Witness to Faith, Pervaiz Masih

Maybe you've heard this story, but today it's news to me; anyway, it deserves much repeating. Most people, if faced with a gunman who seems intent on committing a horrible crime would either freeze or try to run away. How many of us would have the courage to die that we might save elite women of a society in which we are of the lowest ranks?

ISLAMABAD, Oct 21: The courage shown by two unsung heroes, including one who lost his life during the two suicide bombings in the International Islamic University (IIU), saved lives of hundreds of girl students in the institution’s cafeteria on Tuesday.

Pervez Masih, a 40-year-old Christian worker, saved scores of lives at the double-storey cafeteria, where around 400 female students were present at the time of the attack.

“There would have been dozens of deaths had the suicide bomber not been blocked by Pervez Masih,” said Saifur Rehman, a senior security official of the IIU.

The other hero, Mohammad Shaukat, survived the attack but he is fighting for his life on a bed in the surgical ward of Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences, as a shot fired by the suicide bomber hit him in lower abdomen.

Narrating the scene of the suicide attack on the cafeteria for women, Shaukat told Dawn that: “The attacker clad in a black burka was heading towards the cafeteria for female students at a time when they were having their lunch. I felt something wrong as no girl student, even one who observes veil, wears a head-to-toe burka on the women campus. I intercepted the bomber, who shot me, and I fell down but Pervez, who witnessed the scene, understood the designs of suicide bomber and held him at the entrance of the dining hall where the blast took place.”

Organs and flesh of the suicide bomber littered the entrance area and Pervez was thrown at the wall on the other side of the dining hall, said another eye-witness.

Christian writer, Mark Earley, elaborates (HT: Vladtepes)

In late October, at Islamabad’s International Islamic University, an Islamic suicide bomber tried to attack the women’s side of campus. But there worked a lowly janitor, Pervaiz Masih, who like so many of the 2 percent Christian minority in this 95 percent Muslim country are relegated to the most menial jobs in society-garbage collectors, sewage workers, and servants.

The suicide bomber was making his way to a cafeteria of some 300 to 400 women students, when Masih came between him and his goal. Masih is a common name among the Christian minority-it means Messiah. And on October 20th, Masih certainly followed in the footsteps of Jesus, the true Messiah. He refused to let the bomber pass. In the process the bomb detonated, killing Masih, the bomber, and three girls nearby. Meanwhile, the 300 to 400 Muslim girls inside the cafeteria were unharmed.

In the midst of the rubble from the explosion lay two martyrs. A so-called Muslim “martyr” had maliciously murdered others. Meanwhile, a Christian martyr had laid down his life for his brethren. A Christian died to save Muslims from a fellow Muslim.

CNN reported Professor Fateh Muhammad Malik, a rector of the university, as saying that Pervez Masih “rose above the barriers of caste, creed and sectarian terrorism. Despite being a Christian, he sacrificed his life to save the Muslim girls.”

Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that not “despite being a Christian” but because of being a Christian, Masih laid down his life.

As news cameras showed the garbage-strewn cemetery [see video here] where Masih is buried, I couldn’t help but think of God’s great reversals. A King born in a manger. A hero buried beneath garbage. And I couldn’t help thinking how one day this upside-down world would be turned on it its head at the second Advent, when Christ comes in glory.

In the meantime, pray for persecuted Christians in Pakistan who suffer under unjust blasphemy laws, and who as recently as this past July were murdered, beaten, and had their homes set on fire simply for bearing the name of Jesus.

Pray that Masih’s heroic actions will help many Pakistanis to see Christians in a different light. And pray that Islamic extremists would have their eyes opened to what it means to be a true martyr, that is, to give one’s life to save others, not to give one’s life to kill others.

Most people, I dare say, would be unable to make the split-second decision not to run away but instead to put one's life on the line for others, for women who probably never gave you a second's notice unless, perhaps, it was in caste-bound condescension. Most people couldn't make that important moral decision because in some important sense they are less free than the illiterate janitor with the name of "messiah".

Gil Bailie has put up a quote, from Hans Urs von Balthasar, which might throw some light on this event:

. . . from the true Christian there radiates the kind of freedom that is constantly only being sought after by the non-Christian. In modern times, the freedom of man is a theme which preoccupies both Christian and non-Christian, and a competition is in process as to who can understand this freedom more profoundly, who more effectively put it into practice.

Bailie adds:

One could argue that the failure to understand the true nature of freedom is at the heart of the contemporary crisis, and, moreover, that the very notion of the "true nature" of anything has been put into question by our confusions about freedom.

Drink and forgiveness: the secrets to Western success says Roger Scruton

Wretchard has a look at Obama's nascent foreign policy and concludes that since Obama has no clear vision of where he wants to be going, he is taking his cue from America's enemies and asking them what they want: Belmont Club » Stratfor on Obama’s diplomatic ‘reset’ buttons

Roger Scruton would probably frown on this as he says what we Westerners need right now is a renewed sense of who we are and what we stand for. This speech Islam and the West: Lines of Demarcation | Azure is full of keen insights. Here are some excerpts:

In both America and Europe there has been a growing desire for appeasement: a habit of public contrition; an acceptance, though with heavy heart, of the censorious edicts of the mullahs; and a further escalation in the official repudiation of our cultural and religious inheritance. Twenty years ago, it would have been inconceivable that the archbishop of Canterbury would give a public lecture advocating the incorporation of Islamic religious law (shari’ah) into the English legal system. Today, however, many people consider this to be an arguable point, and perhaps the next step on the way to peaceful compromise.

