Beautiful Post from Gates of Vienna

The Self-Imposed Christian Cage
by Baron Bodissey

Using a post by Dymphna as a jumping-off point, Pastorius has written a powerful essay about the current crisis faced by the different branches of Christianity.There is a strain of thought in the liberal we're-all-the-same-under-the-skin wing of Christianity which maintains that Christians, Jews, and Muslims all worship what is essentially the same God.

This assertion can only hold as long as one fails to read the scriptures of the religions involved. The God of the New Testament and the Torah is very different from the Allah found in the Koran. Pastorius highlights an essential difference: The first principle of the Bible is that man needs to be Free, and this comes before anything else.

This is not at all a principle of Islam. In Islam, a good Muslim is to learn the Koran by heart, and to follow its rules by rote. He is not to be analytical, because his analysis can never add anything to that which Allah has already provided. The Koran, itself, is the final word of Allah to man. It is not to be amended or added to. It is to be followed only. And to follow the Koran faithfully is to engage in struggle and violence against the unbeliever until all the world has submitted to the rule of Allah. There is no escaping this imperative.

The most important endeavor the Christian Church can undertake, at this point in time, is to understand that the defense of Western Civilization is of utmost importance to the existence of Christianity. Without the protection Western Civilization provides to Freedom of Conscience, Freedom of Speech, and Democracy, Christianity itself would go into a dark age…

The Christian Church must understand that Western Civilization and the Bible go hand in hand. The Christian Church must become warriors for Western Civilization. I am not saying that this means the Church itself must call for violence. No, the Church, at this juncture has the luxury still of keeping its advocacy in the realm of peace. We can still fight our battles in the realm of ideology.

However, if the Christian Church, and the West, allow too many of our cherished Freedoms to slip away, it will become incumbent upon the Church, once again, to go into the business of War. And, that will be a shame upon us, not because it would be wrong to call for war in such a case, but, because we could have won our war without violence, if we had only acted sooner.

Modern mainstream Christianity has put itself into a cage of its own making, a cage of radical non-violence. It has, in effect, repudiated two thousand years of its own history, forsaking all the heroes who gave their lives so that the work of Christ could continue unmolested.

Are we to forget that Charles Martel drove out the Saracens in the Battle of Poitiers in 732, or that an alliance of Christian European kingdoms defeated the Turks at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, or that John III Sobieski, King of Poland raised the Siege of Vienna in 1683, all so that Christendom could flourish and create the beneficent cultural structure we now know as Western Civilization? If these uncouth, violent, and bloody-minded men had not fought on behalf of their fellow Christians, from whence would have come all the humane and tolerant values of postmodern culture?

This illustrates what I call the "Gandhi Syndrome". Mahatma Gandhi would not have had the impact he did, nor would India have gained its independence in 1947, if the non-violent Hindu movement had been directed at anything except a humane and Christian culture. Gandhi, in effect, shamed the British, pointing out the basis of their own Christian values and forcing them to act accordingly. Under Hitler, or Stalin, or Saddam, or Kim Jong-Il, the equivalent of Gandhi's movement would have been exterminated immediately, and its memory erased from recorded history.

The uncomfortable fact remains: modern civil society, with its culture of tolerance and human rights, is a creation of Western Christendom. Its existence is not a given; it is dependent upon constant vigilance and a willingness to do violence against those who would violently overturn it.

The humane tolerance of Western Civilization is an anomaly. On a historical scale, it has existed for but the briefest of moments, and can be extinguished with very little warning.We ignore these facts at our peril.