America’s Secular Challenge

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Introduction

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

—W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”

Great changes are afoot in Western culture. The world as we’ve known it is becoming a markedly different place, and a more dangerous one, where the very basis of our civilization is increasingly challenged. Let me begin by identifying some of the intellectual and moral factors that are altering our cultural landscape.

The first is multiculturalism, an attitude that proclaims the equality of all cultures but paradoxically assumes that non-Western cultures are somehow more equal, more worthy, than their Western counterparts. This Orwellian phenomenon preaches the gospel of equality, but proceeds as much from self-loathing as from egalitarianism. If women in America on average earn less than men, that is a form of oppression; but if an African culture indulges in ritual mutilation in the form of clitordectomy, that, for the multiculturalist, is simply an expression of cultural difference.

A second factor precipitating cultural change in the West is the decay of religion. European churches are now more museums than places of worship. And even the much-touted religiousness of Americans is often more a function of social activity rather than spiritual observance. In the precincts of elite culture, anyway, the moral and spiritual teachings of Christianity have been in large part interred and replaced by a tepid relativism or various “new age” or “spiritual” outlooks.

A third shift in attitude is that extreme form of liberalism in which the traditional liberal virtue of tolerance has degenerated into an unwillingness to discriminate. According to this anesthetic philosophy, right and wrong are archaic concepts that belong to the ash heap of history. What counts is “openness,” that perversion of tolerance that, as Allan Bloom observed in The Closing of the American Mind, is indistinguishable from indifference.

Secularists nurture a hope that rationalism, now that it has supplanted religion, can solve all problems. If only people—or their more far-sighted representatives—are playing on the same field, then all the world’s heretofore unsolvable problems can be solved. This is the fourth shift, a utopian delusion has led to the rise of transnationalism. In our time, the chief example of the trend is the effort to reduce or eliminate the national heritage of European states through continental harmonization. This effort has had the unintended consequence of making citizens rudderless, robbing them of their national identity and undermining their patriotism. In the United States, transnationalism has adherents who argue that the American experience should be recast as merely one species of world history. But such proposals invariably lose sight of American exceptionalism, suggesting that the United States is like all other nations.

The last factor in the West’s cultural shift is a loss of existential confidence that is at the same time a failure of nerve. The retreat of apostolic teaching is a case in point. Catholicism, despite many new converts, is culturally in retreat, not only as a religion but as an authoritative voice of moral conviction. Pope Benedict XVI was utterly correct when he told a youthful audience, “The great challenge of our time is secularism,” adding that, “Society creates the illusion that God does not exist, or that God can be restricted to the realm of purely private affairs. Christians cannot accept that attitude. This is the first necessity: that God becomes newly present in our lives.”

Implicitly, the Pope was arguing that the philosophic underpinnings of the West are under assault as much from the privatization of belief as from external enemies. If the vigorous liberalism cherished by America’s Founding Fathers underwrites our political freedom, its degeneration into relativistic “openness” has left us prey to the blandishments of fanatics.

Lest the reader conclude from all this that I am some fundamentalist Christian calling for a Great Awakening, let me stress that my concern about the rise of radical secularism and its attack on the Christian foundations of the West is entirely independent of my own religious convictions. Just as the historian Perry Miller, an agnostic, came to appreciate the power of Puritanism in advancing the American agenda, so I, a Jew, have come to appreciate the role that Christianity plays in buttressing Western democracies. I can hear the guffaws of secularists over that line, especially from those who see in any religious defense an argument for theocracy. But the historical truth is that our way of life, including the liberty ensconced in liberalism, emerged from and is sustained by Christian principles.

In 1954 President Eisenhower, not typically remembered for his Christian observance, said, “Our government makes no sense unless it is founded on deeply religious faith and I don’t care what it is.” This may be a reflection of Eisenhower’s Erasmian view of religion as something taking its force more from commitment to moral conduct than from theological dogma. Even so, Eisenhower here was suggesting something unique about faith in the public service.

Of course, faith comes in many forms. Secularism itself is a kind of faith, as is the dogmatic commitment to scientific rationality, to which so many secularists appeal in the hopes of answering moral and ontological questions that were once answered by religion. Even what the sociologist Robert Bellah, and Rousseau before him, called “civil religion” involves faith in the achievements and existential vitality of our republican traditions, including its religious traditions.

For the secular humanist, the fact that the mass of humanity may be unable to live without religion is not dispositive. In considering this matter, however, the secularist disinters a “religious” canon of his own, one that has a distinct value system even as it rejects Christianity and Judaism. Of course, the secularist challenge to religion has been an important social force since the Enlightenment. What is different today is the unwitting collusion between some of the attitudes fostered by secularism and those promoted by the enemies of the West. As Bernard Lewis, a great scholar of Islam, and others have observed, democracies around the world face an imminent danger from elements within their own societies that often pose as pro-peace and human rights. In the West, the leftist naiveté that exaggerates the imperfections in democracy has fueled the Islamic agenda that challenges the West.

