Mark Shea on the Clash of Civilizations

I figured this would happen
I've not read D'Souza's book...but I've been following the discussion of it a bit and I tend to agree with Kathy Shaidle's assessment: if it's this roundly hated by both sides in the Ideology Wars, there is probably something to it. From what I gather, he's making the perfectly sensible point that we are idiots if we seriously think we can or should go to war with a billion people. He makes the further point that Islam is not a monolith and the smart way to fight Radical Islam is to befriend who can be befriended in non-Radical Islam.

Part of the way to do this, of course, is to examine our own house and see if we've got some repentin' to do. That's essentially the annoying approach the prophets tended to take with Israel. When the Assyrians came into town, the prophets didn't tells Israel that the Assyrians were misunderstood guys who meant well if your properly contextualized the mounds of human heads they liked to construct. But they also didn't blather jingoistic crap about Our Israelite Way of Life Must Be Preserved Against Terrorists Who Hate Our Freedom. They said, "Repent and the Lord will take care of the Rod he has brought against you."

The biggest paradigm shift we face as the last superpower is the assumption that History is About Us. It's not. It's about Christ and the Church. American, like all nation states, is a temporal thing with a lifespan. Insofar as D'Souza is arguing that a post-Christian West has every reason to expect that its culture (currently exploring the outer edges of embryo cannibalism, bestiality and the artistic nuances of child rape, while consolidating earlier victories enshringing sins that cry out to heaven as Fundamental Human Rights) is going to be viewed with utter disgust by the more traditional moralities that still flourish in other parts of the world, he's right. Insofar as he is arguing that the West should repent of the moral freak show it has become if it wishes to make allies with non-radical Muslims of a more traditional moral bent, he's right.

Not having read the book, I can't say for sure, but I suspect that his main argument does not have in view "repentance in order to please God" but repentance in order to save our butts. The latter is a fine place to start. God has accepted many a sinner who started there. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.

But it cannot end there. A so-called "spiritual revival" in the West predicated on Being More Moral So As Not to Further Alienate Moderate Muslims is ultimately not a revival but an act. It's better than nothing, but in the end, it's false and will fail because it is not rooted in the love of God. It will suffer from all similar attempts to be saved by law: it will lack grace.

So it requires in the end, what the gospel requires: a serious committment to Christ and his Church. That's why he world, including ideologues both Left and Right, hate it. On the Left and Libertarian fronts, the Andrew Sullivan types gleefully point to any attempt to rebuke the West's culture of Hedonism and the Imperial Autonomous Self as Taliban Christianism. On the Right, the anger is directed toward D'Souza's attempts to be conciliatory toward Muslims.

What is unspoken here is that that Christianity and the great religious traditions of the world generally have natural law in common. Christ did not propound a brand new moral doctrine. He accepted--as children, Eskimos, Muslims, and ancient Jews did--that certain things were normal and other things were not. The Catholic tradition does the same, which is why Pope Benedict can have a fruitful conversation with Muslims and take seriously their moral teachings: because they are typically just the same old expressions of the natural law that undergird the Ten Commandments.

But the post-Christian West has made a radical break with the old natural law and, in fact, denies that there is a natural law. On the Sullivan front, this means that any attempt to assert a moral teaching not suited to the needs of Sullivan's groin is derided as "Christianism". The proof? *Muslims say the same thing!* And so the normal yah yah about theocons and the imminent Christian sharia are trotted out to great effect.

Meanwhile, on the Right, the jingos build up similar blockades between serious Christians and sensible Muslims with lots of "whose side are you on?" rhetoric and simplistic claims that what D'Souza is saying essentially a stupid political quick fix: "all we have to do is put our clothes back on and go back to church and the fanatical jihadists will leave us alone."

I think it's pretty obvious this is not what any thoughtful person would say. But it is a convenient way to dismiss D'Souza. I likewise think it pretty obvious that what any sensible Catholic who considers the problem must really say is that you cannot fight an inflamed spirituality like Radical Islam with the watery anemic spirituality that constitutes, say, Andrew Sullivan's vision of the Faith. What is necessary is a healthy spirituality: one that fully embodies not only a right understanding of God, but a right understanding of Man. In the end, only the Faith revealed by the one who is both fully God and fully man can do that.

At some level, I think many of D'Souza's critics are terrified of that fact.

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Since he asked...
My take on D'Souza book is pretty much the same as Ross'. It is:

is an attempt to marry a perfectly sensible idea - that the globalization of Western popular culture has helped provoked anti-Americanism in the Islamic world, and that we need to find a way to reach out to the millions of Muslims who find many of our social freedoms off-putting or appalling - to an inflammatory, attention-grabbing thesis, in which the cultural left is held "responsible" for 9/11 and American conservatives are depicted as having more in common with a Grand Mufti than with Michael Moore.

I think it is incontrovertibly true that much of Western popular culture is extremely sick and depraved and that normal people do well to look on it with horror and revulsion. And I think it is utterly cheap political partisanship on D'Souza's part to try to pin all that on the Left.

I say this, not out of some devotion to Islam, but out of devotion to Jesus Christ and ordinary, undepraved humanity. If it comes to that, I also think that much of Islamic culture is also extremely sick and depraved and that normal people do well to look on that with horror and revulsion too. As I've made clear many times, I think the essence of our clash of civilizations is between those who want to remake the world in the image of Foaming Bronze Age fanaticism and those who want to indulge in the secular messianism fantasy of a humanity that will be saved by some amalgam of Self-Esteem, Technology, pagan spirituality (including the worship of Pleasure and her consort Pride, {expressed by countries as Nationalism), militarism, money, and Machiavelli. Neither of these visions has the least room at all for the Church, except insofar as Christianity is useful. At present, Christianity is still quite useful here in the West. And the West retains enough of the Christian heritage and enough real believers in Christ that the secular messianic spirit of antichrist that animates the dreams of our Manufacturers of Culture cannot do to the Church all it would like to do--yet. Indeed, I have hope that the Church will continue for long years yet in the more hospitable world of the West. But I will not be surprised if another Diocletian arises in my lifetime. I will not even be surprised if it happens as the result of some Muslim outrage against the West. Our elites are itching to crush Christianity on the excuse that one Abrahamic religion is the same as another. And voices of reason from the Church are easy to paint as treason when a city has been destroyed.

I am confident in Christ Jesus that the Church will weather the storm as these two pathological civilizations destroy each other. But it will still be agonizing and it will still probably kill millions. Deliver us from evil, O Lord.

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