The BBC today is reporting an important speech by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. The headline captures the essence of it: “West should focus on radical Islam.” He argues that issues such as the Ukraine crisis are temporary shadows flitting across the global landscape which is more deeply marked by the confrontation between two cultures, which he labels “the West” and “radical Islam.”
For the sake of this post let us concede that Blair is correct in his assessment of sideshow crises and in his diagnosis of the real symptomatic issue of our time. (I hasten to add that history would urge a more concerned analysis of sideshows and their impact on global affairs, but be that as it may.) My focus just now is on the notion of “radical” as applied to a religious faith.
Blair sets up an implicit contrast. On the one hand, he speaks, as reported, of “the threat posed by a radical view which ‘distorts and warps Islam’s true message,’” which he further labels as both “a threat” and “closed-minded.” On the other hand, he posits “the culture” of “the West” which is, he asserts, “open-minded.” On the one hand, “radical” Islam and on the other “open-minded culture.”
Tony Blair is, in his personal life, a Roman Catholic. Perhaps a fear of being thought biased has prompted his utterly bland description of the conflict. Would branding the West as “Christian” be portrayed as something other than “open-minded” or would it simply be ridiculed as being inaccurate? Probably both. Let me elaborate.
Only very recently could a Western international statesmen, for such is Tony Blair if anyone is, get away with such a blandly vanilla description of the heartbeat of Western culture. After all, as Simon Schama makes clear in his recent The Story of the Jews, the Jewish experience of Western culture ever since their expulsion from the Holy Land under Roman decree was one of anti-Semitic prejudice followed by programs and pogroms and indeed Schama uses this Christian pressure on Jews as justifying intellectual foundation for his own embracing of Zionism. One exception he enthusiastically notes and lauds, namely the seven century experience in Spain during which Jews were ruled by, wait for it, Muslims. Schama does not use the label but in essence he founds Zionism on a reaction to “radical Christianity.” Closed-minded Christianity, of course. The Nazi horror was, Schama would have us understand, the apotheosis of this Geist.
I mention this not to disagree with Schama’s analysis of the history of anti-Semitism, but rather to throw into high relief the nature of today’s western culture. In short, Christianity is so weakened in the West by secularism and the insidiously suicidal identification of its own values with those of liberal democracy that its institutional vigor has withered to the point of public irrelevance, the hullabaloo over the current pope’s “leadership style” notwithstanding.
From this perspective, therefore, any enthusiasm (!) for religion and its public practice and/or role in political life is bound to seem “extreme, radical” even primitive. “Radical Islam” is a phrase that trips off the tongue too felicitously in the West. What strikes a secular resident of the West as radical may be no more than faithful observance. Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn are viewed as almost quaint, in the same realm as the Pennsylvania Amish. Tourist attractions, not terrorists.
I hear the objection: But they do not blow up buildings and kill innocent people. Clearly. Criminal activity is criminal no matter the motive and criminal activity is a challenge to justice. The slaughter by gunshot currently taking place on the streets of Chicago (as widely reported) and fast approaching crisis proportions (a death rate exceeding that in Afghanistan) is not branded “radical western secular culture.” It is simply “drug gang related madness,” a criminal trend that must be stopped; not a good advertisement for an “open-minded” heaven. Nor are the riots in Rio on the eve (almost) of the World Cup.
My point can be put this way: in the West today any faith commitment seems radical if expressed in public and asserted to be relevant to policy. Only a hermit could be unaware of the “war on Christianity” currently being waged across the USA in ways both subtle and explicit. Former president, Jimmy Carter, once asked, “If Christianity were a crime would there be enough evidence to convict you?” Alas, the answer in our secular culture, open-minded though it may be, is too obvious for too many. Western Christians are not “radical” or “extreme” enough. But, should they stick their noses into the public square just the teeniest, tiniest bit, they will be labeled as such.
clamjamfrey 