Given the decidedly strange response of the Obama Administration
and much of the Western commentariat to the violence sweeping the
Islamic world, one temptation is to view their reaction as simple
incomprehension in the face of the severe unreason that leads some
people to riot and kill in a religion’s name. But while the
Administration’s response has plenty to do with trying to defend a
foreign policy that has plainly gone south, it also reflects
something far more problematic: the Western secular mind’s
increasing inability to think seriously and coherently about
religion at all.
This problem manifests itself in several ways. The first is the
manner in which many secular thinkers seem to regard all religions
as “basically the same.” By this, they often mean either equally
irrational or as promoting essentially similar values.
A moment’s reflection would indicate to even the most militant
atheist that this simply isn’t true. Islam and Christianity, for
instance, have very different understandings of who Jesus Christ
is. Christians believe that he is God, the second Person of the
Trinity. Muslims do not. Ergo, Islam and Christianity are
not effectively the same. At their respective cores are
fundamentally irreconcilable theological positions. It’s also very
difficult to find robust affirmations of free will outside Judaism
and Christianity (at least the orthodox varieties of these two
faiths).
Likewise, as any informed Muslim will tell you, Islamic theology
has no real equivalent of the Christian idea of the church. The
Greek word for “church” (ekklesia) literally means to be
“called out.” That, alongside Christ’s words about the limits to
Caesar’s power, had immense implications for how Christians think
about the state and its relationship to religion. Among other
things, it means Christianity has always maintained significant
distinctions between the temporal and the spiritual realms that are
far less perceptible — again, as any pious Muslim will inform you
— in Islamic theology and history.
All this, however, is a little complicated for those secular
intellectuals who simply regard religion as just another
lifestyle-choice rather than being essentially about people’s
natural desire to (1) know the truth about the transcendent and (2)
live their lives in accordance with such truths.
That’s why the left talks so much today about “freedom of
worship” (as if your faith-decisions are akin to choosing which
mall you shop at) and are trying to peddle a version of religious
liberty that basically confines religious freedom to what happens
inside your church, synagogue, mosque or temple on your given
holy-day of the week. The notion that religious liberty is all
about creating space for people to live out their beliefs
consistent with others’ freedom to do the same and even permits us
to peacefully argue — gasp! — about the truth of
different religions’ claims seems to be beyond their grasp.
Then there is the sheer ignorance of history prevailing among
much of the secular intelligentsia. This was unfortunately
exemplified by the lamentable historiography that was on full
display in President Obama’s once much-touted, now much-forgotten
2009 Cairo speech. Among other things, the President referred
to how Islam “carried the light of learning through so many
centuries, paving the way for Europe’s Renaissance and
Enlightenment.”
Really? Did the President’s advisors and speechwriters know that
this thesis has been subject to withering critique for over 100
years? Were they conscious that, as the French professor of Arabic
and religious philosophy Rémi Brague demonstrated in his book
Europe, La voie romaine (1992/1999), the
statesman-scholar-monk Cassiodorus (c.485-c.585 AD) not only
collaborated with Pope Agapetus I in arranging for the translation
of classical Greek texts into Latin, but also established a
monastery-school on his family estate to safeguard and study the
same works? Were they aware that the works of Antiquity never
somehow vanished but were preserved for centuries by Greek-speaking
Eastern Christians? Or that Aristotle was known and read in the
medieval West long before Arabic translations appeared in
Europe?
The answer to all the above questions hardly needs to be
stated.
In other words, civilizational development is a much more
complicated affair than many secular-minded people are willing to
concede. And that partly reflects their ongoing efforts to
whitewash Christianity’s immense civilizational achievements out of
history.
Today’s history textbooks, for example, are full of mythologies
about the so-called “Dark Ages.” These publications invariably
overlook, for instance, the powerful contributions made to the
development of the modern sciences by figures such as the
13th-century saint Albertus Magnus or the profound advances made in
constitutional theories of limited government by medieval
theologians like Thomas Aquinas.
Why? Because acknowledging such facts raises the question of
whether the various Enlightenments (which saddled us with such
intellectual dead-ends as David Hume’s skepticism and Rousseau’s
egalitarian-obsessions) were as radical and enlightened as many
liberals make them out to be.
And that brings us to yet another problem with the secular mind
regarding religion: its increasing embrace of what might be called
suppressive tolerance. This is the art of discouraging people from
expressing their views on particular subjects on the grounds that
saying what you think might involve what’s become the ultimate
crime of modern times: hurting other peoples’ feelings.
Of course, most secular intellectuals are very selective about
applying this. You can, after all, say the most uninformed and
truly bigoted things about Christians and that’s free speech. If,
however, you ask polite but direct questions about aspects of
particular schools of Islamic thought (even while acknowledging
parallels with specific Christian thinkers) as Benedict XVI did in
his 2006
Regensburg lecture, then you’re being “hurtful.”
Lastly there’s the difficulty of wishful thinking. This might be
described as many secular intellectuals’ belief that, deep down,
everyone really wants to be like them: what George Weigel
calls “debonair nihilists.”
Eventually, or so the theory goes, the unwashed masses will “get
over” all those pesky questions about the meaning of life, death,
good, and evil to which religious faiths attempt to provide
comprehensive answers — many of which are far more convincing that
the default philosophical materialism, relativism, and skepticism
that passes for sophisticated thinking in the faculty lounge these
days. Instead, they expect we’ll eventually accept that life is
meaningless and the most we can do is, as Marx described his future
society, “one thing today and another tomorrow; to hunt in the
morning, fish in the afternoon, breed cattle in the evening and
criticize after dinner, just as I please.”
Unfortunately for the urbane hedonist crowd, God’s death has
been forecast on numerous occasions by figures ranging from Marx
and Nietzsche, to the Economist
in 1999. The latter, however, was smart enough to retract
this assertion in 2007 in the face of overwhelming evidence that,
globally speaking, the world was becoming more religious rather
than less.
And that perhaps points to the greatest tragedy of the secular
mind’s remarkable close-mindedness to any serious contemporary
conversation about religion. Its core operating assumptions,
historical unawareness, and reliance upon numerous legends for
legitimacy translates into many Western intellectuals having little
of a meaningful nature to say about how we address real problems of
religiously inspired violence and of truth-suffocating intolerance
masquerading as tolerance.
Put another, more troubling way, one of the West’s greatest
impediments in its struggle against religious extremism may well
the fact that the secular part of its soul turns out to be far less
enlightened than anyone imagined possible.
