Sunday, May 15, 2016

Politics

Populism is diminishing democracies from Philippines to US

This was the week the world changed. The giant waves of crude populism — the new unstoppable force in global politics — crashed through the flimsy defences of the political establishment everywhere, defences that once looked so unassailable.Left-wing populism and right-wing populism, in truth lightly disguised twins, are devouring the politics of the centre, whether centre right or centre left.
In jurisdictions as different as they can be, sharing only the feature of being democratic in their politics, gross, vulgar, hyper-partisan populism is winning victory after victory for irrational hatreds and prejudices.
This week in The Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte was elected president by a big margin. The mayor of Davao City, Duterte once joked at the rape and murder of an Australian nurse that she was so good-looking he wished he had got in first. He boasted of his association with Davao death squads. He offered to kill hundreds of criminals and dump their bodies in Manila Bay. He abused the Pope in foul terms and cursed him for causing traffic gridlock during his visit. And he said that if his nation’s congress attempts to thwart his plans, he will dissolve it and rule The Philippines without congress.
Why did he win? His main promise was to crack down on crime, which is, as ever, a plague in The Philippines.
But Duterte’s victory follows six years of outstandingly good government by Filipino standards under the outgoing Benigno Aquino III, which saw the most rapid economic growth in the country since the earliest days of Ferdinand Marcos.
When ordinary voters were asked why they supported a figure such as Duterte, many of them said the same thing that Donald Trump’s new supporters say in the US: he seems authentic.
Authentic is the new vile word of democratic politics. Being authentic seems to mean you rejoice in your ignorance, you are dedicated to vulgarity and abuse, and your policies are incoherent.
The US also reached a new stage in the rise of populism this week. Oddly, it didn’t directly involve Trump. Bernie Sanders, the 74-year-old socialist from Vermont, smashed Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary in West Virginia. He has won 19 states to her 23. Sanders calls for a revolution in politics; he wants to implement socialism, he wants to smash up the banks, cut the military, impose radical new climate change policies, soak the top 1 per cent, make the rich pay and all the rest, without any idea about how these impulses might be reconciled with each other, or with the limitations of the physical universe.
But here’s the thing that was different this week; here is the marker of a new paradigm:
one-third of those who voted for Sanders in West Virginia say that if the US presidential election in November is a contest between Clinton and Trump, they will vote for Trump rather than Sanders’s political stablemate Clinton.
In a further radical development, new polls have Trump neck and neck with Clinton, especially in the key battleground states.
A month ago, Clinton led Trump by wide margins. Clinton is the last defender of centrist politics in the US, and her position has been steadily worsening for weeks.
There are differences between left-wing populism and right-wing populism.
Left-wing populism wants to smash capitalism in the interests of the climate, it tends not to be so nationalistic, though outside the US it is virulently anti-American, and it is mostly pro-gay rights.
Right-wing populism is intensely nationalistic and often nativist. It wants to smash capitalism, as it currently works, in the interest of giving more government money to the middle class.
But the common core of left and right populism is much more important than their differences. The common core is a seething anger beyond proportion to any injustice or imperfection that really exists in the society. The common core is a determination to smash politics-as-usual, with all its messy compromises.
The common core is a demand that government give more and perhaps endless transfer payments to the middle classes as well as to the poor. The common core is a hatred of international trade, which is really a hatred of foreigners, made palatable to the Left and newly attractive to the Right. The common core is a demonisation of any political competitor. And the common core is a loss of any sense of balance, restraint, coherence or responsibility, and an absolute contempt for the proper processes of democracy.
The third great moment of populist triumph this week was the impeachment by the Brazilian Senate of the democratically elected president, Dilma Rousseff.
There are lots of reasons to be critical of Rousseff. Brazil is suffering recession. Rousseff is not a very attractive politician. But she was impeached for allegedly fudging the figures of the national budget, surely a “crime” of which most governments are guilty, and impeached by a congress with dozens of members who are facing charges of actual corruption, of dishonestly putting money in their own pockets.