All this suggests that we in the West stand on the edge of a dangerous period of concession, in which the legitimate claims of our own culture and inheritance will be ignored or downplayed in an attempt to prove our peaceful intentions. It will be some time before the truth will be allowed to play its all-important role of rectifying our current mistakes and preparing the way for the next ones. This means that it is more necessary than ever for us to rehearse the truth and come to a clear and objective understanding of what is at stake. I will, therefore, spell out in what follows some of the critical features of the Western inheritance which must be understood and defended in our current confrontation. Each of these features marks a point of contrast, and possibly of conflict, with the traditional Islamic vision of society, and each has played a vital part in creating the modern world. Islamist belligerence stems from having found no secure place in that world, and from turning for refuge to precepts and values that are at odds with the Western way of life. This does not mean that we should renounce or repudiate the distinguishing features of our civilization, as many would have us do. On the contrary, it means that we must be all the more vigilant in their defense.
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Scruton then discusses citizenship, law, nationality, and Christianity:

I have no doubt that it is the long centuries of Christian dominance in Europe which laid the foundations of national loyalty as a type above those of faith and family, and on which a secular jurisdiction and an order of citizenship could be founded. It may sound paradoxical to identify a religion as the major force behind the development of secular government. But we should remember the peculiar circumstances in which Christianity entered the world. The Jews of first-century Judea were a closed community, bound by a tight web of religious legalisms but nonetheless governed from Rome by a law which made no reference to any God, and which offered an ideal of citizenship to which every free subject of the empire might aspire.

Jesus found himself in conflict with the legalism of his fellow Jews, and in broad sympathy with the idea of secular government. Hence his famous words in the parable of the tribute money: “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.” After his death, the Christian faith was shaped by Paul for communities within the Roman Empire that sought only the freedom to pursue their worship, and had no intention of challenging the secular powers. This idea of dual loyalty continued after Constantine, and was endorsed by Pope Gelasius I in the fifth century in his doctrine of the two swords given to mankind for their government: that which guards the body politic, and that which guards the individual soul. This endorsement of secular law by the early Church was responsible for subsequent developments in Europe, from the Reformation and the Enlightenment through to the purely territorial law that prevails in the West today.
During the early centuries of Islam various philosophers attempted to develop a theory of the perfect state, but religion was always at the heart of it. The tenth-century polymath al-Fârâbî even tried to recast Plato’s Republic in Islamic terms, with the prophet as philosopher-king. When all such discussion stopped, at the time of Ibn Taymiyya in the fourteenth century, it was clear that Islam had decisively turned its back on secular government, and would henceforth be unable to develop anything remotely like a national—as opposed to a religious—form of allegiance. Indeed, the most important advocate of Arab nationalism in recent times, Michel Aflaq, was not a Muslim but rather a Greek Orthodox Christian, who was born in Syria, educated in France, and died in Iraq, disillusioned with the Baath party he had helped to found. If national loyalties have emerged in the Muslim world in recent times, it is in spite of Islam, and not because of it. And it should come as no surprise if these loyalties seem peculiarly fragile and fractious, as we have noticed in the case of Palestinian attempts at national cohesion, and in the troubled history of Pakistan.
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This habit of self-criticism has created another critical feature of Western civilization, and that is representation. We in the West, and the English-speaking peoples preeminently, are heirs to a longstanding habit of free association, in which we join together in clubs, businesses, pressure groups, and educational foundations. This associative genius was particularly remarked upon by Tocqueville in his journeys through America, and it is facilitated by the unique branch of the English common law—equity and the law of trusts—which enables people to set up funds in common and to administer them without asking permission from any higher authority.

This associative habit goes hand in hand with the tradition of representation. When we form a club or a society which has a public profile, we are in the habit of appointing officers to represent it. The decisions of these officers are then assumed to be binding on all members, who cannot reject them without leaving the club. In this way, a single individual is able to speak for an entire group, and in so doing, to bind it to accept the decisions made in its name. We find nothing strange in this, and it has affected the political, educational, economic, and leisure institutions of our society in incalculable ways. It has also affected the government of our religious institutions, both Catholic and Protestant. Indeed, it was among nineteenth-century Protestant theologians that the theory of the corporation as a moral idea was first fully developed. We know that the hierarchy of our church, be it Baptist, Episcopalian, or Catholic, is empowered to take decisions on our behalf, and can enter into dialogue with institutions in other parts of the world, in order to secure the space that we require for worship.

Association takes a very different form in traditional Islamic societies, however. Clubs and societies of strangers are rare, and the primary social unit is not the free association, but the family. Companies do not enjoy a developed legal framework under Islamic law, and it has been argued by Malise Ruthven and others that the concept of the corporate person has no equivalent in shari’ah.2 The same is true for other forms of association. Charities, for instance, are organized in a completely different way than are those in the West: not as property held in trust for beneficiaries, but as property that has been religiously “stopped” (waqf). As a result, all public entities, including schools and hospitals, are regarded as ancillary to the mosque and governed by religious principles. Meanwhile, the mosque itself is not a corporate person, nor is there an entity which can be called “the Mosque” in the same sense as we refer to the Church—that is, an entity whose decisions are binding on all its members, which can negotiate on their behalf, and which can be held to account for its misdeeds and abuses.

