Faith's Contenders

No one concerned with the subject of Islam and jihad can afford to ignore Robert Spencer. His website, JihadWatch.org, maintains a day-to-day catalogue of jihadist aggression and its links to classic Islamic teaching and theology. Spencer’s popular book, The Truth About Muhammad, is a most readable primer on the founder of Islam, especially for those of us who find the canonical texts too dull to wade through. This is why this critique needs to be written, for criticism of those with whom you agree and even admire is more necessary than criticism of those you loathe.

In Religionof Peace? Spencer argues three points. The first, that any equivalence between modern day Islam and Christianity is not merely unjust but pathological, is hard to argue with. Not that this stops many from trying. Spencer lists a swarm of writers, intellectuals, and celebrities who argue this very thing, from Rosie O’Donnell’s comments that “radical Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam” to the marginally less risible Chris Hedges, the title of whose book—American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America—gives a fair indication of the level of argument.

Religion of Peace also attacks the kind of atheists who are fine with being against religion in general but turn green when one points out the psychoses peculiar to Islam. He draws heavily on the works of three of the so-called “Horsemen”—Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens—to show how generic “religion” is used as a stand-in for Islam.

I’d quibble with some of this. Richard Dawkins has described Islam as unquestionably the greatest evil of our times, Sam Harris has noted that “the refrain ‘all religions have their extremists’ is bullshit” and Christopher Hitchens has called Hedges “a perfect picture of the cretinous relationship between half-baked religious absolutism, sloppy moral relativism, and the journalism that lies in between,”—a diction one has trouble imagining the mild-mannered Spencer employing.

An Imbalanced View

Nonetheless, for all that Spencer paints in broad strokes, the broad strokes are accurate. A highly imbalanced and unjust view of both Christianity and Islam is somewhat prevalent. Mainstream atheist organizations such as the Freedom from Religion Foundation do seem to be more obsessed with shout-and-holler Christianity of the Falwell stripe than with confronting jihadist atrocity. A similar problem can be seen in the media; compare the hysteria over Sarah Palin’s admittedly rather weird preachers, to the insouciance over the opening of shariah courts in the U.K. Finally, the vocal atheist P.Z. Myers, of the popular blog Pharyngula, recently complained that “It’s about time the U.S. law enforcement agencies recognized that the real terrorist groups in this country aren’t populated by people with funny Arabic names: they’re homegrown, and they’ve got European names like von Brunn and McVeigh and Roeder,”—this while Hamas maintains chapters in 40 U.S. states.

Spencer makes an astute point that this foolishness is rooted in a terrible parochialism. He quotes the New York Times’s Nicholas Kristof on the Left Behind series of books; if such books were popular in the Islamic world, “we would have a fit.” In point of fact, such books are very popular in the Islamic world and yet fits seem notably absent.

Spencer’s second point is to argue that, due to fundamental doctrinal differences, Judaism and Christianity are necessarily more humane. He points out that both have developed extensive traditions to minimize or ignore the more violent passages of their scriptures, but no such traditions exist in Islam. I agree, up to a point. There have been far too many Christians who do not accept these traditions. The religious wars that devastated Europe were between different kinds of Christian, something captured in Red and Gold, a folksong about the English civil war:

Through the hedgerow’s fragile cover,

I watched brother killing brother

And all this was done in Jesus’ name.

The problem Spencer has is one of trying to prove too much, especially in the historic arguments. Dismissing the idea that Pius XII was “Hitler’s Pope”, the book fails to mention that 25 percent of the SS were confessing Catholics. Nor does Spencer address the deep connection between Catholicism and various fascist movements, such as Mussolini’s Fascist Party, or the Croatian Ustaša.

There is a much simpler argument, and it’s a pity that Spencer does not make it:  True horrors were practiced in the name of a religion founded by a committed pacifist, therefore what are we to expect in the name of a religion founded by a warlord?

