Lilla calls for Western surrender to Islam

In January 2006 I wrote that when push came to shove and a European Caliphate was formed, European elites would eagerly surrender to it, since they would prefer to live under the power of Islam than to continue as leaders of their own civilization which they despise. My prediction has been coming true faster than I expected. In a long cover article in the August 19 New York Times Magazine, Mark Lilla, a respected academic who teaches at Columbia University and the renowned Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago and has been published widely in neoconservative journals, presents the following argument. Liberalism, with its rejection of religion, a rejection that Lilla supports 100 percent, has nothing to offer against the Islamic religion which liberalism has permitted into the West in the form of tens of millions of Muslim immigrants. Therefore, Lilla concludes, the best that we can do is hope that a moderate form of Islam, such as that proposed by Tariq Ramadan, becomes the dominant belief system of the West. Though Muslims are at present only one percent of the U.S. population, Lilla nevertheless thinks that they are so strong, and we so weak, that we must allow their religion to hold sway in our society. Lilla prefers this outcome to a renewed Western Christian faith that would fight back against Islam.

Notice the nihilistic last sentence of Lilla’s article: “All we have is our own lucidity, which we must train on a world where faith still inflames the minds of men.” His lucidity is that of the liberal who believes in no truth that the lucidity could illuminate, a lucidity that can only perceive the strange irrational beliefs of others. And if those others are Christians, we must dismiss and silence them. And if those others are Muslims, we must let them take us over, and “hope” that they will not be too harsh toward us.

Thus in one week we have seen two articles from two nominal conservatives with essentially the same theme. John Derbyshire and Mark Lilla, both of whom hate Christianity more than they love the West, have written off any possible Western defense against Islam, because such defense would require affirming the truth and goodness of Christianity. Yet they reject Christianity for different reasons. Lilla rejects it because he fears any kind of revelation, any kind of truth-claim that would threaten to become authoritative for society (unless of course the truth-claim is that of Islam). So Lilla rejects Christianity because he fears its strength, while Derbyshire rejects Christianity because, ostensibly, he despises its weakness: it’s a “religion of slaves” which allows alien masses to invade and transform our countries. Of course that’s only a pretext; does anyone imagine that Derbyshire would be pro-Christianity if he thought it were strong? His real wish is to make manifest the Nothing that is his god. To see America and the West go down, and be able to blame this catastrophe on Christianity and its belief in God—that is Derbyshire’s desideratum.

The depth of Lilla’s animus against Christianity is suggested by the fact that he repeatedly refers to Islam as a “biblical” faith along with Christianity and Judaism. Islam is based on the Koran, not the Bible, and its various references to the Bible are distorted and grotesque beyond belief. Muslims are commanded to wage unending war against Jews and Christians and to kill all Jews at the last day. To call Islam a “biblical” faith is obscene. But it is much more than an expression of disrespect or bigotry. I’ve previously written that when Scott McConnell, the editor and publisher of The American Conservative, approvingly quoted a Christian minister who had described Mary the mother of Jesus as a “poor Palestinian woman,” he was “invoking the Revisionist Palestinian Theology which is aimed at removing Israel from its central place in the Christian world view, as a preparation for removing Israel from the world.” Similarly, Mark Lilla, by calling Islam one of the “biblical faiths,” moves Islam into the space occupied by Judaism and Christianity in our civilizaition, in preparation for replacing them as our dominant religion.

Apart from his hostility to Christianity, which, after all, is only to be expected of a secular liberal such as himself, the most remarkable thing about Lilla’s article is that he won’t even take a stand in defense of liberalism. He doesn’t say: “We cannot let these anti-liberal Muslims destroy our free, liberal, tolerant society. We must put limits on their activities; we must stop further Muslim immigration; we must insist that Muslims accept our liberal values or leave.” He doesn’t even mouth the usual empty slogans about assimilation being the answer. Nope. He just wants to hand the West over to Tariq Ramadan.

