Death everywhere and always is the penalty
for apostasy, in Islam and every other faith. It
cannot be otherwise, for faith is life and its
abandonment is death. Americans should remove the
beam from their own eye as they contemplate the
gallows in the eye of the Muslims. Philistine
hypocrisy pervades Western denunciations of the
Afghan courts, which were threatening to hang
Christian convert Abdul Rahman until the case was
dropped on Monday.
Afghanistan, to be
sure, is a tribal society whose encounter with the
modern world inevitably will be a train wreck. The
trouble is
that
the West has apostatized, and is killing itself.
There turned out to be hope for Rahman, but there
is none for Latvia or Ukraine, and little enough
for Germany or Spain. That said, I wish to make
clear that I found the persecution of Rahman
deplorable.
The practice of killing
heretics has nothing to do with what
differentiates Islam from Christianity or Judaism.
St Thomas
Aquinas defended not just the execution
of individual heretics but also the mass
extermination of heretical populations in the
12th-century Albigensian Crusades. For this he was
defended by the Catholic philosopher Michael
Novak, author of learned books about the faith of
the United States of America's founding fathers
(see Muslim anguish and Western
hypocrisy, November 23, 2004).
Western religions today inflict symbolic
rather than physical death. One's local priest
does not like to preach such things from his
post-modern pulpit, but the Catholic Church
prescribes eternal hellfire for those who come
into communion with Christ and then reject him.
Observant Jews hold a funeral for an apostate
child who is spiritually dead to them (retroactive
abortions not being permitted).
The last
heretic hanged by the Catholic Church was a
Spanish schoolteacher accused of Deist (shall we
call that "moderate Christian"?) views in Valencia
as recently as 1826. Without Napoleon Bonaparte
and the humiliation of the Church by the German
and Italian nationalist movements, who knows when
the killing of heretics would have stopped?
"Where are the moderate Muslims?" sigh the
self-appointed Sybils of the Western media. Faith
is life. What does it mean to be moderately alive?
Find the "moderate Christians" and the "moderate
Jews", and you will have the answer. "Moderate
Christians" such as Episcopalian priests or
Anglican vicars are becoming redundant as their
congregations migrate to red-blooded evangelical
denominations or give up religion altogether.
"Moderate Jews" are mainly secular and tend to
intermarry. There really is no such thing as a
"moderate" Christian; there simply are Christians,
and soon-to-be-ex-Christians. The secular
establishment has awoken with sheer panic to this
fact at last. In response we have such diatribes
such as Kevin Phillips' new book American
Theocracy, an amalgam of misunderstandings,
myths and calumnies about the so-called religious
right. [1]
The tragedy of Abdul Rahman
also is the tragedy of Western religion. Islam
differs radically from Christianity, in that the
Christian god is a lover who demands love in
return, whereas the Muslim god is a sovereign who
demands the fulfillment of duty. Christian prayer
is communion, an act of love incomprehensible to
Muslims; Muslim worship is an act of submission,
the repetition of a few lines of text to accompany
physical expression of self-subjugation to the
sovereign. The People of Christ are pilgrims en
route to the next world; the People of Allah are
soldiers in this one. Contrary to all the ink
spilled and trees murdered to produce the tomes of
Karen Armstrong and John Esposito, Christianity
and Islam call forth different peoples to serve
different gods for different reasons.
But
the fact that Christianity and Islam educe
different peoples for different gods should not
obscure that one cannot be either Christian or
Muslim without belonging to a People of God in
flesh as well as spirit. Christianity demands that
the gentile, whose very origin is redolent of
death, and whose heathen nature is sinful, undergo
a new birth to join God's people. Whether this
second birth occurs at the baptismal font for a
Catholic infant or at the river for an evangelical
adult is another matter. The Christian's rebirth
is also a vicarious death - the death of the
Christian's heathen nature - through Christ's
sacrifice. No vicarious sacrifice occurs in Islam;
the Muslim, on the contrary, sacrifices himself
(The blood is the life, Mr
Rumsfeld!, October 5, 2005).
Where is the moderation? The Christian
either joins the People of God in its pilgrimage
to the Kingdom of Heaven, or he does not; the
Muslim either is a soldier of the ummah, or
he is nothing. Religious conversion is not mere
adaptation to another tradition. It is a change of
people. If God is "able of these stones to raise
children of Abraham" (Matthew 3:9), Christians are
the Gentiles made into sons of Abraham by miracle.
In Islamic society, the convert to Christianity
instantly becomes an alien and an enemy.