As a result of this long tradition of associating only under the aegis of the mosque or the family, Islamic communities lack the conception of the spokesman.3 When serious conflicts erupt between Muslim minorities in Western cities and the surrounding society, we have found it difficult, if not impossible, to negotiate with the Muslim community, since there is no one who will speak for it or take responsibility for imposing any decision upon it. If by chance someone does step forward, the individual members of the Muslim community feel free to accept or reject his decisions at will. The same problem has been witnessed in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and other countries with radicalized Muslim populations. When someone attempts to speak for a dissident group, it is very often on his own initiative, and without any procedure that validates his office. Like as not, should he agree to a solution to a given problem, he will be assassinated, or at any rate disowned, by the radical members of the group for whom he purports to be speaking.
This point leads me to reflect once again on the idea of citizenship. An important reason for the stability and peacefulness of societies based on citizenship is that individuals in such societies are fully protected by their rights. They are fenced off from their neighbors in spheres of private sovereignty, where they alone make decisions. As a result, a society of citizens can establish good relations and shared allegiance between strangers. You don’t have to know your fellow citizen in order to ascertain your rights against him or your duties toward him; moreover, his being a stranger in no way alters the fact that you are each prepared to die for the territory that contains you and the laws which you enjoy. This remarkable feature of nation-states is sustained by the habits to which I have referred: self-criticism, representation, and corporate life, the very habits not to be found in traditional Islamic societies. What the Islamist movements promise their adherents is not citizenship, but “brotherhood”—ikhwân—an altogether warmer, closer, and more metaphysically satisfying thing.

And yet, the warmer and closer an attachment, the less widely can it be spread. Brotherhood is selective and exclusive. It cannot extend very far without exposing itself to sudden and violent refutation. Hence the Arab proverb: “I and my brother against my cousin; I and my cousin against the world.” An association of brothers is not a new entity, a corporation which can negotiate for its members. It remains essentially plural—indeed, ikhwân is simply the plural of akh, “brother”—and denotes an assembly of like-minded people brought together by their common commitment, rather than any institution which can claim sovereignty over them. This has significant political repercussions. For instance, when Nasser’s successor as president of Egypt, Anwar Sadat, set aside seats in the Egyptian parliament for the Muslim Brotherhood, they were immediately occupied by those judged suitable by the president, and disowned by the real Brotherhood, which continued its violent activities, culminating in Sadat’s assassination. Simply put, brothers don’t take orders. They act together as a family—until they quarrel and fight.

This brings me to a final and critical point of difference between Western and Islamic communities. We live in a society of strangers who associate rapidly and tolerate each other’s differences. Yet ours is not a society of vigilant conformity. It makes few public demands that are not contained in secular law; and it allows people to move quickly from one group to the next, one relationship to the next, one business, religion, or way of life to the next, and all with relative ease. It is endlessly creative in forming the institutions and associations that enable people to live with their differences and remain on peaceful terms, without the need for intimacy, brotherhood, or tribal loyalties. I am not arguing that this is a good thing, but it is the way things are, and this is the inevitable byproduct of citizenship as I have described it.

What makes it possible to live in this way? There is a simple answer, and that is drink. What the Koran promises in paradise but forbids here below is the necessary lubricant of the Western dynamo. You see this clearly in America, where cocktail parties immediately break the ice between strangers and set every large gathering in motion, stimulating a collective desire for rapid agreement among people who a moment before did not know each other from Adam. This habit of quickly coming to the point depends on many aspects of our culture besides drink, of course, but drink is critical, and those who have studied the phenomenon are largely persuaded that, for all the costs that our civilization has paid in terms of alcoholism, accidents, and broken homes, it is largely thanks to drink that we have been, in the long run, so successful. Of course, Islamic societies have their own ways of creating fleeting associations: the hookah, the coffee house, and the traditional bathhouse, praised by Lady Mary Wortley Montague as establishing a solidarity among women that has no equivalent in the Christian world. But these forms of association are also forms of withdrawal, a standing back from the business of government in a posture of peaceful resignation. Drink has the opposite effect: It brings strangers together in a state of controlled aggression, able and willing to engage in any business that should arise from the current conversation.

The features to which I have referred do not merely explain the uniqueness of Western civilization; they also account for its success in navigating the enormous changes that have come about through the advance of technology and science, just as they explain the political stability and democratic ethos of its component nation-states. These features also distinguish Western civilization from the Islamic communities in which terrorists are cultivated. And they help to explain the great resentment of those terrorists who cannot match, with their own moral and religious resources, the easy competence with which the citizens of Europe and America negotiate the modern world.

