Christianity, Islam and Atheism by William Kilpatrick

Author:William Kilpatrick [Kilpatrick, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spiritual & Religion
ISBN: 9781586176969
Published: 2016-11-20T16:00:00+00:00

PART IV

THE CULTURE WAR AND

THE TERROR WAR

11

Don’t Throw Out the Britney

with the Bath Water

As political scientist Samuel Huntington observed, we are in a civilizational struggle with Islam; however, there is a different, intracivilizational struggle underway that may determine the outcome of that global struggle. It’s called the culture war. The culture war has many fronts: debates over marriage, abortion, education, the sexualization of children by the entertainment industry, and a dozen other issues. Although the culture war is far from over, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that Christians have been on the losing side. Moreover, a case can be made that the loss of the culture war will almost inevitably lead to the loss of the struggle against the resurgent Islam that is attacking the West.

In losing ground in the culture war, we’ve lost ground in defending ourselves against Islamic aggression, but the reason for this is more complex than some think. Before discussing that reason, it’s important to address a misleading simplification of the connection between the two conflicts. A common argument—one that many conservative Christians find appealing—contends that Muslim grievances against the West are based almost wholly on our own cultural corruption. There is, of course, plenty wrong with our culture. The trouble with this argument is that it fails to recognize that there is also something wrong with Islam—something that can’t be fixed by fixing our own culture. Nevertheless, it has been an influential argument—one that requires a closer look.

The argument is summed up in a discussion that arose a few years ago about pop icon Britney Spears. The debate revolved around what, at first glance, might seem an unusual question: Did Britney cause 9/11? No one, of course, claims that Britney conspired with Muhammad Atta to blow up the Pentagon and the World Trade Center (although in this age of strange conspiracy theories, there might be a few partisans of that view). The argument, rather, is that there is something about American popular culture that provoked the 9/11 attacks. And since “Britney” is shorthand for all that’s wrong with American pop culture, let’s call it the “Britney thesis”.

This is, more or less, the central argument of Dinesh D’Souza’s book The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11. According to D’Souza, the simple answer to the question “Why do they hate us?” is “Because we are decadent.” And they (Muslim fundamentalists) fear that we mean to export to their traditional societies our debased values—not just Britney and Eminem and rap music, but also illegitimacy, easy divorce, abortion, and gay “marriage”.1 As proof, D’Souza quotes extensively from Islamic leaders, including Osama bin Laden and Sayyid Qutb, the intellectual father of the modern jihadist movement. For example, in his “Letter to America”, bin Laden calls on Americans to “reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling and trading with interest” and to replace them with “manners, principles, honor and purity”.2 Qutb, who thought American influence was turning the world into a “large brothel”,

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