Fear A Secular America

Hasan Piker says that “pound-for-pound” the US is the biggest terrorist nation on earth.  We spent a good deal of the week that ended last weekend examining the moral idiocy that the Lindsey Clancy mistrial made so terribly apparent.  This week we have been consumed with fear over the machines conquering us, as if life was science fiction.  And yet, in the combination of Piker’s seeming lunacy and the moral idiocy revealed in the Clancy situation I see what may be the greatest danger this nation has ever faced.

The radically leftward shift inside the Democratic Party is being lead by names like Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Zoran Mamdani, with names like Piker in media and El-Sayed seeking to join the movement.  Our fear of appearing racist or some other “-ist” has driven us to ignore that fact that they are all Islamic? Can we afford that?

An interesting post appeared a couple of days ago entitled “Veterans of the GWOT “saw things with our own eyes that are hard for others to believe.”  It is an interesting list of observations made by military veterans that spent significant amounts of time in nations that are predominantly Islamic.  You want to ignore it because it is so horrible and prejudicial.

And yet I worked for a few weeks in a mildly Islamic nation in southeastern Europe some years ago and this particular observation is undeniable, “Wholly corrupt governments; bribery as a uniform standard.”  I witnessed it first hand when parts I needed to complete my work were stuck at the port and had been for weeks.  I watched the president of my client company walk to the petty cash safe, grab a wad, have dinner with the president of the nation that evening and the parts showed up the next day.  The list is hard for me to dismiss entirely, and even if the list is not entirely true, partial truth is horrible enough.

Another observation is the one that truly frightens me – “Acceptance of the idea that lying can be and is necessary and proper.”  I once worked for a man that while he claimed Coptic Christianity as his faith, hailed from the very Islamic Egypt and that man did not hesitate to lie.  I not so eventually quit the job over it.  It was apparent to me that even if the man was not Islamic, he hailed from a place where lies were simply accepted as part of reality and all engaged in them – he as much as told me so.

We cannot afford to disregard that list, regardless of how bigoted and prejudicial it may appear.  It simply carries too much of a ring of truth to it.

Larry Taunton is what I would describe as a “pugilistic” Christian. He is a media figure that has made his chops, such as they are, by “battling” notable Christian opponents – Dawkins, Hitchens, Singer – the typical list.  His faith notwithstanding, he is not a guy I pay much attention to.  I don’t care for his style.  He speaks too much in superlatives and his approach lacks grace.  Nonetheless, God has been known to speak through donkeys, so sometimes even a person you don’t much care for speaks wisdom.  Taunton did so in relation to 9-11:

Secularism is no match for Islam. It’s why Islam is steamrolling the West. Muslims have finally cracked the code on the West. They have learned that Islam doesn’t sell well, but socialism does — with the young. And so that has become the Trojan horse to power.

Yes, there is the deep taint of conspiracy theory to that, and yet it fits the available facts.  Not to mention it leads to the key take-away, the sentence “Secularism is no match for Islam.”  G.K. Chesterton wrote, “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”

You may or may not wish to assign the moral erosion and rise of socialism that is so evident in this country to an Islamic plot.  Nonetheless, it should be obvious that there is a branch of Islam, a branch that is on the march, that is militantly and violently opposed to our culture and society.  It should be obvious that the most visible leading proponents of the movement in this nation that seek to radically alter our culture and society are Islamic or of Islamic descent.  Those two facts may or may not be connected, but they are indeed facts.

Finally, and most importantly, it should be obvious that these facts have cultural and social traction because of the void left by Christian retreat from the public square.

Our enemy is more than the terrorism sent forth from Iran and its proxies.  That is the most imminent danger, but it is only one expression of the enemy.  Our greatest enemy is ourselves and our retreat into a “personal” Christian faith.  In so doing we have ceded the public square to ideas and ideologies that are deeply opposed to the culture we cherish.  We have put that culture at risk.  How long before we reclaim it?