If this is so, then how should we defend the West from Islamist terrorism? I shall suggest a brief answer to that question. First, we should be clear about what it is that we are and are not defending. We are not defending, for example, our wealth or our territory; these things are not at stake. Rather, we are defending our political and cultural inheritance, embodied in the seven features which I have singled out here for attention. Second, we should be clear that you cannot overcome resentment by feeling guilty or by conceding fault. Weakness provokes, since it alerts your enemy to the possibility of destroying you. We should therefore be prepared to affirm what we have, and to express our determination to hold on to it. That said, we must recognize that it is not envy but resentment that animates the terrorist. Envy is the desire to possess what the other has; resentment is the desire to destroy it. How do you deal with resentment? This is the great question that so few leaders of mankind have been able to answer. Christians, however, are fortunate in being heirs to the one great attempt to answer it, which was that of Jesus, who drew on a longstanding Jewish tradition that goes back to the Tora, and which was expressed in similar terms by his contemporary R. Hillel. You overcome resentment, Jesus told us, by forgiving it. To reach out in a spirit of forgiveness is not to accuse yourself; it is to make a gift to the other. And it is here, it seems to me, that we have taken a wrong turn in recent decades. The illusion that we are to blame, that we must confess our faults and join our cause to that of our enemies, only exposes us to a more determined hatred. The truth is that we are not to blame; that our enemies’ hatred of us is entirely unjustified; and that their implacable enmity cannot be defused by our breast-beating.

There is a drawback to realizing this truth, however. It makes it seem as though we are powerless. But we are not powerless. There are two resources on which we can call in our defense, one public, and the other private. In the public sphere, we can resolve to protect the good things that we have inherited. That means making no concessions to those who wish us to exchange citizenship for subjection, nationality for religious conformity, secular law for shari’ah, the Judeo-Christian inheritance for Islam, irony for solemnity, self-criticism for dogmatism, representation for submission, and cheerful drinking for censorious abstinence. We should treat with scorn all those who demand these changes and invite them to live where their preferred form of political order is already installed. And we must respond to their violence with whatever force is required to contain it.

In the private sphere, however, Christians should follow the path laid down for them by Jesus: namely, looking soberly and in a spirit of forgiveness on the hurts that we receive, and showing, by our example, that these hurts achieve nothing save to discredit the one who inflicts them. This is the hard part of the task—hard to perform, hard to endorse, and hard to recommend to others. Nonetheless, it is the task at hand, and in a battle the stakes of which are so high, it is a task that we cannot fail to undertake.

Maybe the Covenant Zone should consider shifting its Thursday meetings away from the cafe and into the pub. What is the future of our cities now that cafes for solitary laptop thumpers are taking over every corner and our old drinking culture is being marginalized?

Is this Christianity?

My interest in the church is presently that of an outsider who nonetheless has many reasons to believe the revival of Judeo-Christian ways of understanding the human are probably necessary to a revival of our shared Western freedom. One of the debates in today's church that interests me is whether a woman can properly play the role of priest. Of course a woman can be a priest or priestess, in general human terms - history has seen many - but can she be one in a specifically Christian context that will remain coherently and meaningfully Christian (not that I have any firm ideas about any necessary limits of Christianity in relation to any other possible religious positions)?

In other words, can a woman satisfactorily represent Jesus in relation to the church that has been traditionally figured as female (which, by the way, was a tradition continued when the at first Presbyterian and Anglican sons of a somewhat de-ritualized protestantism re-discovered their need for priestly ritual and created all-male priestly fraternities, starting in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. On the initial model of the Freemasons, the fraternal lodges that were, until the last few generations, ubiquitous in Anglo-American civil society were figured as feminine: e.g., one used turns of phrase like "our Mother lodge"; "our sister lodge" to refer to one's lodge's relationship to other lodges, though one's fellow priests were definitely fellows or brothers in the craft.)

While I believe we are primarily cultural beings, culture cannot eliminate or make insignificant certain underlying biological natures and these inevitably influence how we play any role, and how it was first "played" before it became the basis of a ritual. Anyway, this is just to explain why this story grabbed my interest:

Clergy Catwalk Show at Westpoint, showing off the cloths form the cloth is - Reverend Wiz Slater, curate at St Michael's CofE Stoke Gifford (Photo: SWNS)
The ecclesiastical event was a showcase of the latest designs of religious gowns in various colours, patterns, shapes and textures.

Several priests acted as 'models' to strut the cat walk in front of hundreds of clergy at the exhibition .

One model, The Rev James Hutchings, said: "I've done nothing like this before. It has certainly caused lots of laughs in the parish.

"My children thought it was hilarious. They probably won't ask me back. My pirouette was terrible."

Designers featured in the show including J Wippell Ltd, of Exeter, Juliet Hemingway and Shinglers of Sutton.

Ms Hemingway, who has designed vestments for George Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, told the Express and Echo: "Women clergy have brought a fresh look to garments.

"They are not as willing to put up with dirty, worn-out robes. I think this has rubbed off on male clergy."

Reverend Hilary Dawson, Church of England curate in the Netherexe Mission Community, near Exeter, modelled various designs. She told the newspaper she had bought four stoles from Juliet Hemingway.

"My stoles say something about my faith, the place in which I am serving and, most of all, point to the gospel of Christ," she said. "My green stole, for example, reflects the water and hills of my new home and parishes."

WWJD?

Filling Holes

I've just about finished reading The Tide Is Turning Towards Catholicism, by David J. Hartline, and of all the lessons it's teaching me, there's a simple one that it seems I will be re-learning over and over again, as yesterday I learned it for the millionth time: to learn how little I really know.