What this shows is that, once a Western liberal has turned against his culture, nation, and religion, of which liberalism was an outgrowth and expression, he abandons liberalism as well.

Our culture, nation, and religion are like our bodily self. Liberalism is a set of ideas believed in by that bodily self; take away the body, and there’s no self there anymore to believe in or defend those ideas.

Listen, liberals! If you want our society to maintain its liberalism, albeit in a modified, no longer dominant form, then you need to support the renewal of our historic nationhood, culture and religion that traditionalists such as myself advocate. Only such a renewed culture can fortify and defend the West against the Islamic religion which would destroy all liberalism.

Below I have excerpted the final and most relevant section of Lilla’s article.

The Politics of God
Mark Lilla
New York Times Magazine
August 19, 2007

… For more than two centuries, promoters of modernization have taken it for granted that science, technology, urbanization and education would eventually “disenchant” the charmed world of believers, and that with time people would either abandon their traditional faiths or transform them in politically anodyne ways. They point to continental Europe, where belief in God has been in steady decline over the last 50 years, and suggest that, with time, Muslims everywhere will undergo a similar transformation. Those predictions may eventually prove right. But Europe’s rapid secularization is historically unique and, as we have just seen, relatively recent. Political theology is highly adaptive and can present to even educated minds a more compelling vision of the future than the prospect of secular modernity. It takes as little for a highly trained medical doctor to fashion a car bomb today as it took for advanced thinkers to fashion biblically inspired justifications of fascist and communist totalitarianism in Weimar Germany. When the urge to connect is strong, passions are high and fantasies are vivid, the trinkets of our modern lives are impotent amulets against political intoxication.

Realizing this, a number of Muslim thinkers around the world have taken to promoting a “liberal” Islam. What they mean is an Islam more adapted to the demands of modern life, kinder in its treatment of women and children, more tolerant of other faiths, more open to dissent. These are brave people who have often suffered for their efforts, in prison or exile, as did their predecessors in the 19th century, of which there were many. But now as then, their efforts have been swept away by deeper theological currents they cannot master and perhaps do not even understand. The history of Protestant and Jewish liberal theology reveals the problem: the more a biblical faith is trimmed to fit the demands of the moment, the fewer reasons it gives believers for holding on to that faith in troubled times, when self-appointed guardians of theological purity offer more radical hope. Worse still, when such a faith is used to bestow theological sanctification on a single form of political life—even an attractive one like liberal democracy—the more it will be seen as collaborating with injustice when that political system fails. The dynamics of political theology seem to dictate that when liberalizing reformers try to conform to the present, they inspire a countervailing and far more passionate longing for redemption in the messianic future. That is what happened in Weimar Germany and is happening again in contemporary Islam.

The complacent liberalism and revolutionary messianism we’ve encountered are not the only theological options. There is another kind of transformation possible in biblical faiths, and that is the renewal of traditional political theology from within. If liberalizers are apologists for religion at the court of modern life, renovators stand firmly within their faith and reinterpret political theology so believers can adapt without feeling themselves to be apostates. Luther and Calvin were renovators in this sense, not liberalizers. They called Christians back to the fundamentals of their faith, but in a way that made it easier, not harder, to enjoy the fruits of temporal existence. They found theological reasons to reject the ideal of celibacy, and its frequent violation by priests, and thus returned the clergy to ordinary family life. They then found theological reasons to reject otherworldly monasticism and the all-too-worldly imperialism of Rome, offering biblical reasons that Christians should be loyal citizens of the state they live in. And they did this, not by speaking the apologetic language of toleration and progress, but by rewriting the language of Christian political theology and demanding that Christians be faithful to it.

