Authors: Mark Steyn
One of the exhibits at the Umm Al-Maarik Mosque in central Baghdad is a copy of the Koran written in Saddam Hussein's own blood (he donated twenty-four liters over three years). Yet this is merely the most spectacular of Saddam's periodic sops to the mullahs. He is, in reality, a career-long secularist--indeed an "infidel," according to bin Laden. Although there is no Bible on Capitol Hill written in the blood of George Bush, we are obliged to accept the fact that Bush is more religious than Saddam: of the two presidents, he is, in this respect, the more psychologically primitive. We hear about the successful "Texanisation" of the Republican Party. And doesn't Texas sometimes seem to resemble a country like Saudi Arabia, with its great heat, its oil wealth, its brimming houses of worship, and its weekly executions?
Clever. After the long post-Cold War drought, the Europeans have finally found a new
"moral equivalence." "It's nonsense to say, 'We're the force of good,''' scoffed Pierre Hassner of the Center for International Studies and Research in Paris. "We're living through the battle of the born-agains:
Bush the born-again Christian, bin Laden the born-again Muslim." In 1944, at a terrible moment of the most terrible century, Henri de Lubac wrote a reflection on Europe's civilizational crisis, Le drame de l'humanisme athée. By "atheistic humanism" he meant the organized rejection of God--not the freelance atheism of individual skeptics but atheism as an ideology and political project in its own right. As de Lubac wrote,
"It is not true, as is sometimes said, that man cannot organize the world without God. What is true is that, without God, he can only organize it against man." Reviewing the film The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Polly Toynbee, the queen of progressivist pieties in Britain, wrote that Aslan "is an emblem for everything an atheist objects to in religion. His divine presence is a way to avoid humans taking responsibility for everything here and now on earth, where no one is watching, no one is guiding, no one is judging, and there is no other place yet to come. Without an Aslan, there is no one here but ourselves to suffer for our sins, no one to redeem us but ourselves: we are obliged to settle our own disputes and do what we can."
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Sounds very nice. But in practice the lack of belief in divine presence is just as likely to lead to humans avoiding responsibility: if there's nothing other than the here and now, who needs to settle disputes at all? All you have to do is manage to defer them till after you're dead--which is the European electorates' approach to their unaffordable social programs. The meek's prospects of inheriting the earth are considerably diminished in a post-Christian society: chances are they'll just get steamrollered by more motivated types. You don't have to look far to get the cut of my jib.
And yet even those who understand very clearly the nature of Islam are complacent about Europe's own structural defects. Olivier Roy, one of the most respected Islamic experts in France, nevertheless insists "secularism is the future." Almost by definition, secularism cannot be a future: it's a present-tense culture that over time disconnects a society from cross-generational purpose. Which is why there are no examples of sustained atheist civilizations. "Atheistic humanism" became inhumanism in the hands of the Fascists and Communists and, in its less malign form in today's European Union, a kind of dehumanism in which a present-tense culture amuses itself to extinction. Post-Christian European culture is already post-cultural and, with its surging Muslim populations, will soon be postEuropean. If ever there were a time for a strong voice from the heart of Christianity, this would be it. And yet most mainline Protestant churches are as wedded to the platitudes du jour as the laziest politician. These days, if it weren't for homosexuality, the "mainstream" Christian churches would get barely any press at all. In 2005, the big story in America was the Episcopal Church's first openly gay bishop; in Britain, the nomination of a celibate gay bishop; in Canada, New Westminster's decision to become the first diocese in the Anglican communion to perform same-sex ceremonies. In Nigeria, where on any Sunday the Anglicans in the pews outnumber those in America, Britain, and Canada combined, the archbishop is understandably miffed that the only news he gets from head office revolves around various permutations of gayness. Getting a reputation as a cult for upscale Western sodomites and a few attendant fetishists, doesn't help when half your country's in the grip of sharia and the local Islamoheavies are just itching to torch your churches. Whatever one's views of homosexuality, it would seem in the greater scheme of things to be marginal, and thus the preoccupation with minority sexuality is best understood as an example of mainstream Protestantism's retreat to the periphery. It's the difference between the Broadway of Rodgers and Hammerstein and the Broadway of Stephen Sondheim. The former was the great central thruway of American popular culture; the latter may be, as its admirers claim, better, sharper, more sophisticated, but it's also under-attended. The bishop of Maryland, making a painful attempt to get with the program, tried to square the awkward Biblical strictures on homosexuality with the vigorous sex life of Gene Robinson, the Anglican Communion's first openly gay bishop. His line is that God isn't against gay sex per se, just gay sex practiced by heterosexual men. Really.