But that is the character of the new populism, a contempt for traditional restraints. This wave is breaking everywhere. Centrist politics is in full, panicked retreat.
A couple of weeks ago, Austria held a presidential election. Because no candidate won 50 per cent of the vote there will need to be a second round. The winner in the first round was the gun-toting Norbert Hofer of the far-right Freedom Party. Second placegetter was Alexander Van der Bellen from the Green Party.
The Austrian centre is mortally wounded. For the first time since 1945, neither the Social Democrats nor the Christian democrats will win Austria’s presidency. Hofer says he will veto Europe’s free-trade deal with the US, he is ardently anti-immigrant, but he is pro-welfare payments.
Eastern Europe is swinging away from moderate centrist democracy, which replaced communism in what seemed a historic and enduring triumph, and is instead heading towards populist authoritarianism.
Hungary’s government says it wants to build an “illiberal state”.
The Polish government wants the media to do as the government tells it to do.
The Czech President joins in anti-Muslim rallies.
Populism is destroying rational economics, with unknowable consequences. In Britain the populist UK Independence Party, which made huge gains in recent local council and Welsh assembly elections, started life as Eurosceptic and economically rationalist, arguing for smaller government and lower taxes.
It has abandoned economic rationalism and favours greater government money for almost everybody. It is leading a populist assault notionally from the right, but which is potentially more dangerous to the British ­Labour Party than to the Conservatives.
One central feature of populism is that its proponents know they will almost certainly never have to make the real, painful, inevitable compromises of effective government. They can and do promise anything and everything, things that cannot go together.
Trump says he will pay down $US19 trillion of debt, increase military spending, protect social entitlements and balance the budget. It can’t be done, by him or by anyone else.
A new Italian party promises to double the pension. This will bankrupt the country. It’s not about economics, they say, but justice.
The attachment of tremendous moral intensity to irrational policy positions is the essence of populism. Populism has brought about the massive growth of parties that don’t care for compromise.
In 1955, 96 per cent of the British electorate voted Conservative or Labour. Both of these parties had coherent policy packages that made the essential compromises of reality and offered alternative but coherent policy platforms.
Last year, barely two-thirds of Brits voted for either of the main parties. This is not a splendid flowering of diversity but a flight from responsibility.
The same trends are evident in Australia. In 1975, 95 per cent of the vote went to the Coalition or to Labor. In 2013, it was little more than three-quarters in the House of Representatives and less in the Senate.
There are many reasons people vote for minor parties, but there is no escaping the fact no minor party really offers a coherent program in which means and ends are matched. Those minor parties that used to preach fiscal discipline, such as Germany’s venerable Free Democrats, have disappeared.
Our own politics are profoundly shaped by the global rise of populism. This is obscured only a little by the eclipse of the Palmer United Party. That came about for two clear reasons unrelated to policy: the commercial demise of Queensland Nickel and the personal divisions within the PUP Senate team. But, as in the US, it is our main parties that are now becoming ­hostages to populism or enthusiastic vehicles for it.
The Liberal-National government under Malcolm Turnbull has virtually given up on fiscal consolidation. And fiscal consolidation, of course — the idea that you might take something away from some voters to balance the budget, live within your means, avoid a long-term debt crisis, keep the taxation burden in order, promote wider economic growth — is the very opposite of populism.
So while the Turnbull government is not a populist avatar, it is a prisoner of populism. Even its rhetoric is now unconsciously apeing the rhetoric of the populist Occupy Wall Street movement, the anti-1 per cent movement, the movement that demonises high-income earners.
Thus in justifying perfectly defensible changes to superannuation arrangements, Scott Morrison this week commented that if you are in the top 1 per cent, you can afford to pay some more tax.
Here is the new Liberal response to populism — a mild, measured, well-mannered offer to manage the populist impulse less damagingly than Labor would. But gone is the rhetoric of smaller government, deregulation or any real effort to lower taxes.