I'm not much into sports, so when I got to the book's 11th chapter, on "Catholic athletes and coaches", I was mightily tempted to skip it, and zip ahead to chapter 12, "Megachurches, Salvation, and other debated issues", which sounded much meatier and more to my interest. Ankle-deep into that next chapter I mentally forced myself to go back and tackle the book in the order the author intended; how could I know whether or not the previous chapter was not worth reading, unless I at least made the effort to listen to what he had to say? Why was I presuming that the author wouldn't find a way to at least make his stories interesting? He had, after all, succeeded in doing so in every other chapter I had read so far. So I steeled myself to read it.

Was I ever glad I did. It ended up being the most inspiring chapter of the book to date, and introduced me to someone a non-sports person like myself would probably never have heard about otherwise: the remarkable Coach Lou Holtz.

Author David Hartline quotes from an interview he had conducted with the former Notre Dame football coach, and it was so inspiring that it whetted my appetite for more. Taking my lead from the chapter that I almost chose not to read, I searched for the full interview at the author's website; at the end of the online interview came this marvelous suggestion for a game plan for living life:

Coach Holtz: You know Dave it has taken me a long time to figure this out but I now live by the belief that if something isn’t going to bother you on your death bed then it shouldn’t bother you now. I can’t say that I do that with every problem, but I am trying.
[Let] me leave the Catholic Report readers with a couple of thoughts. There are four things that we must do and have to succeed in life.

1. Something to live for
2. Someone to love and love us
3. Something to hope for
4. Something to believe in

Due to my vanity I almost ended up missing out on discovering this most helpful advice. I can't help but think if I had heard it twenty years ago I would have lived a much more meaningful pair of decades... if I could have summoned the humility to feel the need to listen to him in the first place.

Goes to show that we can just never know what lies ahead; try as we might, think as we will, we really can't know everything. We can't really know who will and who will not prove to be of service to us.

When we're young we're taught the sensible advice, "Don't Talk To Strangers". But like so much else in life, that should be a principle, not a rule; as we are changed through aging, this admonition should adapt as well, growing as we grow, maybe even to the point of us growing out of its first formulation, in the same way that we eventually outgrow the teeth we first use to chew our daily bread.

If we never listen to strangers, how do we test our ideas? Is it so impressive to win an argument against yourself? Even if we're convinced we're right, do we really have the whole truth..? Do we really see the big picture... or are there holes needing to be filled? How do we even know what holes might need filling, unless we interact with different people with different experiences, holding different pieces to the puzzle.

The old analogy of the blind men and the elephant comes to mind; the lord of a castle looks into his courtyard, and watches a group of blind men examining an elephant, by touch. Being blind, they can't know that it's an elephant, so they are busily relaying to each other the conclusions they are drawing from their individual pieces, together trying to define this big picture. Their best guess is shattered by the lord surveying the test, who shouts down to them: "You're describing an elephant."

In our own lives, we tend to think of ourselves as the lord of the castle, and not who we really are, one of the groping blind men, with holes to fill.

UPDATE: Welcome readers of the Catholic Report! Thank you for visiting our Canadian team blog. My usual "beat" is to write about European news, searching for stories that don't seem to get picked up by other North American sites.

Here are some past articles, some with good news and some with bad, that you might find of interest:

Looking For Reasons To Keep Faith In The UK

French Teens In Suicidal Leap Of Faith

Blind Faith Decapitates Madonna In French Church

France Destroys Her Churches

The New Reformation

There's quite a thought-provoking article in First Things magazine on the decline of Protestantism in the United States. Joseph Bottum's "The Death of Protestant America: A Political Theory of the Protestant Mainline" chronicles the results of the theological shifts that are reforming the Protestant churches of America.

Reading this article reminded me of the eternal question we wrestle with as we seek a personal relationship with God by learning from the experiences of those who have searched before us: Do you want your church's faith to change you, or do you want to change your church's faith?

Episcopalian, Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran—the name hardly matters anymore. It’s true that if you dig through the conservative manifestos and broadsides of the past thirty years, you find one distressed cry after another, each bemoaning the particular path by which this or that denomination lost its intellectual and doctrinal distinctiveness.

After you’ve read a few of these outraged complaints, however, the targets begin to blur together. The names may vary, but the topics remain the same: the uniformity of social class at the church head­quarters, the routine genuflections toward the latest political causes, the feminizing of the clergy, the unimportance of the ecclesial points that once defined the denomination, the substitution of leftist social action for Christian evangelizing, and the disappearance of biblical theology. All the Mainline churches have become essentially the same church: their histories, their theologies, and even much of their practice lost to a uniform vision of social progress. Only the names of the corporations that own their properties seem to differ.

The emptying churches don't necessarily reveal an abandonment of religious faith; in many cases, it seems, believers in absolute truths are merely seceding to new religions, although they may not define their choices that way...:

Look at the fury, for instance, with which environmentalists now attack any disputing of global warming. Such movements seek converts, not supporters, and they respond to objections the way religions respond to heretics and heathens. ...

Some interesting links

How do we turn things around? How does a conservative hope to connect with a culture that in many respects is no longer conservative? These are the kinds of questions we frequently discuss on Thursday nights at the library. I just came across a couple of tentative but interesting answers. Britain's Peter Hitchens argues that it is wrong for conservatives to raise too many passions about the state of our fallen nations, passions we have no realistic ways to mediate. One must discover what are the pragmatic first steps for involving people again in their national covenant, that they may be free to find the compacts by which to live as they see fit, freed of the overbearing hand of the present soft-totalitarian state of the UK/EU. The first step is thus to reassert national sovereignty and democratic self-rule: Take Britain out of the EU!

