Why We Need to Keep “Peaceful” Muslims Out: The Islamic Threat as the Overdue and Popular Funeral of Western Liberalism
“Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the Kingdom of God.” -Jesus the Christ
There is no country, no rule of law, without a culture to tell us what the nature and destiny of man is, and therefore what justice is. There is no culture without a specific dominant tradition. The culture flows from its tradition. As the anthropologists have noted, culture is religion made concrete. Culture is the practical implementation of a traditional account of moral and metaphysical Reality including, at the core, its understanding of what it means to be human and therefore what it means to be just. (For Christians this starts with the Ten Commandments.) Politics are simply a dimension of dominant culture.
If we will not embrace and defend an official tradition then non-violent Muslims are more dangerous than violent Muslims, precisely because there are more of them and their method is much more effective — creeping numeric superiority. The “peaceful” Muslim is a much more effective agent of fascism than the terrorist. A country without a clear commitment to a competing tradition is his ideal target.
If we do not have a clear, institutionalized tradition, or if we refuse to defend the one we have, we are finished. The liberal myth of universal reason leading us to universal principles of justice is dead. It is waiting to be buried. A myth, let alone a dead one, cannot protect us from competing traditions like Islam which demonstrate the uselessness of the notion that universal reason, which does not exist, is the viable replacement for human traditions, human religion.
The contemporary rise of Islam is poison injected directly into the veins of the western liberal tradition. It will precipitate Liberalism’s overdue funeral in western countries, as a failed response to human nature and human history. As soon as we bury liberalism in the west, we will be ready to bury Islam in the west. Liberalism is a disintegrating buffer zone between Islam and orthodox Christianity. Both Islam and Christianity will participate in the destruction of Liberalism. Liberals think this is shocking, a nightmare. We think it is natural and inevitable.
Think of liberalism as an attempt to end the ancient, ongoing war between Christianity and Islam, by introducing a tradition-transcendent description of reason around which both sides could coexist, coming together over rational agreement about the nature of justice. This is like the neighborhood soccer mom exhorting Rommel and Patton to kiss and make up. Saudi Arabia, and other mid-eastern countries, are in no more control of their real Muslims than American elites, including establishment Republicans, can control its real Christians. Elite control of any of us is an illusion. We are not interested in living in their vapid world. This disgusts the elites, which only delights us.
The methodologically non-violent Muslims, like the violent Muslims, know that the West cannot survive on the basis of liberalism. They see western liberalism as a death wish they are helping the west to fulfill. The difference between methodologically non-violent and violent Muslims is the patience of the former. Islam cannot win with terrorism. It can only win with sheer numbers, and the smartest Islamic strategists know it. These strategists, no doubt, abhor Islamic terrorism as a threat to the winning strategy. The “peaceful” Muslims, putting their time and energy into PR and numeric superiority, are smarter, much more effective, and, therefore, more dangerous.
There must be a morality underpinning the total prohibition of Islamic immigration. Which moral argument is more convincing, (A) or (B)?
A. Islamic immigration must end because a small fraction of immigrants will engage in violence. We have the right to make even one incident impossible.
B. Islamic immigration must end because Islam is fascism. It is the enemy of our Christian tradition which we must now be explicitly committed to as the underpinning, the justification, of our whole system of justice. There is no American system of justice, as we know it, including human rights, without Christian anthropology anchored in Christian theology. In the meantime western Liberalism is dead. It is no longer a viable substitute for the Christian tradition with respect to establishing and securing human rights. There is no such thing as universal reason and Islam proves it.
The trouble with (A) is that we do not know which immigrants are criminals. (A) presupposes that if an immigrant is not a terrorist he should be let in. Since we cannot know that an immigrant will commit violence before he has committed it, (A) punishes the good with the bad. There is no other standard implied by (A) except the non-violence standard which is impossible to apply before the fact.
The strength of (B) is that it understands why all Islamic immigrants are a threat to our freedom, even when they do not. We must not expect the average, peaceful Muslim to understand why he is a threat to our tradition, our freedom and our justice, defined by our traditional language. We are the judges of that, not them. Muslims reserve the right, in their own countries, to make the same judgment about the “American tradition” let alone the Christian tradition. Liberalism gives up the right to this judgment about foreign traditions wherever liberalism happens to be the dominant tradition — Europe and America. This is morally insane because it implies that Islam has the right to replace liberalism itself. In the meantime the average Muslim is not an expert about Islam. On the internet we find evidence that some Muslims, on their way to Christianity, are shocked by what they did not understand about Islam. This is not something we are obligated to count on.
The Christian tradition and Islam are incommensurate. There is no logical contact. There is no liberal dialogue, or debate, or conversation. And we will not be patronized by liberal fools and elites. They are not the judge of whether or not Islam is compatible with the American tradition, with a Christian system of justice. We are.
WE the people will decide for ourselves what the true nature of Islam is. Neither western liberals, nor politicians, nor nice Muslims, nor Hollywood stars, nor academic experts, nor the mainstream media will decide this for us. About this, they can all rest assured. We are currently engaged in the process of making it clear to the elites, the “experts”, the Muslims, that WE, the American people, will be the judge of Islam. This is a liberal nightmare, and we are going to make it real.
Christian anthropology argues that man is made in the image of a personal God, that he therefore has personal dignity and rights as a human individual even when he is guilty; that he should be treated the way that Christ treated persons; that persons are ends in themselves and the goal of creation; that each individual is a center of freedom and responsibility; that his nature and destiny transcends the state, transcends politics, transcends any caliphate; that his primary source of authority is Christ for which there is no other rightful substitute; that his divine transcendence makes all authoritarianism and totalitarianism by temporal government evil.