If the Coalition is a prisoner of the new populism, Labor is its enthusiastic proponent. At a time when the nation faces a $40 billion deficit and already pays more than $12bn a year in interest, when foreign debt is $1 trillion, when our terms of trade have moved decisively against us, Bill Shorten offers a massive new burst of social spending, demonising of the banks, entrenched labour market rigidity to protect unions and lock the marginalised out of work, and endlessly increased welfare to keep them dependent forevermore.
All this at a time when the evidence has never been weaker that increased spending on education, along the lines of the huge increases we have had during the past 1½ decades, produces any tangible benefit.
One central part of populism is an utter distrust of government and the integrity of government processes. So all claims for good policy are inherently suspect. The only thing the electorate accepts from government is money. More transfer payments, more money for health and education, salary increases for public servants of all kinds.
The electorate just about believes government can deliver on this, but good economic policy, long-term tax relief, these are now meaningless. All of that resides in a realm of policy discussion much of the electorate no longer takes seriously.
What has caused this global rise of populism? That is a very big question. Here are some initial, sketchy suggestions.
There is obvious anger at the income inequality that seems to have been exacerbated by the global financial crisis of nearly a decade ago, and the stagnation, especially in the US, of wages for the bottom half of society.
But that alone is a most unsatisfactory explanation. The West endured the Depression and resorted only to the moderate efforts of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the US and a Labor government in Australia. There was no Donald Trump or anything like him.
Instead, here are a few other longer-term likely culprits.
One is the education system. Western education, at school and university level, is infused with the idea that the West is corrupt and wicked in all its works, that capitalism is destroying the environment, that Western history is one long brutal story of military conquest, that Western society is sexist, racist, homophobic, militarist, that Western religion is irrational.
Often an exaggerated hostility to the West is the chief connecting thread of education. The examples of this are countless. Israel is demonised in part because it is a Western-patterned society in the Middle East, so naturally Victorian Certificate of Education students study a locally written play depicting Israel as evil and the oppressor of the Palestinians.
Second, US politics, and therefore global politics, has undergone a long discrediting. Watergate under Richard Nixon shocked Americans and convinced them that their president can lie and cheat. Bill Clinton’s scandal with Monica Lewinsky was not so important in itself, but Clinton lied about it under oath, proving that anything goes.
And the Republicans responded in spades with abuse. Both sides became hyper-partisan. They spoke about each other in terms of extravagant disrespect in a way that Americans had not been accustomed to speaking of their political leaders.
Then came the failures of Iraq and the sense again, even if not justified, that the government had lied to the people. The disappointment of Barack Obama followed. And US political culture lends its character in some measure to democratic political culture everywhere. There is nothing more derivative than allegedly spontaneous populist outrage.
Third, American popular culture, which in truth is global popular culture, has for a few decades now produced film after film, TV series after TV series, in which the villain is the US government, the CIA or a big corporation. That is now many people’s mental reality.
Fourth, the corrosive influence of social media on public debate serves above all to amplify complaint and abuse, and complaint and abuse are the dark heart of populism.
These turbulent currents threaten a kind of permanent crisis in governance across the democratic world.
And our only weapons in response are rational argument and the petty integrity of facts.
This could all get much worse before it gets any better.
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Vocations

Crisis Magazine

Sacrificing Religious Life on the Altar of Egalitarianism


Young Catholics are spurning religious life.  According to the Official Catholic Directory, there were only 1,853 seminarians studying for American religious orders in 2011.  That’s less than half the number of religious seminarians that were studying in 1980 (4,674), and less than one tenth the number that were studying in 1965 (22,230), according to Kenneth Jones’ Index of Leading Catholic Indicators.  Even the most successful religious orders are suffering.  The U.S. Dominicans boast of increased vocations, but today they have only about 100 student brothers (compared to 343 in 1965).  Dominican vocations may have increased in the past few years—likely as a result of perceived orthodoxy, strong community life, and aggressive promotional efforts—but they are still anemic.  Orders like the Dominicans look successful only because everyone else has hit rock bottom.