God may be able to raise sons of Abraham
from stones; that is not necessarily within the
power of earthly churches. European Christianity,
as I have argued often in the past, made a devil's
bargain with the heathen invaders whom it made
into Christians in the thousand years between the
fall of Rome and the conversion of the Balts. It
permitted them to keep one foot in their national
past and another in the Catholic Church, under the
umbrella of universal empire. The peoples revolted
against church and empire and reverted to their
pagan roots, and then fought one another to a
bloody standoff in the two great wars of the 20th
century.
In parallel to Christianity, but
in a different way, Islam made its own compromise
with the nations it absorbed. It would defend the
pure traditional society of tribal life against
the encroachment of the empires that encircled
them: first the Byzantines and Persians, then
Christian Europe, and now America. Traditional
life inevitably must break down in the face of
globalization of trade and information, and the
ummah closes ranks to delay the time when
the descendants of today's Muslims will look with
pity upon ancestral photographs, as they turn
momentarily from their video game.
Europe's Christians could not summon up
the "moderation" necessary to tolerate their
Jewish neighbors until after 1945, when Europe was
conquered and rebuilt by the Americans. Once the
ambitions of Europe's peoples were crushed in the
world wars, European Christianity became
"moderate" indeed, so moderate that Europeans no
longer bother about it. They also do not bother to
reproduce, so that the formerly Christian
populations of Europe will disappear, starting
with the captive nations of the former Soviet
Union.
No Christian People of God emerged
from Europe. In a century or two, few European
peoples will exist in recognizable form.
Americans, by contrast, arrived in the New World
with the object - at least in the case of the
Massachusetts Bay Colony - of becoming a new
People of God in a new Promised Land.
In a
December essay in First Things titled Our American Babylon, Father
Richard John Neuhaus argues that the United States
itself is not the Promised Land or the Kingdom of
God; it is still another place of exile. In
Christian theological terms that is quite true.
But the stubborn fact remains that if the English
Separatists who founded Massachusetts had not
deviated from Christian theology, and set out to
become a new chosen people in a new Promised Land,
we would not be talking about the United States of
America to begin with. Christianity drew the
notion of a People of God from the Jews, upon
whose trunk it proposes to graft the reborn
Gentiles. But the graft did not take except where
radical Protestants emulated the Jews, and set out
to make a new people in a new land.
Kevin
Phillips, author of American Theocracy,
warns that America's religious right is "abetting
far-reaching ideological change and eroding the
separation of powers between church and state",
giving the Republican Party "a new incarnation as
an ecumenical religious party, claiming loyalties
from hard-shell Baptists and Mormons, as well as
Eastern Rite Catholics and Hasidic Jews". On the
face of it, this is a nonsensical statement, for
how can a coalition of Baptists, Mormons,
Catholics and Jews oppose separation of church and
state, a doctrine promulgated by dissenting
Protestants to protect their own religious
practice against the persecution of an established
church?
The fact that the US boasts
roughly 200 major Christian denominations, none of
which can aspire to a plurality of members,
ensures that no possible theocracy ever could
emerge. When Phillips uses the word "theocracy",
he simply means the emergence of a religious vote
on such issues beloved of the secular left as
homosexual marriage, abortion, or censorship of
pornography. But there is nothing theocratic in
people of faith forming occasional coalitions to
impose what the law calls community standards.
American Christians are migrating en masse
to denominations that preach Christ crucified and
the saving power of his blood, eschewing the
blancmange Christianity of the old mainline sects
('It's the culture, stupid',
November 5, 2004). But the United States is unique
among the nations, an assembly of individuals
called out from among the nations, where Christian
identity is compatible with a secular definition
of peoplehood. Even in the US Christians find that
one cannot be half-pregnant: either one is saved,
or one is not.
Islam does not know
moderation or extremism: it only knows success or
failure. Unlike Christianity, which prevailed only
through the improbable project of abandoning its
old center to create a new land altogether, Islam
cannot exist outside of traditional society, which
by definition knows no doubt. Nowhere else but in
the United States has personal conscience rather
than religious establishment succeeded as the
guiding principle of Christianity. "Moderate
Islam" is an empty construct; the Islam of the
Afghan courts is the religion with which the West
must contend.
Note 1.
American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of
Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the
21st Century by Kevin Phillips. Viking,
US$26.95, 462 pages.
(Copyright 2006 Asia
Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact us about sales, syndication and republishing
.)
Aquinas defended not just the execution
of individual heretics but also the mass
extermination of heretical populations in the
12th-century Albigensian Crusades. For this he was
defended by the Catholic philosopher Michael
Novak, author of learned books about the faith of
the United States of America's founding fathers
(see 
