A Blog for Dallas Area Catholics

Why aren’t liberals more critical of islam? May 17, 2013

I found this post on a blog I don’t read very often, bookwormroom, discussing the very strange and really nonsensical phenomenon of why liberals constantly attack Christianity, but bend over backwards, upside down, and inside out, to give islam a pass.  I think it has some merit, but also misses some rather significant reasons:

The article I read on this subject is Benjamin Wiker’s “Why aren’t liberals more critical of Islam?” In it, he posits that, because secularism arose within and in opposition to a Christian Europe and America, Christianity was its original enemy.  Giving proof, however, to my repeated claim that “Progressives” are actually profoundly “regressive,” secularists (i.e., Leftists) continue their battle with Christianity despite that particular war having ended long ago. Judaism and Christianity absorbed the better parts of secularism while holding on to their core religious principles. [Well, the author is probably quite right regarding the absorption of secularism, but I would argue that doing so has badly disfigured Christianity and left the Church - and Christianity in general - in a profound crisis. Because secularism and Christianity are not complimentary ideologies, but implacably hostile ones.  To the extent the Church and various sects have embraced secularism, they have been wounded by the experience. The Catholic Church fought mightily against doing so for three or more centuries, then suddenly tore down the bastions of resistance in the latter half of the 20th century. The result has been catastrophe, the biggest, most universal collapse in the practice of the Faith the Church has seen in its 2000 year history]

Because they are locked forever in an ideological time warp, says Wiker, liberals (or Progressives or Leftists or whatever else they call themselves to avoid the taint their ideas leave behind) cannot contemplate the possibility that there is another enemy, greater than their old foe Christianity.

And here I think the author makes a critical mistake. Yes, it is ludicrous that progressives ignore the truly monstrous ideology of islam, which poses at present a far more direct threat to progressives interests than does Christianity, but perhaps the progressives aren’t so blind and dumb as we think.  Secular pagan progressivism is locked in a death struggle with Christianity.  Secularism knows that a culture can either embrace secular values, or Christian ones, but not both.  So, even though secularism is at present highly ascendent, and the Church and Christianity in general quite moribund, secularism still knows that the most existential threat to its existence resides in Christiainity.  I think secularists are highly confident that they can pervert and corrupt islam much more easily than they have Christianity.  They may be wrong about that, but there are many signs they are not.  For one thing, as islam has become exposed to the modern world, their birth rate has collapsed at a rate faster than any seen in recorded history (true for most countries, not all, but most).  Islamic embrace of the worst of western immorality, like rampant porn use, is another sign that islam may not stand up to secularism.  But, at the same time, islam possesses such a perverse moral code, many muslims see no problem in brutally subjugating their wives and daughters while getting off to western porn at night.  Such isn’t even seen as immoral.

I think there is something to the idea that pagan sexularism cannot recognize the threat of islam for many reasons, one of the most prime of which is the inherent hostility towards Christianity creating an attitude of sophist admiration for any non-Christian religion, a willingness to turn a blind eye to the deformed immoralities of islam or voodoo or whatever, and seeing in these groups a falsely benign alternative to “evil” Christianity. Sort of along the lines of the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

In fact, the author Wiker noted above gets it, whereas I don’t think bookworm did.  Secularists are not only blind to the fact that all other religions are highly deficient in comparison to Christianity, and most of them are much more violently hostile to secularism, but secularism needs these other religions to be “good” in order to continue painting Christianity in a bad light.  Secularism needs to be able to say that “islam is the religion of peace,” in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, so they can claim that Christianity is the religion of death and war. Even though that is completely inside out and upside down. As pretty much all secularist thinking is.

But while the radical pagan sexularists of the modern West may have huge blind-spots, they are not dumb.  Or not as dumb as they act.  While we Catholics may look around and say “what else could the secularists do to destroy our culture?,” the secularists look around and see a very unfinished job. They are not nearly done driving Christianity, and especially the embodiment of it, the Church, from the public square.  Sexular paganism with a strong socialist bent has as its highest imperative the destruction of Christianity.  I fear things will get much, much worse, before they get better.

But, we know how the story will end.  So, never fear. It can actually be a very good thing to live in a time of persecution. Both white and red martyrdom atone for many sins, and may speed one’s way to Heaven.  All we need to worry about is our own personal practice of virtue and adhering to the Truth Christ has revealed through His Church. Nothing else really matters.