According to Jones’ figures, the Passionists went from having 574 seminarians in 1965, to 5 in 2000.  The Vincentians went from 700 to 18.  The Oblates of Mary Immaculate went from 914 to 13.  The Redemptorists went from 1,128 to 24.  The same story holds for the Jesuits, OFM, Christian Brothers, Benedictines, Maryknoll Fathers, Holy Cross Fathers, Augustinians, and Carmelites.  American religious vocations have been decimated, and they remain decimated today.  Religious life in America, therefore, continues its precipitous decline: according to the USCCB, compared to the 214,932 American religious in 1965, there were only 102,326 religious in 2000; 84,918 in 2006; 80,137 in 2008; and now 69,405 in 2013.  Of the 69,405 religious who remain today the average age is close to seventy years old.
What happened to religious vocations?  Some commentators blame heterodoxy within American orders.  Others blame our glitzy, debauched culture.  Still others blame a prevailing spiritual malaise amongst Catholics.  But there is another cause for the vocations crisis that commentators fail to recognize: vocations directors, counselors, and authors, despite their best intentions, systematically undermine religious vocations.
Suppose that you are considering religious life.  Today’s vocations counselors will advise you to search your heart for a desire to live religious life; and they will tell you that if you don’t find this desire you are probably not called.  For example, James Martin, S.J., prominent Catholic author and editor of America, writes in an article for the VISION Vocations Network, “God awakens our vocations primarily through our desires.”  He claims, “Henri Nouwen became a priest because he desired it,” and “Thérèse of Lisieux entered the convent because she desired it.”  Fr. Martin Pable, author of the widely recommended guide to religious discernment, A Religious Vocation: Is It for Me?, also focuses on desire.  He says that we are called to religious life by a “natural desire or attraction toward
the life.”  If we are “repulsed or just not attracted” by religious life, that’s “a sign we are not being called.”  Vocations directors across the country refer young Catholics to authors like Martin and Pable.  They also echo Martin and Pable’s discernment advice.  Sister Colleen Therese Smith, vocation director of the Apostles of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, says that when it comes to your vocation “your own deepest desires do in fact reflect God’s deepest desires for you.”  The Mid-America Cupuchins’ vocation team says that the first sign of a religious vocation “can be phrased by the question, ‘Do I have a desire for the life?’”  Sister Margie Lavonis, vocations counselor for the Sisters of the Holy Cross, says, “One of the best ways to discover what God asks of you is for you to listen to the deepest desire of your heart.”  Other examples abound.  The prevailing opinion amongst those who talk and write about discernment is that God calls men and women to religious life by placing an innate desire for religious life in their hearts.  If you have no such desire, it is unlikely that you are called.
This advice, although it looks harmless on the surface, ends up thwarting religious vocations.  Men and women who prayerfully examine their desires almost never find a strong desire for religious life lodged in the depths of their hearts.  Religious life, in itself, is not a desirable good.  Religious life is a renunciation.  It is a kind of death.  It involves turning one’s back on what is humanly good and desirable.  Consider the life of a Trappist.  A Trappist monk deprives himself of sleep, deprives himself of food, gives up a wife and children, puts aside the joys of conversation, gives up his personal property, rises at 4:00 in the morning every day to chant interminable psalms in a cold church, loses the opportunity to travel, and even relinquishes his own will.  The thought of being a Trappist is not an appealing thought.  It instills a kind of dread—the sort of dread that we feel when we contemplate a skull, or when we stand over a precipice, or when we look across a barren landscape.  All forms of religious life have this repulsive effect.  All forms of religious life, at their very core, consist of three vows—poverty, chastity, and obedience—and each of these vows is repulsive.  The vow of poverty means giving up money and property; the vow of chastity means giving up a spouse and children; and the vow of obedience means giving up one’s own will.  No one has an innate desire to sever himself from property, family, and his own will.  No one has an innate desire to uproot three of life’s greatest goods.  Such a desire would be mere perversion.