But renewal is not just a political question. It also has a religious or cultural dimension. Peter Leithart (ht. Chris Morrissey) argues:

Here, as on so many other questions, there’s much to be learned from Christians in the Southern Hemisphere. It’s a truism among African theologians that the Church has grown most rapidly where traditional African religions are strongest. According to Ghanaian theologian Kwame Bediako, this is no accident but highlights the “special relationship” that African “primal religions” have with Christianity. Like primal African religion, Christianity displays a strong sense of human finitude and sin, believes in a spiritual world that interacts with the human world, teaches the reality of life after death, and cultivates the sacramental sense that physical objects are carriers of spiritual power. Christianity catches on there because it gives names to the realities they already know and experience.

This special relationship is not unique to twenty-first-century Africa. Many African theologians invoke the patristic notion of a praeparatio evangelii, the belief that pre-Christian religion was designed to prepare the way for the gospel, to justify their approach to African religions. Athens might have been the birthplace of philosophy, but the Athenian citizens opened civic assemblies with sacrifices and Athenian women celebrated the Thesmophoria in honor of Demeter.
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If Christianity is most successful among traditional religions, perhaps the Church has to reinvent primal religion before the West can be restored to Christ. Of course I don’t mean that churches should send their tithes to Wicca International or initiate pulpit exchanges with the Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans. Re-paganizing the West means acting on the premise that, for all our pretense of sophistication, the West has never entirely escaped the impulses and habits of primitive culture, or that, by escaping Christianity, we are reverting to it. Re-paganizing the West means working out the implications of the French sociologist Bruno Latour’s assertion: We have never been modern.

Part of the trick is cultivating a healthy skepticism toward secularization theories. For Max Weber and armies of Weberian sociologists, modernity disenchanted the world, locking us all in the iron cage of rationalized bureaucracy. Even modern religion and music, Weber argued, submit to the tyranny of systematization and disperse the gods. Latour will have none of this. The world has not and cannot be disenchanted: “How could we be capable of disenchanting the world,” he asks, “when every day our laboratories and our factories populate the world with hundreds of hybrids stranger than those of the day before? . . . How could we be chilled by the cold breath of the sciences, when the sciences are hot and fragile, human and controversial, full of thinking reeds and of subjects who are themselves inhabited by things?”

Part of the trick, too, is recognizing the continuities between pagan and modern habits and learning to call them by their traditional names. If a rock concert looks, smells, and sounds like a bacchanal, why not call it that, with all the religious overtones that go with the name? If the rock star elicits frenzy, why not call him a shaman?
[...]
Kant moralized and modernized sin, atonement, justification, and the Church to bring Christianity to Enlightened maturity. Perhaps we must reverse the process and primitivize the Enlightenment, so that the gospel can again speak directly to our not-so-modern society. Perhaps we must re-paganize the West as a prerequisite to its re-evangelizing it.

Primitivize the Enlightenment? Some of our champions of modernity might have trouble with that rhetoric from the Idaho pastor, but he's surely right that modernity as we have experienced it, and not just idealized it, has contained a lot of primitive sacrificial thinking. At a time when Osama bin Laden is recommending we read Noam Chomsky, there may well be more people becoming more aware of the underpinnings of the left-Islamic alliance, epitomized by men like Chomsky who on the one hand comes across as an arch-Enlightenment rationalist, but on the other is clearly allied to some violent and irrational sacrificial forces. How has this historical merger come about? When we can well explain this to ordinary educated people, and show how so much of modern "Enlightenment" is a form of not-so-enlightened Gnosticism, we will be on the way to renewing their interest in the truer traditions of Western culture and becoming useful champions of both modernity and tradition.

Have Jews done better under Chistian or Moslem rule?

First off, I want to apologize to my co-bloggers for not having put much up lately. The last couple of days I have been sidetracked at other places, responding to other people's posts. I am, at heart, a denizen of comments sections, and less successful as a first-from-the-post blogger.

Anyway, the question referred to in the title to this post is of course the subject of a number of recent books and dubious arguments by luminaries such as Prof. Bernard Lewis. Wanting to clarify my own thoughts on the matter I attempted to reply to a reviewer, goodmusicman's comment at Amazon.com. Goodmusicman was trying to condemn the work of Andrew Bostom and Bat Ye'Or. Unfortunately, I could not post my comment at Amazon under my nom de blog, without first purchasing products with a credit card under this name. So, I will post my lengthy comments here. The abstract reasoning of the argument will not constitute a writing style that appeals to everyone. It is an illustration of my own religious understanding and if it offends the religious or literary sense of readers, I can only hope you will take it in the spirit of an honest, if misguided, attempt at approximating truth. All clarifications and corrections on points of interpretation will be welcome.


Dear goodmusicman,

I think it rather unnuanced of you so strongly to criticize Bat Ye'Or for being anti-Islam, as if you too were not obviously defining yourself against an Other (Christianity), as we must all do to some extent if we are not to condemn ourselves to nihilism, and our own culture to stagnation and death.

