Not bringing a religion to a clash of civilizations is like not
bringing a gun to a gunfight. Every major civilization has had its basis in a
core religion.
Consider these three quotes from Sam Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations:
Consider these three quotes from Sam Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations:
1.
The underlying problem for the West
is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilization whose
people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with
the inferiority of their power. The problem for Islam is not the CIA or the
U.S. Department of Defense. It is the West, a different civilization whose
people are convinced of the universality of their culture and believe that
their superior, if declining, power imposes on them the obligation to extend that
culture throughout the world. These are the basic ingredients that fuel
conflict between Islam and the West.
2.
Blood, language, religion, way of
life, were what the Greeks had in common and what distinguished them from the
Persians and other non-Greeks. Of all the objective elements which define
civilizations, however, the most important usually is religion, as the
Athenians emphasized. To a very large degree, the major civilizations in human
history have been closely identified with the world’s great religions; and
people who share ethnicity and language but differ in religion may slaughter
each other, as happened in Lebanon, the former Yugoslavia, and the
Subcontinent.
3.
Religion is a central defining
characteristic of civilizations, and, as Christopher Dawson said, “the great
religions are the foundations on which the great civilizations rest.” Of
Weber’s five “world religions,” four—Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and
Confucianism—are associated with major civilizations. The fifth, Buddhism, is
not.
Now,
one can blithely try to wave away Huntington's civilizational perspective and
his thesis, but considering how The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World
Order was published in 1996 and has proven to be not merely
far more insightful and predictive than Fukuyama's End of History thesis or any
other conceptual model, one would have to be grossly ignorant to do so.
So,
if we accept the idea that Western civilization and Islamic civilization are in
conflict, what must we logically conclude from the three quotes provided?
1.
The decline of the West is the
direct result of the decline of Christianity in the West, both religious and
institutional.
2.
The growing power of Islam in the
West cannot be halted by secularism, white nationalism, or any
sub-civilization-level force.
3.
The preservation of the West
requires a revival of Christianity.
4.
The preservation of the West
requires the abandonment of some, though not all, secular values, beginning
with the freedom of religion, that conflict with the restoration of
Christianity
There
is considerably more that can be concluded from this particular perspective,
but I expect most people, even of an Alt-West persuasion, will struggle to
accept just those four inescapable conclusions.