Everyone, however, has an innate desire to get married.  Religious life is a renunciation, but marriage is a positive good.  So, if we ask people to decide between religious life and marriage on the basis of their desires, they are going to choose marriage every time.  And that’s what’s happening.  Vocations directors tell their advisees to prayerfully search their desires in order to find their vocation.  The advisees search, and what do they find?  An aversion to religious life and a desire for marriage.  So they choose marriage.  Meanwhile, religious orders shrink and die.
If we want to revitalize religious life, we need to rethink our methodology.  We need to stop telling people to look within their hearts for an innate desire for religious life.  They have no such desire.  Instead of asking people whether they desire religious life, we should ask them whether they desire salvation—whether they desire to become saints.  If sanctity is the goal, then religious life and all its harrowing renunciations begin to make sense.  Although religious life is the hardest, most fearsome way to live, it is also the most spiritually secure, most fruitful, and most meritorious.  Saint Bernard of Clairvaux tells us that because they renounce property, family, and their own wills, religious “live more purely, they fall more rarely, they rise more speedily, they are aided more powerfully, they live more peacefully, they die more securely, and they are rewarded more abundantly.”  According to Saint Athanasius, “if a man embraces the holy and unearthly way, even though as compared with [married life] it be rugged and hard to accomplish, nonetheless it has the more wonderful gifts: for it grows the perfect fruit, namely a hundredfold.”  Theresa of Avila even tells us that she became a nun, against her own desires, because she “saw that the religious state was the best and safest.”  Religious life is daunting, it is tough, and it requires us to give up many good things.  But, according to the Church and her great saints, it is the surest road to holiness.  And that is why we choose it.  The only way to increase vocations is to tell young Catholics the truth about religious life.  Religious life is the most effective means to sanctity—more effective than marriage, and more effective than any other calling.
Vocations directors, however, are unwilling to talk about religious life as the most effective means to sanctity.  One reason for this unwillingness is their fear of contradicting the Second Vatican Council’s universal call to holiness.  According toLumen Gentium: “All Christians in any state of life are called to the fullness of Christian life and to the perfection of love.”  This message is both true and good.  But many Catholics take the message a step farther than it was intended to go.  They infer that because all people are called to become saints all vocations must be equally effective means to sanctity.  This is a great error.  The view that marriage and religious life are equal paths to holiness is contrary to the writings of saints like Bernard, Athanasius, and Theresa, but it is also condemned by the Council of Trent and contradicted by John Paul II in Vita Consecrata.  Session XXIV of the Council of Trent declared: anyone who denies that it is “better and more blessed to remain in virginity, or in celibacy, than to be united in matrimony; let him be anathema.”  Pope John Paul II reaffirmed this teaching in Vita Consecrata: “it is to be recognized that the consecrated life… has an objective superiority.”
Today’s ubiquitous assumption that marriage and religious life are equal paths to holiness is not merely bad doctrine.  It is also a deathblow for religious life.  Once you accept that religious life and lay married life are equally effective means to sanctity, you undercut the only compelling motivation for becoming a religious.  If lay married life provides an equally effective means to sanctity, plus the goods of pleasure, family, property, one’s own will, etc., then it is irrational to choose religious life.  Choosing religious life over marriage would mean punishing yourself for no good reason.  It would mean turning your back on—showing contempt for—the goods of God’s creation while gaining nothing from your sacrifice.  If lay married life gets you to sanctity just as easily and reliably as religious life, then all that religious life amounts to is a kind of masochism.  In the words of University of Washington sociologist Rodney Stark, “what does a woman gain in return for her vows of celibacy, poverty, and obedience, if she… acquires no special holiness thereby, while spending her working hours side-by-side with married women who now are officially seen as her equal in terms of virtue, but who are free from her obligations?”