"We might say about the Sodom passage," he elaborated, "that it is not really about a group of gay men behaving badly, but a group of heterosexual men behaving atrociously." Similarly, in Romans, Paul isn't objecting to homosexual men having sex with each other, just heterosexual men having sex with each other.
Who knew? So God's cool with practicing straights, He's cool with practicing gays; it's just bi-guys He's got a problem with. Or have I misunderstood the bishop's argument?
Anything to say on non-gay issues? Well, the archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, declared during the Afghan campaign that the United States Air Force pilot and
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the suicide bomber are morally equivalent--both "can only see from a distance: the sort of distance from which you can't see a face, meet the eyes of someone, hear who they are, imagine who and what they love. All violence works with that sort of distance." That doesn't even work as glib lefty equivalence. The distinguishing feature of the suicide bomber is that he doesn't see at a distance. He looks into your face, meets your eyes--and he still blows you up, because even face to face he can't imagine who you are or what you love. He can't see anything about you, other than that you're the Other. So, like the Beslan schoolhouse slaughterers and Daniel Pearl's decapitators, he looks into the eyes--and then he kills. The United States Air Force pilot is running on GPS technology--that blip's a mosque, that one's a nursery--and from hundreds of miles and thousands of feet he can still see the common humanity more clearly. And, most perplexing of all, he can see more clearly than the archbishop of Canterbury, insulated by the distance of his own assumptions. Most mainline Protestant churches are, to one degree or another, post-Christian. If they no longer seem disposed to converting the unbelieving to Christ, they can at least convert them to the boggiest of soft-left political cliches, on the grounds that if Jesus were alive today he'd most likely be a gay Anglican bishop in a committed relationship driving around in an environmentally friendly car with an "Arms Are for Hugging" sticker on the way to an interfaith dialogue with a Wiccan and a couple of Wahhabi imams.
Yet if the purpose of the modern church is to be a cutting-edge political pacesetter, Islam is doing the better job. It's easy to look at gold-toothed Punjabi yobs in northern England or Berber pseudo-rappers in French suburbs and think, oh well, their Muslim identity is clearly pretty residual. But that's to apply Westernized notions of piety. Most of us have known that moment when we realize we're in the presence of someone good, or at least goody-goody: the clean-cut Christian youth group that boards the plane and takes the seats around you, and whose very niceness makes you feel awkward. But the mosque is a meetinghouse, and throughout the West what it meets to discuss is, even when not explicitly jihadist, always political. The mosque or madrassa is not the place to go for spiritual contemplation as much as political motivation. The Muslim identity of those French rioters or English jailbirds may seem spiritually vestigial but it's politically potent. Pre-modern Islam beats post-modern Christianity.
In 2006, a dozen intellectuals published a manifesto against Islamism and in defense of
"secular values for all." The signatories included Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Dutch parliamentarian; Irshad Manji, the Canadian writer; and Salman Rushdie, the British novelist. All three are brave figures and important allies in the campaign against the Islamist tide. But they're making a mistake: secular humanism is an insufficient rallying cry. As another Canadian, Kathy Shaidle, wrote in response: "It is secularism itself which is part of the problem, not the solution, since secularism is precisely what created the Euro spiritual/moral vacuum into which Islamism has rushed headlong."
