On the impact of Christianity
[The Jihad] has turned the civility of the United States and Europe, into a weapon and turned it against us. It has weaponized niceness, it has weaponized compassion, it has weaponized the fundamental decency of Western Civilization. It has weaponized our desire for peace. It has recognized that our goodness is no match for its savagery, and will continue to exploit that fact until we lose and they win. (…) We have become too civilized to defeat our enemies, perhaps too civilized to survive. The dagger of our decency stabs us in the back." — American writer Raymond Kraft
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This love for suffering can potentially make — and has in the past made — Christians into perfect dhimmi material. Muslims inflict suffering upon others, thus following the example of their religious founder, and Christians suffer, thus following the example of their religious founder. Cynically speaking, Islam and Christianity can thus make a perfect yin-yang couple.''
Paul Fregosi says in his book Jihad in the West: “Western colonization of nearby Muslim lands lasted 130 years, from the 1830s to the 1960s. Muslim colonization of nearby European lands lasted 1300 years, from the 600s to the mid-1960s. Yet, strangely, it is the Muslims, the Arabs and the Moors to be precise, who are the most bitter about colonialism and the humiliations to which they have been subjected; and it is the Europeans who harbor the shame and the guilt. It should be the other way around.
But why do we harbor such guilt, whether it is warranted or not? I believe this is somehow related to the Judeo-Christian strand of the West, not the Greco-Roman or Germanic ones.
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As Euripides said: “Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.” Well, the West is currently stark, raving mad, and sometimes actively hates itself. We feel guilty about past colonial history or slavery, but Muslims have done the same and worse, and never produced any of the great advances for mankind that we have, yet they don’t feel even the slightest guilt over this. One component of Western self-loathing is the idea that we should we be punished for crimes, perceived or real, committed by our ancestors before we were even born. It could be argued that this idea has its roots in the Christian concept of original sin. Christian ethics have proved more durable than Christian beliefs. Even when we have supposedly left the religion behind, we still believe we have to make atonement for the sins of our forefathers, but since we no longer believe that Christ has made that sacrifice for us and washed away our sins, we end up sacrificing ourselves instead. However, I’ve noticed that Jews have elements of this, too, so maybe it’s a Judeo-Christian thing.
Whatever its cause, our guilt complex is skillfully cultivated and exploited by both external and internal enemies. Modern Westerners are told to feel vaguely guilty all the time, frequently without knowing specifically why. Needless to say, this weakens us considerably.
[...] We have scrapped the Christian religion, but we have still retained some of the moral restraints associated with it, which have been so mired in our cultural DNA that we probably don’t even think about them as Christian anymore. Yet our humanitarian ideas are secular versions of Christian compassion, and it is Christian or post-Christian compassion that compels us to keep feeding and funding the unsustainable birth rates in other cultures, even actively hostile ones.''
Fjordman quotes Michael Gerson, liberal Christian speechwriter for Bush
The Christian faith teaches that our common humanity is more important than our nationality. That all of us, ultimately, are strangers in this world and brothers to the bone; and all in need of amnesty. This belief does not dictate certain policies in a piece of legislation, but it does forbid rage and national chauvinism. And this is worth a reminder as well.''
Gerson is obviously a very liberal Christian, and the fact that he is yet another liberal Christian in Bush's inner circle should further illustrate my assertion that Bush is NOT the fundamentalist conservative Christian he is painted as. But Fjordman may believe that Gerson represents mainstream Christianity, and he does not.
Fjordman is fairer to Christianity in this piece than many secular pro-Western commentators are. I can't count the number of times I have been in internet discussions about the 'Camp of the Saints' invasion of the West, or the advent of Eurabia, and encountered bitter animosity towards Christians and Christianity as the cause of all our problems. Many people flatly state that were it not for the pernicious effects of a feminizing Christianity, the West would not be so mortally weakened.
Some of the critics go so far as to suggest that if the West rediscovered its pre-Christian, pagan roots, we would be able to fend off all threats. Now, I admit that I am biased, being a Christian, but I just don't think that all those who favor appeasement of Islam or multiculturalism or mass immigration are motivated by Christian ethics, as Fjordman implies.
He quotes Paul Fregosi, and I have not read Fregosi's books, but judging by comments on his Jihad in the West, he sounds as though he is dishing up some moral equivalency between Christianity and Islam. Fregosi, as quoted above by Fjordman, asserts that Europeans in general carry a lot of guilt regarding Islam. Really? And if this is true, we know that the guilt is a result of Christianity because -- ?? Europe has in recent decades, during the time of the greatest Islamic colonization of Europe, become decidedly post-Christian, and I cannot see how Christianity has been capable of instilling guilt in Europeans long after they have stopped believing in Christianity. I realize there are isolated pockets of believers in Europe, but they are not the people who sit in Brussels in powerful positions, or in seats of power in the individual countries of Europe. And those Christians who still retain any positions of public visibility in the UK, for example, are often outrageously liberal, like the 'Druid' Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams.
I don't know how to explain any 'guilt' feelings Christians supposedly harbor as regards Islam and Moslems. If such feelings exist, it must be among liberal Christians who are constantly trying to do penance for Western society's guilt. These Christians surely don't get the Christian message: believing, redeemed Christians no longer bear guilt.
In my opinion, much of what is identified as 'Western guilt' or 'Christian guilt' seems to be a strange byproduct of the Therapeutic Culture which has taken hold since the mid-20th century in the West. Paul Gottfried has written about this 'therapeutic culture' in which the media and the government both emphasize our collective guilt as a civilization and who focus on 'victim' groups to whom we owe some kind of atonement. On a world scale, we have groups like Moslems who have positioned themselves as perpetual victims, and there are certainly many Westerners who believe that Moslems have some kind of legitmate grievances against us. Still, I would say that those who believe this are most likely to be secular liberals, influenced by the psychologized 'therapeutic' culture.
