Spencer against the anti-“theocrats”; Farah for re-Christianization

Robert Spencer at FrontPage Magazine today criticizes the overheated leftist secularists who are warning that America and the West are threatened by a “Christian theocracy,” which they say is the mirror image of Islamic theocracy. Unfortunately, Spencer fails to mention that one of the outspoken opponents of “Christian theocracy” is the woman he calls “one of the heroes of our age,” Ayaan Hirsi Ali. See my discussion of the manifesto Ali signed last year that equated Christianity with Islam as religious threats to freedom.

Apart from that little inconsistency on Spencer’s part, these anti-“theocrats” are scary people who are demonizing the very thing we need most. Far from being a threat to the West, Christianity, which is weak in America (compared to its historic status) and vastly weaker in Europe, is the key to its recovery. As Joseph Farah at WorldNetDaily writes:

Europe is going to go one of two ways in the near future:

- It’s going to become Eurabia;

- It’s going to rediscover Christianity in a way that will give its people—native Europeans and transplants from Muslim countries alike—something else they can believe in.

Therefore, says Farah, instead of sending U.S. Muslims to Europe to teach Muslims in Europe how to assimilate, which is what the U.S. government is, unbelievably, currently doing, the U.S. should be sending Christians to Europe to evangelize the Europeans. “It’s time they had a real choice—not just between secular humanism and Islam,” but between Christianity and Islam.

I agree. The spiritually dead and politically helpless Europe of today is history’s clearest example of what happens to a people when they reject God and Christ.

As for Farah’s idea of converting Muslims to Christianity as well as formerly Christian Europeans, while such conversion of Muslims would certainly be welcome, it is extremely unlikely beyond very small numbers. As I’ve said a hundred times, any anti-Islam strategy that depends on what Muslims do (such as becoming moderates, or embracing democracy, or converting to Christianity), rather than on what we do in our own self-defense against Islam, is sheerest folly.

Ingemar P. writes:

As good as an idea as re-Christianizing Europe is, I fear it is nothing but a fantasy, even worse than the ludicrous idea that “moderate” Muslims will somehow save the world. The simple fact is that Europeans have been “immunized” as it were against Christianity. If European education can be described as ultraleftist education, then it can only be supposed that any mention of Christianity in the schoolbooks is at best neutral and at worst incredibly negative.

I do not see any fruit coming from the tree that bore Sartre, Nietzsche, Russel and Dawkins.

LA replies:

I don’t think anyone is suggesting that this is something that could happen just like that. It’s a way of bringing into consciousness more positive possibilities and ways of thinking. It alters our view of reality. Instead of accepting that our civilization is retreating and that Muslims must keep pushing us back, we conceive of our own civilization waking up again and moving positively into the world. And out of those thoughts, different kinds of actions may come.

Further, I reject Ingemar’s idea, as seductive as it may be, that nothing positive can grow from Europe. He’s really missing the whole point. Of course Europe has died spiritually. Of course Europe has come to the end of its tether. But that very fact introduces the possibility of a turnabout. To state as a conclusive fact that there is no hope, that it’s over, as though one can know this, is sinful.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 27, 2007 10:52 AM | Send