Mark Steyn - America Alone

One of the exhibits at the Umm Al-Maarik Mosque in central Baghdad is a copy of the Koran written in Saddam Hussein’s own blood (he donated twenty-four liters over three years). Yet this is merely the most spectacular of Saddam’s periodic sops to the mullahs. He is, in reality, a career-long secularist — indeed an “infidel,” according to bin Laden. Although there is no Bible on Capitol Hill written in the blood of George Bush, we are obliged to accept the fact that Bush is more religious than Saddam: of the two presidents, he is, in this respect, the more psychologically primitive. We hear about the successful “Texanisation” of the Republican Party. And doesn’t Texas sometimes seem to resemble a country like Saudi Arabia, with its great heat, its oil wealth, its brimming houses of worship, and its weekly executions?

Clever. After the long post-Cold War drought, the Europeans have finally found a new “moral equivalence.” “It’s nonsense to say, ‘We’re the force of good,’” scoffed Pierre Hassner of the Center for International Studies and Research in Paris. “We’re living through the battle of the born-agains: Bush the born-again Christian, bin Laden the born-again Muslim.” In 1944, at a terrible moment of the most terrible century, Henri de Lubac wrote a reflection on Europe’s civilizational crisis, Le drame de l’humanisme athée. By “atheistic humanism” he meant the organized rejection of God — not the freelance atheism of individual skeptics but atheism as an ideology and political project in its own right. As de Lubac wrote, “It is not true, as is sometimes said, that man cannot organize the world without God. What is true is that, without God, he can only organize it against man.” Reviewing the film The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Polly Toynbee, the queen of progressivist pieties in Britain, wrote that Aslan “is an emblem for everything an atheist objects to in religion. His divine presence is a way to avoid humans taking responsibility for everything here and now on earth, where no one is watching, no one is guiding, no one is judging, and there is no other place yet to come. Without an Aslan, there is no one here but ourselves to suffer for our sins, no one to redeem us but ourselves: we are obliged to settle our own disputes and do what we can.”

Sounds very nice. But in practice the lack of belief in divine presence is just as likely to lead to humans avoiding responsibility: if there’s nothing other than the here and now, who needs to settle disputes at all? All you have to do is manage to defer them till after you’re dead — which is the European electorates’ approach to their unaffordable social programs. The meek’s prospects of inheriting the earth are considerably diminished in a post-Christian society: chances are they’ll just get steamrollered by more motivated types. You don’t have to look far to get the cut of my jib.

And yet even those who understand very clearly the nature of Islam are complacent about Europe’s own structural defects. Olivier Roy, one of the most respected Islamic experts in France, nevertheless insists “secularism is the future.” Almost by definition, secularism cannot be a future: it’s a present-tense culture that over time disconnects a society from cross-generational purpose. Which is why there are no examples of sustained atheist civilizations. “Atheistic humanism” became inhumanism in the hands of the Fascists and Communists and, in its less malign form in today’s European Union, a kind of dehumanism in which a present-tense culture amuses itself to extinction. Post-Christian European culture is already post-cultural and, with its surging Muslim populations, will soon be postEuropean. If ever there were a time for a strong voice from the heart of Christianity, this would be it. And yet most mainline Protestant churches are as wedded to the platitudes du jour as the laziest politician. These days, if it weren’t for homosexuality, the “mainstream” Christian churches would get barely any press at all. In 2005, the big story in America was the Episcopal Church’s first openly gay bishop; in Britain, the nomination of a celibate gay bishop; in Canada, New Westminster’s decision to become the first diocese in the Anglican communion to perform same-sex ceremonies. In Nigeria, where on any Sunday the Anglicans in the pews outnumber those in America, Britain, and Canada combined, the archbishop is understandably miffed that the only news he gets from head office revolves around various permutations of gayness. Getting a reputation as a cult for upscale Western sodomites and a few attendant fetishists, doesn’t help when half your country’s in the grip of sharia and the local Islamoheavies are just itching to torch your churches. Whatever one’s views of homosexuality, it would seem in the greater scheme of things to be marginal, and thus the preoccupation with minority sexuality is best understood as an example of mainstream Protestantism’s retreat to the periphery. It’s the difference between the Broadway of Rodgers and Hammerstein and the Broadway of Stephen Sondheim. The former was the great central thruway of American popular culture; the latter may be, as its admirers claim, better, sharper, more sophisticated, but it’s also under-attended. The bishop of Maryland, making a painful attempt to get with the program, tried to square the awkward Biblical strictures on homosexuality with the vigorous sex life of Gene Robinson, the Anglican Communion’s first openly gay bishop. His line is that God isn’t against gay sex per se, just gay sex practiced by heterosexual men. Really.

“We might say about the Sodom passage,” he elaborated, “that it is not really about a group of gay men behaving badly, but a group of heterosexual men behaving atrociously.” Similarly, in Romans, Paul isn’t objecting to homosexual men having sex with each other, just heterosexual men having sex with each other.

Who knew? So God’s cool with practicing straights, He’s cool with practicing gays; it’s just bi-guys He’s got a problem with. Or have I misunderstood the bishop’s argument?

Anything to say on non-gay issues? Well, the archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, declared during the Afghan campaign that the United States Air Force pilot and the suicide bomber are morally equivalent — both “can only see from a distance: the sort of distance from which you can’t see a face, meet the eyes of someone, hear who they are, imagine who and what they love. All violence works with that sort of distance.” That doesn’t even work as glib lefty equivalence. The distinguishing feature of the suicide bomber is that he doesn’t see at a distance. He looks into your face, meets your eyes — and he still blows you up, because even face to face he can’t imagine who you are or what you love. He can’t see anything about you, other than that you’re the Other. So, like the Beslan schoolhouse slaughterers and Daniel Pearl’s decapitators, he looks into the eyes — and then he kills. The United States Air Force pilot is running on GPS technology — that blip’s a mosque, that one’s a nursery — and from hundreds of miles and thousands of feet he can still see the common humanity more clearly. And, most perplexing of all, he can see more clearly than the archbishop of Canterbury, insulated by the distance of his own assumptions. Most mainline Protestant churches are, to one degree or another, post-Christian. If they no longer seem disposed to converting the unbelieving to Christ, they can at least convert them to the boggiest of soft-left political cliches, on the grounds that if Jesus were alive today he’d most likely be a gay Anglican bishop in a committed relationship driving around in an environmentally friendly car with an “Arms Are for Hugging” sticker on the way to an interfaith dialogue with a Wiccan and a couple of Wahhabi imams.