Yikes

There has been great reluctance in some quarters to recognize that the war on terror is a religious war. The people who staff the universities and the media are overwhelmingly multicultural secularists, with a strong antipathy toward religion. They would like to deny that what they perceive as ancient systems of absurd superstition can have any genuine causal force in the modern world. Religion is viewed as vestigial, a quaint survival from simpler and darker times, something in the process of withering away in the clear light of logic and science.

From that perspective, religious conflicts are presumed not to have genuine integrity on their own terms, but always occurring as by-products or proxies for ethnic conflicts, poverty, sexual repression or, above all, for the effects of sheer ignorance and lack of education. They find it very hard to imagine that specifically religious commitments can by themselves drive behavior among people, and in situations, that cannot be characterized in any of those ways. Religion is seen as hitching a ride on something more real, like ethnic conflict -- but what if those are equally real? Or, what if it's ethnic conflict that's hitching the ride?

The rise of radical Islam is demonstrating how radically mistaken the secular liberal view can be. Religious claims cannot be reduced to something else; it's the difference between "believing that," which expresses an intellectual acceptance based on evidence, and "believing in," which expresses a passionate commitment to a way of living and perceiving the world. That commitment gets described in religious language that outsiders may be tempted to dismiss as the inane prattling of the deluded and foolish. If pointless name-calling was a productive approach, that would be a productive approach.

We in the secular West have our hands full here, and I doubt we yet have any good estimate of just how full. We have mostly not even reached the point where we are able or willing to correctly identify the nature of the adversary, because we have trouble thinking in religious terms. We are still in the stage of denial where we imagine that religious conflict can be stuffed into one or another familiar secular category then dealt with in those terms. Thus the pathetically hopeful search for the elusive Moderate Muslim Majority, that mythical large group who are just like us, the ones who have no serious belief in their religion and who can therefore be bought off with the usual inducements, like fawning attention and approval, community benefits, and neighborhood services. But the relevance of such people in a war waged by the radicals seems pretty limited. They're just fodder along with the rest of us.

We are nowhere close to coming to grips with this; we are clueless and floundering. It may be that our academic, media, and policy elites no longer have even the vocabulary to talk about religious commitments, except derisively.

Andrew Norfolk's article is chilling, more disturbing than anything I've read in the last year. Somebody please tell me why I'm wrong to feel that way.

Byron