Jerusalem over Athens

If Spencer’s first point is sound, and his second slightly shaky, his third collapses entirely. This is his contention that Western civilization’s roots are exclusively Judeo-Christian. Religion of Peace cites the essayist Fjordman that Western civilization has two legs, the Christian and the Jewish. The Greek and the Roman are apparently two legs too many. This omission is never corrected throughout the book. The only mention of Aristotle is in a discussion of whether Christian or Muslim translators of the philosopher were the most important.

While the simplistic view of the Enlightenment as a purely pagan phenomenon is open to debate, and while it can be argued that Christianity is the great historic popularizer of individual dignity, to neglect Athens entirely in favor of Jerusalem is ludicrous.

This leaves Spencer trying to build on a hopelessly inadequate foundation. Faith and Unreason the book’s weakest chapter, quotes Thomas Aquinas to argue that Christianity laid the basis for scientific inquiry by assuming a virtuous God implies an orderly Universe. This is a common tack used in modern Christian apologetics, but it simply does not hold water. How does this explain China?  How does it explain the intellectual fecundity of ancient Greece compared to the intellectual sterility of medieval Christendom?

Furthermore, it is disingenuous to quote Aquinas as evidence of Christianity’s doctrinal rationality. Aquinas was a break with centuries of Augustinian obscurantism that cursed science as “the lust of the eyes.” Even in his own lifetime, those who held that natural law was an offence to God’s omnipotence—exactly the flaw Spencer identifies in Islam—heavily criticized Aquinas.

Less sanctified persons faced considerably worse than criticism for their free thought. Trying to deflect the obvious citing of the Galileo affair, Religion of Peace approvingly quotes John Henry Cardinal Newman who “found it revealing that [the Galileo Affair] is practically the only example that ever comes to mind.”  This is nonsense. Two other names immediately sprang to my mind, Joseph Priestly and Giordano Bruno, and it would be little work compile a list of others. Christian opposition to scientific advance has a long pedigree, from those who opposed painkillers and vaccination to those trying to foist the junk science of intelligent design on children today. (To his great credit, Spencer seems entirely free of this strain of intellectual philistinism that infects so much of the American Right.)

Toward a Second Enlightenment

Spencer begins the book with the following comment: “We cannot simply fight against the jihadists […] We must be contending for something.” Amen. That is why it is so dispiriting that Religion of Peace is lopsided in identifying the basis of Western civilization.

Framing the conflict as between Islam and the Judeo-Christian West excludes many valuable allies and potential allies. It excludes nearly a billion Hindus, many of who have very good memories of Islam’s jackboots. It excludes 25 million Sikhs, arguably the people with the best record of resisting the jihad. And it runs the risk of excluding the world’s fastest growing and most important religious group: those with no faith whatsoever. While Robert Spencer does mention that he hopes to form a similar alliance, focusing solely on Judaism and Christianity is not the way to go about it.

Nor can we have any confidence that the proponents of Judaism and Christianity form the most reliable bulwark. During the Rushdie affair, the Vatican and the Chief Sephardic rabbi of Israel joined with the mob in condemning Rushdie’s blasphemy. They did the same during the cartoon crisis. Note that these are hard-line conservatives of their respective faiths, not postmodern mush-pot sentimentalists like Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury. Lest anyone forget, the popular televangelists Pat Roberston and Jerry Falwell initially framed the 9/11 attacks as the deserved wrath of God, delivered providentially by the hands of enemies.

Rather than trying to build around a largely constructed historic legacy, a better policy would be to forcefully state and defend the principles that unite all civilized men and women, and to welcome all who rally to this standards, regardless of the historic and cultural route they take to get there. These principles—best summarized as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—are of universal relevance, to all men and women, in all times, in all places. There is precedent for this. The first struggle against religious obscurantism and clerical barbarism, the Enlightenment, was formed of men of wildly differing views and attitudes, who would nonetheless close ranks if against the common enemy. Let us hope such a Second Enlightenment is already forming.