Of course you're right that history is not linear (because it remains open-ended) or one-way, and that Jewish experience under Islam and under Christianity has varied according to place and time. While this fact politicizes the motivations behind any summary of the historical experiences, our political goal in criticizing one or another religious-political tradition may be a worthy one, e.g. to make possible a new international compact in the hope that certain politicized religions and certain states can change their ways, making their internal politics more transparent and open, so as to become more predictable and thus to live according to useful rules and procedures for minimizing conflict. In this respect, some cultures may have more work to do than others.

We inevitably do and should try to sum up things like a religion’s attitudes towards the Jews, or other cultural historical innovators, by mapping the general shape and range of experiences that a religion's founding revelations have so far permitted vis a vis other claimants on monotheist truth. Thus we may grasp how expansive, or profound, a founding revelation has been and when it has been a more or less proximate cause in shaping specific historical events and representations. No religion is endlessly mutable; the experiences it makes possible remain tethered to founding revelations and a religion must be challenged in fundamental ways if it seems unable to change to meet the evident needs for a new international compact.

Anyone disinterestedly studying the life and revelations of Mohamed, as recorded in the Islamic holy texts, cannot help but see a great resentment directed towards the non-believers. About half the verses in the Koran condemn the unbeliever in one way or another, as if Mohamed (or is it Allah?) were an unsuccessful religious promoter who became an active warrior marshaling troops, which of course he was. And, as Andrew Bostom notes in his review of Cohen, there are passages in the Islamic holy texts in which Jews, specifically, suffer dehumanization and violence. Now, in comparison, the New Testament also condemns the unbeliever, though not nearly to the same incessant extent as does the Koran, and in some respects it also specifically criticizes the Jews, though not without a good deal of ambiguity (e.g. Matthew 9:17) about what aspects, or how much, of Jewish life are being found insufficient by Christ, or simply incompatible with the new way Christ proposes.

A book like the Gospel of John can of course be read as Judeophobic, but it is not at all obvious to me, given the context of Jesus' personal struggle with his own Jewishness and its inevitable limits for one focused on redeeming sin (a proper Jew, whatever men’s worldly sins, will see himself working to remain among the righteous, and so the need for a redeemer of those who have come to see themselves as more fundamentally trapped in human sin is, perhaps, not well-anticipated within Judaism, or for that matter in Islam). In comparison to the New Testament's ambivalent positioning of Jews as both righteous and as sinners in need of redemption, The Koran and Sunna simply do not allow for the same kind of ambiguity about the place of the Jews, claiming that the Jews, under Satanic influences, have taken monotheism astray in willfully misrepresenting their original Mosaic revelation. (Christ only claims that Jews have forgotten some things Moses told them).

Muslim certainty about the true Koranic revelation has been both for better and for worse, from the point of view of Jewish experience under confident (ideologically, if not always spiritually) Muslims, in comparison to often anxious (and hence dangerous) Christians unsure whether their New Testament religion of redeeming sin truly transcends Old Testament Judaism, an uncertainty which has often entailed Christians resenting the surviving presence of the Jew. And yet, Muslim certainty about God's word, in comparison to Christian striving amidst the darkness of sin, might lead someone like Bat Ye'Or to resent one religion, or politics-religion, more than the other, simply in respect of its appeal to a Jewish sense of truth in respect for the incompleteness of our religious knowledge.

The righteous, monotheistic Jew, or a sensitive woman like Bat Ye'Or, experiences Islam and Christianity not just in terms of how either treats the Jews, but also how they treat their other faith competitors and humanity as a whole. While the New Testament has some condemnation of the unbeliever, it does not lay out a worldwide project akin to Jihad and this is reflected in the relatively pacific missionary traditions of Christianity and the Christian imperative to translate the Bible into vernacular tongues, to help create many nations and not just one Umma. (Compare, e.g., Islamic and Christian missions in India.) While Christians as secular agents of Western imperialism and racism have engaged in violence when expanding their civilization, the often violent Jihad, which still goes on all over the place, is promoted in the name of Allah and eternal truth, and is thus without any evident or merely plausible claim to promote a secular civilization or a particular nation in which all faiths may find some value.

In my reading, for what it's worth, there is really no comparison in the level of contempt held for the unbeliever in the Christian and Islamic texts. Nor, in respect to the founding revelations, can one make much of an argument for valuing similarly the ethics of Mohamed, the warrior for Allah, and the Christian contrast of a universal morality with a historically shifting, e.g. "Give unto Caesar", ethics, the contrast of a prophet of divine love in a fallen world. Does Mohammed's revelation, or Sharia law, even provide a basis to distinguish divine morality and worldly ethics? Surely Islam, in contrast to historicizing Christianity, is a throwback to the refusal of early religions to distinguish the two, to assertions that a specific and timeless ethical or ritual code for worldly organization is itself the proper realization of a divine will. But it is a throwback without the old pagan’s tolerance for other tribes having different rituals and ideas about the gods’ will.