Darwinism, by contrast and by way of a competing example, just will not do. Without Christianity, there is no doctrine which can support civilization as humanism. Liberals are so moronic that they imagine that Darwin’s world view is somehow compatible with the primacy of persons, even though they are mere accidents. And neither will Islam do. Persons in the Islamic tradition are nothing but the slaves of Allah and his caliphs. They are not ends in themselves.
For orthodox Christians, planning to defeat Islam in the west, goal number one is to eliminate liberal leadership from all of western culture because liberalism is suicide, a death wish. When it comes to Islam, among other things, liberals are either the greatest morons in the history of the world, or brilliantly evil. Next, the American people must insist, at least in a de facto populist sense, and as the primary manner by which we arm ourselves, that Christianity is the underlying tradition of the United States.
The most tragic and stupid omission of the US Constitution of 1789 is its failure to establish Christianity as the official tradition of the United States and then protecting that tradition, as the foundation of our entire system of justice, in a manner which is perfectly obvious and central to the defense of the nation — an immigration policy which guarantees the dominance of Christianity. This, of course, would have been a complete rejection of the Enlightenment, of western liberalism — the puerile notion that justice could be based on reason alone.
If the average American cannot finally understand, or at least accept his neighbor’s word, that our system of justice, our rejection of Sharia Law, can only be based upon a Christian view of Reality, which is therefore the most indispensable aspect of our country, we are doomed. But the average American, including naïve libertarians, can and will understand this by virtue of being confronted directly by the Islamic threat. The libertarians will come to understand that Islam has its own account of Reason very unlike their own. The average American does not and will not trust Islam. The Islamic threat is an evolving revelation with wide-ranging implications for intellectual couch potatoes. They are already sitting up. Pretty soon they will be standing. Soon after that they may be shaking in fear. God has his reasons for allowing the Islamic threat to grow. It requires the end of liberalism. In order to deal with Islam we start with an overdue populist funeral for what is already dead and redolent.
Ideally, our Constitution would be amended to make Christianity its official religion and prohibit any degree of foreign immigration which could threaten the dominance of that tradition. This can be done without a state church and church taxes. In support of the official tradition, public education should simply be eliminated, not turned into any official church as it is today — the state church of western liberalism. Private schools would be free to attack the tradition. But the government proper would not be.
Today, this vision is radical. But as the Islamic world closes in it will be less and less radical. We are surrounded by temporary fools. They will wise up rapidly when faced with chaos and the potential victory of fascism in the form of Islam.
Liberals believe that underneath all of their cultural baggage everyone has the capacity and desire to be just like them. All it takes are the right circumstances. Muslims, they think, will become liberals as soon as they are made autonomously rational by being provided for.
The only way to explain this moronic falsification of human nature is with the following theory. Liberals are, on average and by degree, amazingly superficial people, who have never experienced a great passion, like a burning religious vision, or a profound sense of the holiness of God and one’s tragic human condition standing next to it. They block out both transcendent hope and the depths of despair. These emotions tell us that we are not in control. They are based in the first place on unresolved guilt. This degree of humanity is very difficult to resolve with drugs and therapy and faith in science. Liberals are incapable of taking the leap of faith, of basing their entire lives on the trust of an omnipotent God over whom they have no control. They convert theology to social justice which they can administer and control. They reduce God to a happy, oblivious uncle who accepts anything his nieces and nephews do. All of their campaigns are a kind of pretense to emotional depth, a kind of feigning of real passion. For clearly, being good in the liberal sense is absolutely mediocre in the eyes of normal, passionate people. Liberals are what they are because the circumstances of their lives never induced enough moral and metaphysical imagination to lead them either to profound despair, or the ecstasy of cosmic hope. They are actually emotionally and morally impoverished people who adopt what they know are impractical forms of idealism as a substitute for real goodness. They will never understand the human search for meaning which transcends anything which liberalism has to offer. Liberalism is spiritual and emotional mediocrity. It is incapable of comprehending the heights and depths that other people experience as the terror and glory of life. Liberals cannot understand orthodox Christians or orthodox Muslims for their dedication to a vision which is all consuming. Real passion, for them, is a strange, alien, threatening experience. All real passion is dangerously illiberal. Liberals choose boredom and mediocrity over a riveting world of dangerous people. The rest of us are willing to embrace the goal of everyone being truly human, truly passionate, and finally potentially if not actually dangerous. In this, we are obviously following God’s example.
Liberalism is an inauthentic existential expression. It is a strategy for escaping, rather than directly confronting, human existence as such — unpleasant experience like guilt and radical evil and the incommensurate conflict of competing traditions. The vast majority of humanity does not care about the liberal version of reason and Reality. Liberalism hides behind the notion that traditional human experience is irrational. Existence itself must be altered because it is by nature illiberal; it arrives broken and tragic as a traditional (religious), unscientific process. It calls for a new human consciousness which liberals have not been able to fabricate or promulgate.
And so the liberals will never understand what is about to destroy their imaginary world — the awful, terrifying passion of both orthodox Christians and Muslims. The modern world has become so boring under liberal leadership that God may have no choice but to terrify the liberals by virtue of making the world interesting again; a place where human life is not reduced to two-bathrooms, two cars with wifi, giant TVs, iPads, drugs, rock music, healthy fast food, smart phones, free health care, and free pornography. Nietzsche was right about this much. A man, or woman, who cannot understand nihilism, in the face of modernity, is not fully human. The saccharine moralizing of liberals, without a religious vision, is bathos; it is the capstone of modern inauthenticity and boredom.
And this is why Islam is visiting itself on the liberals, and concomitantly on us. Orthodox Christianity, as the de facto tradition of the United States, insisted upon by the people whether the liberals like it or not, will save the liberals from a beheading. But it will never again imbue them with power.