Today, a few voices are calling for just this kind of renewal of Islamic political theology. Some, like Khaled Abou El Fadl, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, challenge the authority of today’s puritans, who make categorical judgments based on a literal reading of scattered Koranic verses. In Abou El Fadl’s view, traditional Islamic law can still be applied to present-day situations because it brings a subtle interpretation of the whole text to bear on particular problems in varied circumstances. Others, like the Swiss-born cleric and professor Tariq Ramadan, are public figures whose writings show Western Muslims that their political theology, properly interpreted, offers guidance for living with confidence in their faith and gaining acceptance in what he calls an alien “abode.” To read their works is to be reminded what a risky venture renewal is. It can invite believers to participate more fully and wisely in the political present, as the Protestant Reformation eventually did; it can also foster dreams of returning to a more primitive faith, through violence if necessary, as happened in the Wars of Religion.

Perhaps for this reason, Abou El Fadl and especially Ramadan have become objects of intense and sometimes harsh scrutiny by Western intellectuals. We prefer speaking with the Islamic liberalizers because they share our language: they accept the intellectual presuppositions of the Great Separation and simply want maximum room given for religious and cultural expression. They do not practice political theology. But the prospects of enduring political change through renewal are probably much greater than through liberalization. By speaking from within the community of the faithful, renovators give believers compelling theological reasons for accepting new ways as authentic reinterpretations of the faith. Figures like Abou El Fadl and Ramadan speak a strange tongue, even when promoting changes we find worthy; their reasons are not our reasons. But if we cannot expect mass conversion to the principles of the Great Separation—and we cannot—we had better learn to welcome transformations in Muslim political theology that ease coexistence. The best should not be the enemy of the good.

In the end, though, what happens on the opposite shore will not be up to us. We have little reason to expect societies in the grip of a powerful political theology to follow our unusual path, which was opened up by a unique crisis within Christian civilization. This does not mean that those societies necessarily lack the wherewithal to create a decent and workable political order; it does mean that they will have to find the theological resources within their own traditions to make it happen.

Our challenge is different. We have made a choice that is at once simpler and harder: we have chosen to limit our politics to protecting individuals from the worst harms they can inflict on one another, to securing fundamental liberties and providing for their basic welfare, while leaving their spiritual destinies in their own hands. We have wagered that it is wiser to beware the forces unleashed by the Bible’s messianic promise than to try exploiting them for the public good. We have chosen to keep our politics unilluminated by divine revelation. All we have is our own lucidity, which we must train on a world where faith still inflames the minds of men.

- end of initial entry -

Justin T. writes:

You make the following statement in your post on Lilla’s absurd essay in The New York Times Magazine:

“Listen, liberals! If you want our society to maintain its liberalism, albeit in a modified, no longer dominant form, then you must subscribe to the renewal of nationhood, culture and religion that traditionalists such as myself advocate. Only such a renewed culture can fortify and defend the West against the Islamic religion which would destroy all liberalism.”

Unfortunately, I think that the destruction of our traditional culture by liberals may not necessarily lead them to re-embrace traditionalism as a bulwark against Islam, but something nearly as bad as Islam itself: fascism. In an essay by uber-atheist Sam Harris, “The End of Liberalism?”, he makes the following statement:

“The same failure of liberalism is evident in Western Europe, where the dogma of multiculturalism has left a secular Europe very slow to address the looming problem of religious extremism among its immigrants. The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists.”

And this is from a person well known for his attacks on every aspect of Christianity. Disturbing, it is not?

Laura G. writes:

I happen to be reading Diana West’s book: “The Death of The Grownup,” and think that her thesis is germaine to the issue of the flabby and supine responses of most of the West (especially Europe but including the U.S.) to Islam. She makes the point that here, in the U.S., there occurred a fairly sudden change in expectations for their own lives among youngsters who came of age just after WWII. The phenomenon of “teenagers” suddenly emerged from nowhere, music and movies ceased dramatizing the joys and heartaches of full adulthood, and began glamorizing the forever young and immature. Several of the long term consequences include the failure to raise families (who wants to do that sort of hard work when you can play at the beach and have affairs), very prolonged adolescence, and the shortened attention span and dumbing down of scholastic achievement. Most of all, the MSM ceased portraying genuine adult strength, heroism, and manliness to be admirable qualities which should serve as models for adulthood. Instead, we have the cult and admiration of victims.

