Now that the Boston bombers have turned out, contrary to the
fervent hope of the left, to be not Tea Partiers but Muslims, the media are
spinning the terrorists’ motive away from jihad and shrugging, helplessly
mystified, about the “senseless” attacks. And so our willful blindness about
Islam continues. Nearly a dozen years after the 9/11 attacks, too many Americans
still cling to militant denial about the clear and present danger of an Islamic
fundamentalism surging against an anemic Western culture. What will it take to educate
them? And once awakened, what steps can we take to reverse the tide?
The vicious Boston attack makes these questions and William
“Kirk” Kilpatrick’s new book Christianity, Islam, and Atheism: The Struggle
for the Soul of the West all the more timely. In addition to being an
occasional contributor
to FrontPage Magazine, Kilpatrick is the author of other books, including Why
Johnny Can’t Tell Right from Wrong and Books
That Build Character: A Guide to Teaching Your Child Moral Values Through
Stories, and his articles about Islam have appeared in Investor’s
Business Daily, Catholic World Report, and other publications. He
was interviewed here
by Jamie Glazov at FrontPage about
the new book, which he intended not only as a wake-up call to the West about
Islam, but also as a practical guide, especially for Christians, to pushing
back against its spread and to countering Islam’s Western apologists.
Christianity, Islam,
and Atheism opens with a section titled “The Islamic Threat,” in which Kilpatrick
describes the rise of supremacist Islam and our correspondingly tepid defense
of Western values. Our collapse in the face of Islam, he says, is due in large
part to our abandonment of Christianity, which has led to “a population vacuum
and a spiritual vacuum” that Islam has rushed to fill. “A secular society…
can’t fight a spiritual war,” Kilpatrick writes. Contrary to the
multiculturalist fantasy dominant in the West today, “cultures aren’t the same
because religions aren’t the same. Some religions are more rational, more
compassionate, more forgiving, and more peaceful than others.” This is heresy
in today’s morally relativistic world, but it’s a critical point because “as
Christianity goes, so goes the culture.”
On the one hand, you have a growing
population of Muslim believers brimming with masculine self-confidence and
assertiveness about their faith, and on the other hand, you have a dwindling
population of Christians who are long on nurturance and sensitivity but short
on manpower. Who seems more likely to prevail?
Kilpatrick devotes a chapter to “The Comparison” between
Islam and Christianity, in which he points out that Christians who buy into the
concept of interfaith unity with Muslims would do well to look more closely at
our irreconcilable differences instead of our limited common ground; he
demonstrates, for example, that the imitation of Christ and the imitation of
Muhammad lead a believer in radically different directions.
In “The Culture War and the Terror War” section, Kilpatrick
notes that Christianity is on the losing side of the many fronts of our own
culture war, and this doesn’t bode well for the West’s clash with a resurgent
Islam. An obsession with the shallow, ephemeral distractions of pop culture
isn’t helping to shore up our cultural foundations. “Our survival,” he writes,
“hinges not on generating a succession of momentary sensations, but on finding
narratives that tell us who we are, where we have come from, and where we are
going”:
Our ability to resist aggression –
whether cultural or military – depends on the conviction that we have something
worth defending: something that ought to be preserved not only for our own sake
but also for the sake of those who attack us.
In the section “Islam’s Enablers,” Kilpatrick addresses the multiculturalists,
secularists, atheists, and Christian apologists for Islam whose intellectual
influences have contributed to the moral decline and Islamization of the West.
In a chapter with the great title “Multiculturalists: Why Johnny Can’t Read the
Writing on the Wall,” Kilpatrick comments on the indoctrinating impact of multicultural
educators and their whitewashing of Islam and denigration of our own culture:
[O]ur students would have been
better served if they had spent less time studying the Battle of Wounded Knee
and more time studying the Battle of Lepanto, less time understanding the
beauty of diversity and more time understanding the misery of dhimmitude.
Finally, in “The Cold War with Islam,” Kilpatrick is
pessimistic of our desire to win the hearts and minds of “moderate Muslims.” He
examines at length just what that label actually means, and then notes that
such a strategy isn’t an especially helpful one:
The promotion of the moderate myth
is counterproductive because it misleads the West into thinking that its
problem is only with a small slice of Islam and because it strengthens the hand
of traditional Islam, which is the source of radicalism, not the solution to
it.
What are his recommendations for mounting a defense of our
values against the aggressive spread of Islamic ones? Reviving the commitment
to our own Judeo-Christian values for starters, and then, “instead of a
constant yielding to Islamic sensitivities, it may be time for some
containment. Sharia… should not be allowed to spread through Western
societies.” He touches on immigration, noting that it’s a problematic issue but
suggesting that it’s reasonable to question the motives and agendas of
immigrant groups. The message we must send? “Islam will not prevail. The West
will not yield. You must accommodate to our values and way of life if you
choose to live among us.”
As for going on the offensive, “instead of making excuses
for Islam… we should be devoting our energies to exposing its hollowness,”
relentlessly sowing the seeds of doubt among Muslims and encouraging them to
abandon the faith. Taking that to the next level, Kilpatrick urges Christians
to undertake the daunting task of mounting a widespread evangelizing of
Muslims, luring them to Christianity with the liberating message of the Gospel.
He concedes that this is a long-term strategy and we have no time to lose, but
“both Islam and the left stand on very shaky ideological ground… Christians
should take courage from knowing that in this war of ideas, all the best ideas
are on their side.”
The Freedom Center’s own Robert Spencer calls Christianity, Islam, and Atheism “essential
reading” and “a concise and comprehensive introduction to the reality and
magnitude of the Islamic supremacist threat.” That is exactly right. This brief
review does not do justice to the book’s breadth and compelling moral and
cultural arguments. It’s an important addition to a library for educating
ourselves and others about, as the subtitle puts it, “the struggle for the soul
of the West.”
(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Mag, 4/26/13)
