their PC MC brethren, but as I implied in my essay, I'm not so sure they are really loyal to the West -- they are loyal to the Second Coming when all nations will bow to Christ and the final transformation of reality occurs.
At any rate, the PC MC type Christians far outnumber the conservative or traditionalist Christians -- in all branches (Protestant, Catholic, even Orthodox); and they of course present a problem of hindering the West from dealing with the problem of Islam in a rational way -- but in a way different from the conservative or traditionalist Christians.
Nobody, I agree. While Christians might occasionally have debates with Muslims about doctrine (in order to show how superior Christianity is and in hopes of converting Muslims), they obviously wouldn't be framing the whole thing as a "spiritual war".
In fact, interestingly, the only other entity which conservative/traditionalist Christians use that kind of language about is the "godless secularists" -- whose agenda of gay marriage, sexual freedom, bullying atheism in the public square, etc., becomes framed in terms of a "spiritual war". (This does not apply to the more liberal PC MC-ish Christians, who have no enemies and love everybody -- except, of course, "intolerant" Western conservatives.)
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