I think that this understanding of one of our major flaws is right on the money. In particular, it appears that people who do not have to struggle for their essential needs, and are content to depend for them from others, revert to childhood, and childhood is certainly no position from which people can make a firm and lasting defense of their nation and culture when it comes under attack. I look especially at the Europeans, who have been very happy to allow the U.S. to bear all the dangers, expenses, and efforts of providing them with their national defenses. In this country too, defense is now borne by the relatively few families and personnel of those who choose careers in the military, and is also no longer an expected shared danger and responsibility. In Europe, they have sunk to the point that, when asked to participate with us in essential defense efforts, they are unwilling to go even that far to protect their own future. It has been an amazing thing to watch. All who have left essential functions to others have, as Diana West formulates, reverted to early childhood and are apparently planning to stay there. We can definitely be sure that the many enemies of our evolved and precious civilization have no such intention for themselves.

Alan Levine writes:

Lilla sounded like an idiot or an ignoramus simply for contrasting his contorted view of the West with the “rest of the world” when he really meant, if he meant anything, the Muslim world. The fact is that the rest of the non-Western world, whatever its other faults, is not in the throes of religious fanaticism or reaction in anyway comparable to the Muddle East. I stopped reading his article when I noticed that particular foolishness. Whether he is just that ignorant or trying to submerge the unique faults of the Muslims by smearing everybody else, I don’t know.

M. Mason writes:

I’ve just read the entire Times article and agree with your assessment. It is an unintentionally very revealing piece by a writer—not only of the existential void at the center of his own politics, but also of his intellectual ineptitude when it comes to speaking about the subject of Islam in particular. There is actually quite a lot to criticize about what he wrote, but I will simply point out that if Mr. Lilla were an honest and unprejudiced student of history, he would have at least acknowledged that throughout the centuries it is Islam that has been the relentless aggressor. It is Islam that overran the Mideast, Eastern Europe, and the Levant. It is Islam that is presently engaged in a global jihad against the rest of the world mandated by the Koran and incumbent upon every faithful Muslim. Given these plain facts, it really shouldn’t be difficult for an objective, unbiased individual possessed of normal intelligence to come to a definite conclusion about the dangers this totalitarian political ideology poses for the rest of us.

Our mortal enemy hides in plain sight. Why is Mr. Lilla unable to see the whites of their eyes? Because (echoing your conclusion) his own willful blindness, passivity and ultimately surrender is what a consistently applied liberal faith has left him with. In the end, all he can manage to contribute to the discussion is some pathetic, feeble bleating about “accommodation,” “respect” for and “coping” with the growing presence of Islam in Western countries. We will never really be able to understand an Ahmadinejad, he says, “and we must learn to live with that.”

It is a perfect example of the kind of dessicated, ideological hollow men who infest academia and the major media outlets today. With little if anything left to believe in, they are now primarily animated and fortified by irrational anti-Christian prejudices. Therefore, they have virtually nothing useful to say about how the West must respond to the present crisis it now faces. In the backseat of New York Times limousine liberals along with their ideological traveling companions like Lilla, Derbyshire and the rest, all the windows have been refitted with mirrors. They can no longer see the world as it is, they can only see what their atheism and nihilism has left them with—the reflection of their own emptiness.

Sage McLaughlin writes:

Hello again. I’m intrigued by this comment by your reader M. Mason in the discussion titled “Lilla calls for Western surrender to Islam”:

“They [liberal elites] can no longer see the world as it is, they can only see what their atheism and nihilism has left them with—the reflection of their own emptiness.”

Just so. This observation echoes what I think was Augustine’s quip that when we turn to run from God, we run into our own shadows. To put it in VFR-friendly terms, it is the spiritual darkness cast by our denial of the transcendent that devours our minds. Gazing into the Western soul to find some answer to the challenge of Islam, the modern Western man finds only a God-shaped void. Is it any wonder that so many Muslims believe that this is their time to strike?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 25, 2007 02:22 PM | Send