Well, therein lies the problem.  In order to protect an imagined equality between vocations, today’s vocations directors and counselors are selling masochism under the label ‘religious life.’  No wonder there are so few takers.  Even secular sociologists—after closely examining the data—recognize this as the primary cause for the vocations implosion.  Rodney Stark and Roger Finke, in their joint paper, “Catholic Religious Vocations: Decline and Revival,” claim “the data are conclusive that the collapse of Catholic [religious] vocations was self-imposed, not merely incidental to the process of modernity.”  The decline in religious vocations “was in response to a cost/benefit ratio that had suddenly gone from positive to negative.” “[T]he doctrine denying that special holiness attached to religious vocations transformed the remaining sacrifices of the religious life into gratuitous costs.”  In light of these costs, and “in the absence of the primary rewards of the religious life, few potential recruits found it any longer an attractive choice.”  Young Catholics have been offered masochism under the label ‘religious life,’ and they have wisely rejected it.
If we want to revive religious vocations, then we have only one option.  We must tell the uncomfortable truth.  Religious life is the most effective, reliable means to sanctity and salvation—more effective than marriage, and more effective than any other calling.  This is a tough, unpopular message.  But if we refuse to speak this message, religious life will continue its inevitable decline.  If we refuse to speak this message, then we have chosen to sacrifice religious life on the altar of egalitarianism.
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Wednesday, May 04, 2016

Reality of Islam!!

MAY 4, 2016

Crisis Magazine

Good Islam vs. Bad Islam


The February 11 edition of FrontPage Magazine contains an insightful piece by Daniel Greenfield on our failed counterterrorism strategy. Our policy, he wrote, is based on an artificial distinction between “Good Islam” and “Bad Islam.” Our aim, he continued, is to “convince Good Islam to have nothing to do with Bad Islam.”
Ironically, as Greenfield observed, “our diplomats and politicians don’t verbally acknowledge the existence of Bad Islam.” Instead they claim that the “bad Muslims” (the terrorists) aren’t really Muslims at all. To paraphrase various world leaders, the terrorists have “nothing to do with Islam,” “speak for no religion,” and have completely “perverted” the meaning of Islam. Technically, they’re not bad Muslims, because they’re no kind of Muslim. At least, that’s what the theory says.
In other words, our strategy is based on a circular argument: if you start with the premise that Islam is a peaceful religion, then those who break the peace cannot, by definition, be followers of Islam. They must be motivated by something else: grievances over imperialism, lust for power, or even some kind of psychological defect.
What Greenfield says about government policy toward Islam can also be applied to Church policy. Church leaders are also in the habit of saying that terrorism is a “perversion” of Islam. They claim that the jihadists use religion as a “pretext” to disguise other motives. And, on occasion, they have even urged Muslims to be more faithful to Islam. For example, when speaking to a group of Muslim refugees in Rome two years ago, Pope Francis told them to study the Koran as a means of expelling bitterness, and to follow the faith of their parents. Here’s what I had to say on the topic a year ago:
Church policy should be aimed at weakening faith in Islam. This the reverse of the current policy which is built on the assumption that there is a good (authentic) Islam and a bad (inauthentic) Islam and we should therefore reinforce Muslims’ faith in “true” Islam and encourage them to go deeper into it.
This, as I argued at the time, is an impossible project: “‘Good’ Islam and ‘bad’ Islam are as intimately related as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Mr. Hyde always predominates in the end.” Or, as Greenfield puts it:
Good Islam and Bad Islam are two halves of the same coin … we’re trying to convince Dr. Jekyll to help us fight Mr. Hyde. And Dr. Jekyll might even help us out, until he turns into Mr. Hyde.
The proof of this thesis lies in our fear that the slightest criticism of Islam will force the moderates (good Muslims) to join the extremists (bad Muslims). But if Muslims can so readily convert from Jekyll to Hyde, can there have been much difference between the two in the first place? Nobody worries that an insult to the Catholic Church or even to Jesus is going to suddenly turn moderate Catholics into masked terrorists. The almost universal fear that moderate Muslims can be easily driven into the radical camp is an acknowledgement that the distance between the two is not that great.
