Bush's Secularist Triumph? An Atheist Finds Good in Bush's War on Terror
Christopher Hitchens frankly admits that he is an atheist, and always has been. Yet when he openly says, "The left apologizes for religious fanatics. The president fights them", I'll be the first to give credit where credit is due.
The War Against Terror, and especially the liberal reaction to it, has always surprised me. Why should liberals make common cause with violent ideologues who would probably cut half their heads off, either for being gay, for wanting gays to "marry", or for making fashion statements more appropriate to the "Red Light District" than anything else? Yet that is precisely what they have been doing! And it is what they continue to do, as incredible as it might seem.
Hitchens, as I would have to expect, gets it half right. It is not secularism that Bush means to advance in Iraq and in his operations against that organization that calls itself "The Base." What people consistently fail to grasp about Christianity itself is that Christianity has never been about trying to be God's political advance man on earth. That is not a role to which any Christian would legitimately aspire. St. Paul specifically says, "The weapons of our warfare have nothing to do with the flesh." Then there's the one about every soul subjecting itself to the governing authorities, because those authorities have a job to do [Romans 13:1-7].
And that job has nothing to do with enforcing a belief in the Lord Jesus Christ. No man can enforce that. To mean anything, a profession and confession of faith must be voluntary. To be sure, good government does consist in enforcing a body of laws designed to make society livable. We can argue over where the private sphere ends and the public sphere begins, or what "activities between and among consenting adults" the law ought to allow in public or in private. The trick is to strike an effective balance between total permissiveness and the kind of stricture that is not only oppressive in a way that Jesus would not want us to perform, but would provoke rampant hypocrisy that, in its own way, might be worse than brazen license.
As I said, Bush is not in Iraq, nor running any other anti-terror operation, in order to advance secularism. He is doing it to protect our people, and maybe protect some other people on the side, against that "cult of death" that Mr. Hitchens correctly identifies as the greatest threat to the civilized world today. I'll surprise him, perhaps, by saying that he doesn't go quite far enough in his critique of Islam. Islam has always been, at root, a violent religion--its founding documents prescribe such violence, which the Bible does not. All that I see in the "civil war" that Mr. Hitchens speaks of, is Islam getting back to those violent roots as people go back to fundamentals and decide that they want a rematch of the attempt to conquer Europe. Mr. Hitchens would do well to study the Koran as thoroughly as he did Osama bin Laden's speech--and also study the Bible, and compare them. Then he will see that Bush's faith informs his anti-terror policy far more than Mr. Hitchens might think.
The War Against Terror, and especially the liberal reaction to it, has always surprised me. Why should liberals make common cause with violent ideologues who would probably cut half their heads off, either for being gay, for wanting gays to "marry", or for making fashion statements more appropriate to the "Red Light District" than anything else? Yet that is precisely what they have been doing! And it is what they continue to do, as incredible as it might seem.
Hitchens, as I would have to expect, gets it half right. It is not secularism that Bush means to advance in Iraq and in his operations against that organization that calls itself "The Base." What people consistently fail to grasp about Christianity itself is that Christianity has never been about trying to be God's political advance man on earth. That is not a role to which any Christian would legitimately aspire. St. Paul specifically says, "The weapons of our warfare have nothing to do with the flesh." Then there's the one about every soul subjecting itself to the governing authorities, because those authorities have a job to do [Romans 13:1-7].
And that job has nothing to do with enforcing a belief in the Lord Jesus Christ. No man can enforce that. To mean anything, a profession and confession of faith must be voluntary. To be sure, good government does consist in enforcing a body of laws designed to make society livable. We can argue over where the private sphere ends and the public sphere begins, or what "activities between and among consenting adults" the law ought to allow in public or in private. The trick is to strike an effective balance between total permissiveness and the kind of stricture that is not only oppressive in a way that Jesus would not want us to perform, but would provoke rampant hypocrisy that, in its own way, might be worse than brazen license.
As I said, Bush is not in Iraq, nor running any other anti-terror operation, in order to advance secularism. He is doing it to protect our people, and maybe protect some other people on the side, against that "cult of death" that Mr. Hitchens correctly identifies as the greatest threat to the civilized world today. I'll surprise him, perhaps, by saying that he doesn't go quite far enough in his critique of Islam. Islam has always been, at root, a violent religion--its founding documents prescribe such violence, which the Bible does not. All that I see in the "civil war" that Mr. Hitchens speaks of, is Islam getting back to those violent roots as people go back to fundamentals and decide that they want a rematch of the attempt to conquer Europe. Mr. Hitchens would do well to study the Koran as thoroughly as he did Osama bin Laden's speech--and also study the Bible, and compare them. Then he will see that Bush's faith informs his anti-terror policy far more than Mr. Hitchens might think.
posted by Temlakos at 4:12 PM
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