It has become increasingly obvious that, like it or not, the West is locked in a civilizational struggle with radical Islam. According to Norman Podhoretz, we are already engaged in World War IV (World War III having been the decades-long Cold War). As the first decade of the twenty-first century comes to a close, it seems clear that there will either be a rebirth of the West, bolstered by a resuscitation of its key traditions, or further disintegration as we struggle ineptly against fanaticism. As Mark Steyn has shown in America Alone, the startling demographic decline of Europe and Russia—the birthrate in Europe as a whole is 1.38 percent, significantly below “replacement” level—all but assures a showdown with rapidly multiplying Islamic populations. Meanwhile, the strategy of Islamists is clear: destroy Israel, create a Middle East devoid of any religion but Islam, employ the oil empire to create caliphates from Madrid to Jakarta and then launch a holy war against the West. What remains to be seen is whether such a philosophy would face any real opposition by a weakened West in the decades to come.

In this struggle America is perceived as the Great Satan, not merely by enemies such as Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, but by supposed allies in Egypt and western Europe. For example, Egyptian MP Mustafa Zakri recently opined that “America is the head of the serpent, and the greatest enemy, which we must confront.”

The root of this enmity is centuries old: Some trace it to the victory of Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours in 732. It is not coincidental that Sheik Nasrallah, leader of Hezbollah, continually makes reference to the history of Saladin and refers to the United States and Israel as “crusaders.” Yet there is a nagging question: Why now? Why were there coordinated, violent demonstrations across the globe over cartoons that caricatured the prophet Mohammed? Why is every real or perceived slight against Islam exaggerated into a casus belli? After all, in the Divine Comedy, Dante meets Mohammed suffering in the fires of hell. The Cathedral of Bologna has shown frescoes of Mohammed seen in an unfavorable light for hundreds of years.

Certainly part of the reason for the recent tumult is the belief circulating in the Islamic world that a secular West no longer has the will to resist Islamic jihad. The compromises and willingness to accommodate Islamic factions in European societies are interpreted as signs of weakness. The more open and liberal the society, the more likely it is a target for jihad. It was no accident, as the Marxists used to say, that Denmark and Holland, two of the most radically secular countries in Europe, should have been the site of some of the most violent Islamic outrages in recent years: in Denmark, the destructive riots that exploded in the aftermath of the publication of cartoon caricatures of Mohammed in the Jyllands-Posten; in Holland, the grisly murder of the filmmaker Theo van Gogh on the streets of Amsterdam.

For Islamists, the moment for a triumphalist campaign has arrived, a moment not unlike the jihad Mohammed launched against the three Jewish tribes in Arabia in the seventh century. That the West considers this Islamic fanaticism a form of acting out over deplorable conditions faced by Muslims within their own borders also plays to Islam’s strength. Believing that there must be a rational explanation for seemingly irrational behavior, Western leaders and opinion makers bend over backwards to contrive exculpatory explanations. Rarely do they come to the conclusion that the violence is fomented by religious zealotry no liberal concessions can possibly mitigate.

The riots that attend ever minor offense are aimed at breaking Western will. They are a tactic to test the fortitude of the West, to see if there is any devotion that can withstand the onslaught. If one were to consider the feeble response from European capitals, one would have to conclude that the Islamic clerics are right. Rather than treat the riots as a frontal attack on the West, most leaders describe the incidents as aberrations, a function of high unemployment rates or poor housing conditions.

Consider the incendiary pronouncements of the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has repeatedly promised to “wipe Israel off the map.” Many commentators in the West discount Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric as a form of propaganda that should not be taken too seriously. But why not? Liberal bien pensants took the same tack with Hitler in the 1930s, ignoring or rationalizing his extreme pronouncements as the unfortunate but mostly harmless rantings of a madman. We all know what the fruits of their appeasement were. It is the same with Ahmadinejad. His call for martyrdom is a plea for Armageddon. What he says is precisely what he and the mullahs believe.

There is a civilizational fatwa metastasizing around the globe, from Hamburg to Tehran, from Nablus to Malmo, from Copenhagen to Islamabad. For Muslims, jihad is in the air and the more it manifests itself in orchestrated street theater, the more it will highlight the weakness of the West. The confrontation between radical Islam and the West is fast becoming the defining test of our age. How that contest unfolds remains to be seen. But if the West cannot marshal the strength to defend its core values, these contemporary Crusades will assuredly end in disaster. Part—a large part, in fact—of that task is spiritual. It involves challenging the gospel of radical secularism, according to which the goal of human life is entirely defined by material well-being.

What the political philosopher James Burnham observed about the West’s confrontation with Communism is even truer with respect to its confrontation with radical Islam. “No one,” Burnham wrote, “is willing to sacrifice and die for progressive education, Medicare, humanity in the abstract, the United Nations, and a ten percent rise in Social Security payments.” And yet such “bloodless abstractions” essentially exhaust what secularism has on offer. “Things fall apart,” Yeats wrote in his famous poem, “the centre cannot hold.” It is not yet certain whether Yeats’s dour vision is more a news report or a warning. I believe that we still command the resources to salvage the spiritual center of our civilization. But to accomplish this we must have the courage to challenge the seductive tenets of radical secularism and revivify the traditional values that informed and nourished America. This book is a contribution to that task.

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