It's not an unprecedented arc: Hitler followed Weimar--or, for fans of Cabaret, prison camps followed transvestites in cutaway buttocks. There's an extremely fine line between
"boldly transgressive" and spiritually barren, and it's foolish of secular Western elites to assume their own populations are immune to the strong-horse pitch. There's a reason that Islam is winning reverts in Europe and North America. Prayers for the Assassin, a portrait of the Islamic Republic of America in the year 2040, is an inventive piece of "what if?" fiction by Robert Ferrigno, hitherto an efficient writer of lurid Californian crime novels full of porno stars, druggies, and a decadent elite: a slice of everyday life in the Golden State. In its way, Ferrigno's imagined Islamic future is a corrective to that present:
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Jill Stanton's proclamation of faith while accepting her second Academy Award would have been enough to interest tens of millions of Americans in the truth of Islam, but she had also chosen that moment in the international spotlight to announce her betrothal to Assan Rachman, power forward and MVP of the world champion Los Angeles Lakers. Celebrity conversions cascaded in the weeks after that Oscars night.
They're the American equivalents of Emma Clark and Britain's Muslim soccer players. Absent some transformative catastrophe--as in Ferrigno's novel--the United States has a strain of evangelical Protestantism strong enough to grow in the years ahead. Unfortunately, there is no such surging evangelicalism in Europe. In search of the guiding hand of God, some Europeans will return to Pope Benedict's church, some will accept Islam, but there will be no takers for the archbishop of Canterbury's watery obsolescent soft-left pap. In "Dover Beach," Matthew Arnold wrote:
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
The "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar" has been so long withdrawing in Europe that they don't yet understand the sound they hear is a new roar, not withdrawing but gradually advancing, a new Sea of Faith that one day will be at the full and round Europe's shore like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
By the time that Olympic mega-mosque is open for business in the London of 2012, you'll be surprised how well it fits in.
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Chapter Six
The Four Horsemen of the Eupocalypse
E U T O P I A V S . E U R A B I A
The decline of the French monarchy invited the attack of these insatiate fanatics. The descendants of Clovis had lost the inheritance of his martial and ferocious spirit; and their misfortune or demerit has affixed the epithet of "lazy" to the last kings of the Merovingian race. They ascended the throne without power, and sunk into the grave without a name .... The vineyards of Gascony and the city of Bourdeaux were possessed by the sovereign of Damascus and Samarcand; and the south of France, from the mouth of the Garonne to that of the Rhone, assumed the manners and religion of Arabia. But these narrow limits were scorned by the spirit of Abdalraman, or Abderame, who had been restored by the caliph Hashem to the wishes of the soldiers and people of Spain. That veteran and daring commander adjudged to the obedience of the prophet whatever yet remained of France or of Europe; and prepared to execute the sentence, at the head of a formidable host in the full confidence of surmounting all opposition either of nature or of man.
EDWARD GIBBON,
THE DECLINE
AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE
(1776-1788)
To mark the Fourth of July 2006, the
Los Angeles Times
published an essay by Mark Kurlansky, author of
The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell
. It began thus: Someone has to say it or we are never going to get out of this rut: I am sick and tired of the founding fathers and all their intents. The real American question of our times is how our country in a little over two hundred years sank from the great hope to the most backward democracy in the West. The U.S. offers the worst health care program, one of the worst public school systems, and the worst benefits for workers. The margin between rich and poor has been growing precipitously while it has been decreasing in Europe. Among the great democracies, we use military might less cautiously, show less respect for international law, and are the stumbling block in international environmental cooperation. Few informed people look to the United States anymore for progressive ideas.
We ought to do something. Instead, we keep worrying about the vision of a bunch of sexist, slave-owning eighteenth-century white men in wigs and breeches. Etc. The assumptions behind Kurlansky's piece are widely held, and not just by the Left-the assumption, for example, that Scandinavia is the natural destination of the fully evolved Western democracy and America's just taking a little longer to get there than the Dutch and the Canadians. That's what "the most backward democracy" means: the least like Europe. But it ought to be clear by now that Europe is ahead of America mainly in the sense that its canoe is already halfway over the falls. There may be many things wrong with the United States but only a blind fool who hasn't been paying attention for the last twenty years would hold Europe up as the alternative. The U.S. has the "worst benefits for workers"? Maybe. But it also has the lowest unemployment rate--about half the rate in France and Germany,
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