To return to your point, sure the incredible antisemitism of today's Islamic world has not always been so fierce. And yes, there is a long history of Christian Judeophobia that became genocidal on several occasions. Yet the great similarity between Christianity and Judaism - for example their emphasis on a revelation unfolding in history as man covenants with God - must be considered. Might a Jew concerned with the monotheistic education of humanity as a whole not reasonably feel more confidence in a brother religion than in a more distant cousin, even if the brother's difficult intimacy and competitiveness poses greater threat to him of extreme violence than does the cousin’s more indifferent sense of superiority? Again, the problem with Christianity, from a Jewish perspective, is the Christian's potential obsession and uncertainty that his revelation really transcends Judaism, a Christian bad faith that makes the continuing presence of the Jew, i.e. the Jew's refusal to give up his faith, and any signs of Jewish worldly success, into a great scandal. That Islam has been, if not today, generally much less bothered by the Jewish question, proudly declaring that it has the final and complete revelation, is not necessarily a mark in Islam’s favor if intellectual and spiritual struggle to advance human self-understanding in history is one's chief concern. In comparison to Christendom, perhaps a Jew may sometimes be physically safer, but spiritually or intellectually poorer, under Islamic regimes. How is this taken into account in this debate? Or are we now too materialistic to bother with such perverse questions?

In any case, if safety is your thing, the fact of the matter is that even with all the history of Christian Judeophobia, it is perhaps only in one of the most Christian countries today, the USA (or is this a reality of the Anglosphere more generally?), that Jews can be seen as just normal people, just another ethnic or religious group. The Christian revelation, with its emphasis on maximizing human reciprocity, has finally been allowed, by some worldly interests and powers, to find a fuller realization in the creation of a free market society (that would not have been possible without the Christian revelation) in which Jews have often come to prosper. In the less historically ambitious Islamic world (less ambitious due to its belief that the final and complete revelation of the eternal truth has already been received), everyone, including the Jews, has been kept much more in their supposedly ordained place, and Islamic society as a whole has not evolved so much over the centuries.

Let's say you're a Jew who likes women, all women, not only Jewish women; should you prefer to live under and witness Islam-Sharia's (relatively pre-ordained) or Christianity's (more open) treatment of women? or must the general question, and its claim on wisdom, again dissolve before our respect for "nuance"? or is perhaps the call for “nuance” from so much of the (pseudo) intellectual left today really just a desire for an uncommitted nihilism?

The great majority of Islamic thinkers today, even many in the West, often seem incapable or unwilling to adapt to a global, free-market, modernity without a fight to restrain secular modernity in the name of Islam and Sharia. For all I know, liberals may yet succeed in modernizing Islam, i.e. protecting a secular multifaith order detached from privatized religion and protected from politicized religion (i.e. Orthodox Islam); but as yet there is a long way to go. On the other hand, musicman's argument that the modern separation of Church and State is a product of "the Enlightenment" and not a continuation of Christ's imperative to separate what is owed Caesar and what is owed God strikes me as historically and religiously misconceived in a number of ways. For example, I see the "Enlightenment" as having been an attempt, by intellectuals in declining nations, to understand and codify in secular terms the imperial, scientific, and mercantile success of Protestant countries like 17-18th century England that arose at the expense of once dominant powers like Catholic France, i.e. an attempt to codify the reason and faith behind already well-established Protestant and Gnostic movements within Christian civilization.

Should Jews look relatively favorably on an Islamic history of relative stability and order, even if it has entailed dhimmitude and everyone remaining stuck in medieval conditions? Since Christianity, and not merely “the Enlightenment”, has been the key to unfolding today’s secular modernity and freedoms, has Christianity - with all its difficult and sometimes deadly historical trials pitting, in more ways than one, a fallen humanity against a gospel of love – been obviously a disaster for the Jews?

To sum up: while, historically, many Moslems have not been as anxious as Christians to convert or eliminate the Jews (better, thinks many a Muslim ruler, to keep and tax the dhimmis, since they are often more productive or differently knowledgeable than Moslems), this has been according to the logic of a culture in which opportunities for growth, and an evolving and fuller human self-understanding, have been much more limited for everyone. And when this Islamic culture has had to come face-to-face with the modern world, we get the nightmare antisemitism of a country like Egypt today, a nightmare fostered by its leading universities and media. (And as for free and voluntary conversions, surely Jews have been more likely to find truth in Christianity than in Islam over the years.)

You, musicman, criticize the "unnuanced" position of Andrew Bostom. But yours is hardly more nuanced from the perspective of a Jew or Christian today seeking a sacred basis on which a new international compact may be formed. And to say that things could change tomorrow and life in, say, Arabia (if they let Jews in) may yet become more appealing for Jews than life in, say, today's Europe, is not a fair counter to those who wrongly imply that history is linear, one-way, and that we can know where it is going (e.g. West). We don't know where it is going, but the perspective of the present teaches us something more than could have been known in, say, the year 1200, about the possibilities inherent in a tradition of revelation. And in today's light of secular modernity, Islam seems always to have been destined to fall into a crisis greater even than the crisis of today’s Christian West. Given what we know today about the emergence of, and attitudes towards, free-market modernity, what kind of Jew can reasonably hope for a better future in a society predominantly Islamic rather than Christian? Jews writing history do us no service if their work works to obscure our safer bet, whatever the writer's professional motivations in an academic world full of a desire to express and expiate guilt for white Western historical success relative to those societies that have become immersed, sometimes unwillingly, in the West's claims to have discovered the ethical innovations that will advance humanity as a whole.