In short, Good Islam and Bad Islam are not separated by a gulf; they are on a continuum. Many of the things that the “bad” Muslims do are done by our allies, the “good” Muslims. Thus, as Greenfield points out:
Our Good Islam allies in Pakistan fight Bad Islam’s terror, when they aren’t hiding Osama bin Laden. Bad Islam in the Islamic State beheads people and takes slaves and Good Islam in Saudi Arabia does too… The moderate Iranian government signs a nuclear deal and then the extremist Iranian government calls for “Death to America.”
Is the moderate Muslim nothing but a mirage? Not exactly. But there are probably far fewer of them than is generally assumed. It’s true that at any given time the vast majority of Muslims are peacefully going about their business. But “not-currently-killing-others” is a poor gauge of moderation. If the peaceful Muslims subscribe to more or less the same tenets as the “bad” Muslims, they should not be assumed to be moderate.
Numerous polls have shown that the majority of Muslims worldwide are supportive of extreme (and therefore immoderate) sharia punishments such as amputation for theft, stoning for adultery, and death for apostasy. There is also widespread support for blasphemy laws, which are often used as an excuse to persecute Christians. In Pakistan not long ago, 100,000 people attended the funeral of a man who murdered an opponent of the blasphemy laws. The victim was what we would call a moderate but his murderer seems to have been far more honored. About the same time, representatives of more than thirty-five religious parties and groups called for the revocation of a new Pakistani law protecting women from abuse. Meanwhile, the Nigerian Senate rejected a gender equality bill because Muslim senators said it was un-Islamic.
Such “moderate” Muslims may not be willing to kill, but they may be willing to support those who do. After the bombings in Brussels, it was revealed that the terrorists enjoyed wide support in the Muslim district where they were hiding. And, according to a New York Times article, ninety percent of teens in Muslim districts considered the attackers to be “heroes.” On the other side of the Channel, a poll of UK Muslims revealed that two-thirds of them would not report someone with terrorist ties to the police.
Are there any Muslims who would qualify for the more rigorous definition of moderate? There are indeed. But they are nowhere near a majority and their moderation often reflects a lack of commitment to mainstream Islamic beliefs. Many moderate Muslims are like “cafeteria Catholics.” They pick and choose those aspects of Islam that suit their inclinations and ignore the rest. For them, as for many a liberal Christian, religion is often a personal construct that bears little resemblance to the official version. While we may look upon such people as good Muslims, their co-religionists often look upon them with contempt.
Why, in the face of so much evidence, do so many in the West and in the Church believe that mainstream Islam is a model of moderation? The answer, in a word, is “projection.” When John Kerry says “the real face of Islam is a peaceful religion based on the dignity of all human beings,” he is projecting Western and Christian values onto a culture that is decidedly anti-Western and anti-Christian. When he says that “our faiths and our fates are inextricably linked,” Kerry, a Catholic, may be influenced by the many Catholic prelates who hold a similar view.
Catholics who hold to the more optimistic view of Islam like to think of themselves as champions of multiculturalism. But far from being sensitive to diversity, they are, in reality, being ethnocentric. In short, they assume that everyone else is just like them. They look at Islam through Catholic eyes and conclude, contrary to 1,400 years of evidence, that Islam is just an exotic form of Catholicism. They seem convinced that the vast majority of Muslims share the same concern for social justice, human dignity, and women’s rights that Christians have.
Again, this is an ethnocentric and even egocentric way of viewing the “other.” As Greenfield puts it, “moderate Islam isn’t what most Muslims believe. It’s what most liberals believe that Muslims believe.” Moderate Islam or Good Islam is an invention—“an imaginary religion that they imagine Muslims must practice because the alternative is the end of everything that they believe in.”
The assumption that there is a sharp divide between Good Islam and Bad Islam is a comforting illusion, but it is also a dangerous illusion. In the short run, holding such an assumption will make us feel good about our broad-mindedness. In the long run, we will be very sorry for having played this dangerous game of let’s pretend.
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