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Should Christians “forget” their historical conflict with Islam?
A correspondent disagrees with my criticism of the Second Vatican Council for calling on Christians to “forget” their long history of conflict with Islam. He offers a more benign interpretation of the Council’s statement.
Correspondent to LA:
There are certainly plenty of things to dislike about the post-Vatican II Church, but at the same time I think we need to take the period into account. In the mid-1960s Islam was not a threat; indeed, it was seen by the West as a potential ally. The big worry was Communism, both in the Soviet Union and the Communist parties in western Europe. This belief in Islam’s usefulness continued right up until the 1980s, when Reagan was arming the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan.
That Communism would suddenly vanish 25 years later never dawned on most at the time, even those who considered it a seriously flawed ideology. The same was really true of Islamic radicalism. It’s hard to remember, but most of the Arab terrorist movements in the 1960s were secular in nature, like the PLO and PFLP. Nasser and other Baathists were suppressing Islamists. So, it seemed logical to extend a hand to other believers, even if they were of a different faith.
Of course, none of this excuses later stupidities, like JPII kissing the Koran, or his inane comments on immigration. By the 1980s, the Church should have started figuring things out.
At any rate, given the fact that Islam has not exactly held up its end of the “forgetting” bargain, as we can see with the never ending and tiresome references to the Crusades, I don’t see anything standing in the way of adopting a more confrontational approach. Indeed, if anything, it can be done with a clearer conscience.
LA to correspondent:
Good point. Thank you.
Still, your mitigation of the indictment against Vatican II can only go so far. Was there EVER any basis for an intelligent European Christian to say that “we should forget” the entire history of Islam in its attempt to subdue and destroy all that was not itself, including, most importantly, Christianity?
Also, you’re suggesting that the “forget the history of Islam” idea came from anti-Communism, when, if anything, it came from the liberalism of Vatican II.
Correspondent to LA:
I think when the Vatican Council said “forget,” they meant in the sense that Louis XVIII of France meant when he ordered royalists and republicans to “forget” everything that happened between 1789 and 1815. The idea was to deal with real challenges instead of being divided by abstruse historical accusations and counter-accusations. It was an offer: you drop your grudge and we’ll drop ours. The only catch was that other side didn’t follow through. And, in fact, that approach didn’t work out very well for the Bourbon Restoration, either.
LA to correspondent:
Well, that’s an interesting way of seeing it, but I don’t agree. First, both of the sides that Louis XVIII was addressing were his fellow Frenchmen, not members an alien religion that had been at war with his own for 1,400 years. Second, the phrase, “this sacred synod urges all to forget the past…” is a bombshell, signaling a radical shift of consciousness within the Christian West. For context, look at the words that follow it: “…and to work sincerely for mutual understanding and to preserve as well as to promote together for the benefit of all mankind social justice and moral welfare, as well as peace and freedom.” Peace, Freedom, Social Justice! Everybody getting along! That doesn’t sound like a statement from the historic Catholic Church, but like a manifesto from the Americans for Democratic Action. Given this context, the real meaning of the words, “this sacred synod urges all to forget the past,” becomes clearer: What is being expressed here is liberalism, the denial of the existence of enemies and evil, the belief that all differences can be resolved by good will and reasonable discussion. Anything that doesn’t fit that nice picture must be erased from the mind, “forgotten.” None of this has anything to do with biblical or traditional Christianity.
Here’s a different application of the same mindset, which I discussed in a 1998 article, “Multiculturalism and the Demotion of Man”:
As David Shipler, an apostle of racial correctness, inadvertently reveals in his recent book A Country of Strangers: Black and White in America, this systematic denial of plain evidence by “right-thinking” whites is achieved through a deliberate act of self-hypnosis:
This is the ideal: to search your attitudes, identify your stereotypes, and correct for them as you go about your daily duties.
This, at its Orwellian core, is the mindset that enables contemporary whites never to entertain a negative conclusion about blacks, while always making whites themselves responsible for blacks’ moral and intellectual failings. This (in Joseph Sobran’s useful coinage) is alienism: “a prejudice in favor of the alien, the marginal, the dispossessed, the eccentric, reaching an extreme in the attempt to ‘build a new society’ by destroying the basic institutions of the native.” This is the intellectual and spiritual environment which, combined with racial diversification, has turned America into the opposite of itself—into the anti-white, anti-Christian, anti-rational, anti-American anti-nation that is Multicultural America.
However the project is described, we must systematically block from our minds whatever doesn’t fit the liberal vision of unity and equality. In short, we must lie to ourselves, and punish our fellow citizens who refuse to lie to themselves. So I don’t see the Council’s statement in a benevolent light. When they said, “Forget our historical experience of Islam,” I think they were acting as seriously deluded liberals, or worse.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 20, 2005 09:01 PM | Send
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