Liberals with their obsession with the sins of others, or the guilt of society, have perverted the emphasis of Biblical Christianity. Liberals are like the Pharisee in Luke 18:10-11, who loudly thanked God that he was not a sinner like other men.
The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men [are], extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican.
I fast twice in the week, I give tithes of all that I possess. ''
The modern liberal Pharisee loudly gives thanks that he is not racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, and hateful like other men. The modern liberal 'Christian' is proud, and he is proud of his tolerance. And in order to fully prove that tolerance and openness and moral superiority, the liberal wants to bring all the oppressed of the earth to his own country, and practice his benevolence on these sainted Others.
But where Paul Fregosi locates the guilt that Westerners supposedly feel is unclear. I don't personally know any Christians who think we are guilty of persecuting Islam either in the past or now. I know that a number of my ancestors took part in the Crusades, and I feel no guilt; they did what needed to be done. My Frankish ancestors did their part to drive the Moslems out of France, and without their determination to do so, our civilization would not exist; we would all be part of the 'Dar-al-Islam' and be bowing to Mecca five times a day.
And this is the point that is so often overlooked by the critics of Christianity, the ones who insist that Christian morality is weakening us and emasculating us as a culture. Christianity in the past, until the late 20th century, was quite capable of putting up a robust defense in the face of any threat. The question that should be asked is: what happened to Christianity that it lost that quality, and became weak and submissive and morally lazy, unwilling to confront evil?
What Fjordman perceives as the Christian ethics which are weakening the West are really a perversion of Christianity. James Kurth, a Christian scholar, calls this the 'Protestant Deformation'. Paul Gottfried refers to this in an interview:
In the U.S., what the Presbyterian scholar James Kurth...calls the "Protestant deformation" has profoundly influenced the spread of multiculturalism. Although Catholic clergy, as revealed by the Italian study "L'invasione silenziosa" (The Silent Invasion), have expressed many of the same xenophile sentiments, calling for massive Third World immigration to offset Western parochialism and bigotry, in the U.S., Canada and England, Protestants have taken the lead in pushing both multicultural ideology and the politics of guilt.
Kurth tries to explain this by looking at the progressive deterioration of Protestant theology and moral culture since the nineteenth century. At the heart of the problem is the transformation of justified spiritual guilt into social guilt and the Protestant focus on the individual into a rejection of membership in a shared civilization that needs to be preserved.
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A deus ex machina that may come along to prevent the worsening of the situation I describe is the rallying by Western nations to a defense of their societies.
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Note I do not think these battles will solve long-term problems; unless Western peoples start having families again, the social unit and population base needed for a civilization will be lacking. I do not believe that civilizations are purely or even substantially "propositional" or can be sustained by requiring courses on Martin Luther King and global democracy prepared by Harry Jaffa, Bill Bennett, and Mrs. Cheney.
While societies can assimilate, there are three presuppositions that must obtain: a core population that carries a distinctive culture that it hopes to preserve; a minority that is accepted on the condition that it eagerly embraces that majority culture; and a sufficiently controlled immigration so that assimilation is possible.''
Kurth has also called this 'deformation' of Christianity 'Protestantism without God.' Truly, liberalism in general, even the extreme secular brand of liberalism, is a sort of counterfeit Christianity. This has been pointed out many times. Karl Marx, the son of a Christian convert, was a nonbeliever, but whether consciously or not, the system he fathered was a parody of Christianity. Instead of looking to a kingdom not of this world, Marxism and its offshoots proposed to create a heaven on earth. And instead of becoming a born-again 'new creature' in Christ, the believer would be transmuted into the 'new socialist man.'
Fjordman quotes a comment from Little Green Footballs:
Jesus was persecuted
Jesus was poor
Jesus was a prisoner
Jesus was executed by the state
Therefore:
Those who are persecuted are more Christ-like than those who are not
Those who are poor are more Christ-like than the rich
Those who are incarcerated are Christ-like
Those who are executed are Christ-like.''
This is typical of the kind of subtle twists by which one can transform Christian beliefs into leftist parodies of Christianity. Somehow liberal Christians and secular liberals and leftists alike believe that anyone who suffers or is 'oppressed' even if by their own fault is automatically to be exalted. This is what is at the core of the leftist/liberal reverence for the 'Other', the stranger, the outcast, the invader.
The religion that weakens us is not historical Christianity, certainly not the faith of our fathers, who, after all, had no problem acting in self-defense against Islam and other threats in the past. Christianity, historically, has not been a weak, pacifist religion in most places and times, although some Christians have adopted that stance. The most extreme pacifist Christians, however, such as the Amish, are peaceable people but they exist thanks to the efforts of others who have been willing to take up arms if need be to protect our country.
No, the religion that is destroying Western civilization from within, and leaving us vulnerable to the Islamic threat and to mass invasion is a hybridized creation, more a product of the ideas of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud and Oprah than the product of historical Christianity.
We hear so much about how the Islam that threatens the West is not the 'real' Islam, which is a religion of peace, but that it has been 'hijacked' by violent extremists. Many of us know this is not true, but Islam is a religion of the sword, and has always been at war against the infidel. Militant Islam is the real Islam.
The real 'hijacked' religion is that counterfeit Christianity which is willing to bow to the false gods of tolerance, multiculturalism, egalitarianism, and universalism.
And that hijacked Christianity will readily ally itself with secular humanistic liberalism and with Islam, all in the name of 'inclusion' and brotherhood. This is the threat to the West, not Christianity in its true form.
This impostor Christianity is also turning many people, who know no better, away from the real Christianity, and if we reject the religion of our fathers because of this changeling Christianity, we are harming our own prospects as a civilization.
