Earlier, in November of this year, Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was dragged from his bike in Amsterdam, shot six times, stabbed and slashed across the throat by a suspected Islamic radical.  A five-page letter, impaled on his chest with a knife, included citations from the Qur’an.  It also ranted against “infidels,” vowing death to those who worked with van Gogh.  It continued: “Hair-raising screams will be squeezed from the lungs of nonbelievers.”  It ended with a Dutch incantation in the style of Islamic verse: “I know for sure that you, O America, are going to meet with disaster.  I know for sure that you, O Europe, are going to meet with disaster.  I know for sure that you, O Netherlands, are going to meet with disaster.”  Van Gogh’s murder set off a wave of attacks on mosques in the Netherlands and has caused a shift in how Europeans think about terrorism.  Allow me to think with you about this.

• First some background to the murder itself.  Theo van Gogh, Vincent van Gogh’s great grand-nephew, was a filmmaker who made provocative films.  The one that probably caused his murder was a movie about “Islamic violence against women,” called “Submission.”  The film’s script was written by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a liberal, Dutch member of parliament and an “ex-Muslim” from Somalia.  She has criticized her former faith, calling the Qur’an “in part a license for oppression.”  (Ali is now under 24-hour police protection.)  The film was highly offensive to Muslims and, as often occurs, Muslim clerics ranted against the film.  Mohammed Bouyeri, a 26-year old Dutch-Moroccan Muslim man, has been arrested for the murder of van Gogh, and his expected confederates in the murder share the same trait as other terrorists:  Reasonably educated beneficiaries of the Western societies they want to destroy.  The killing of van Gogh set off a wave of violence.  Arsonists set fire to mosques and Islamic schools; churches were vandalized, probably in retaliation.  Police reported more than 20 such attacks.  When police raided a suspected Muslim hideout in The Hague, those inside lobbed a hand grenade, injuring three officers.   

• Second, this murder of van Gogh has had a devastating impact on the rest of Europe.  Europe, which has always viewed America’s war on terror as crude and brutal, now finds that Muslim terrorists not only see Europe as a base, but also as a target.  For example, in March, Muslim terrorists killed 191 people in bomb attacks on Madrid’s commuter trains.  Perhaps most importantly, however, it has caused Europe to look afresh at its immigration policies.  Like other former colonial powers in Europe, the Netherlands first drew immigrants mostly from its former colonial possessions.  As the demand for cheap labor grew, a new wave of immigrants arrived from Turkey and North Africa.  Initially, the governments of Europe assumed they would one day leave.  They did not, and governments switched toward a policy of assimilation in the 1980s.  All new arrivals are therefore obliged to attend “integration classes.”  In return for promises that immigrants would be treated as equal citizens, the state demanded “respect for the prevailing standards, values and customs.”  The governments then allowed radical mosques to propagate a rendering of Islam inimical to Western values.  Bouyeri attended a radical Islamic mosque in Amsterdam, called al-Tawheed, whose imam preached radical Islam and who praised suicide attackers as “martyrs.” 

• Finally, the European governments are struggling with how to respond to Islamic terrorists.  France has a tough law that allows the detention of terrorists without trial for months on end.  It also monitors activity at mosques across France, reckoning that of 1,500 Muslim prayer places, some 50 preach a radical form of Islam.  France also cooperates with other European governments and regularly shares intelligence with Germany, Britain, Italy and Spain.  All European governments are pursing the dual policy of integrating Muslims into European culture, but expelling the dangerous radicals.  These governments apparently desire to pursue both policies simultaneously — be tolerant of Islam and its practices, but intolerant of the radicals.  Yet, as The Economist laments, “the risk is that, rather than the intolerant learning tolerance, the tolerant become intolerant too.”  Islamic radicals will no doubt avail themselves of continental tolerance to spread intolerance throughout the continent of Europe.  Indeed, at a recent seminar at the Brookings Institution, Francis Fukuyama argued that “Europeans are threatened internally by radical Islam in a much more severe way than Americans are in terms of external threat.”  Further, Bassam Tibi, a moderate Muslim leader in Germany argued, “Either Islam gets Europeanized, or Europe gets Islamized.”  What Europe will need to learn, says The Economist, is that the problem of terrorism on their continent is not “lack of integration or opportunity, but a vicious ideology.”

See “Breakpoint” (17 November 2004); The Economist (13 November 2004), pp. 55-56; “Charlemagne,” The Economist (27 November 2004), p. 56; and Andrew Higgins’s article in the Wall Street Journal (22 November 2004).

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PRESIDENT BUSH VERSUS WASHINGTON, D.C.

Fred Barnes, executive editor of The Weekly Standard, has written a thought-provoking editorial on “Bush the Insurgent.”  Allow me to summarize the argument and then make a few extended comments.

• First, Barnes sets up his argument in a Bush versus the Washington establishment framework.  He contends that Bush has not been “housebroken by establishment forces.”  In short, George W. Bush has not made peace with the Washington establishment at all.  To what or to whom is Barnes referring when he uses the term “establishment?”  The Washington establishment does indeed exist and consists of the permanent bureaucracy, much of the vast political community of lobbyists and lawyers and consultants, leftovers from Congress and earlier administrations, trade groups and think tanks, and the media.  It has become more conservative in recent years, but remains still center-left in its ideology.  Quite clearly, the establishment does not like Bush tactics, the Bush agenda and even the President himself.  Listen to Barnes:  “The president is girding for battle.  He’s aiming to consolidate control of his administration, drive out recalcitrant (read: establishment) elements, and make the permanent government heel, especially the CIA and State Department.”

• Second, Bush’s agenda is post-Reagan in its conservatism, which means it is more far-reaching and thus more threatening to the establishment.  He plans to reform the tax code and Social Security and fill the Supreme Court with conservative judges.  In desiring to spread democracy around the world, he has also ticked off the foreign policy establishment.  His goals are threatening to the Washington establishment, to say the least!

• Third, why has Bush not made friends with the establishment?  Barnes argues that “by Washington standards, Bush is a misfit.  He’s different.  He barely socializes at all and on weekends and holidays makes a beeline for Camp David or his ranch in Crawford, Texas.  He’d rather invite Christian musician Michael W. Smith and his wife to the White House for dinner than eat out. . . . He has held fewer state dinners than any president in memory.”  Also, Bush is a seriously religious man in a largely secular town.  This has brought him no end of criticism.  He also refuses to hide his loathing of the press, probably the most dominant force in the Washington establishment.  President Bush has not tried to fit in!  He exudes a confidence and a certainty that, despite what the establishment says, he will succeed in his second term.  Some have argued that he is guilty of hubris, arrogant pride.  Time will tell, but I see it not as hubris, but as a confidence in himself—he knows who he is—and a confidence in his agenda.  For those around him, there is the danger of hubris (witness the House of Representatives changing the internal House rules to protect Tom DeLay, which I regard as a major mistake in judgment).  He leads an administration and a Congress that could effect significant, transformational change within the nation and throughout the world.  May God grant him the grace to do so.

See Barnes’s editorial in the Wall Street Journal (23 November 2004). 

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WHAT IS WRONG WITH THE MAINLINE DENOMINATIONS?

That the Mainline Denominations are in trouble is a given.  But why?  Allow me to present a thesis that targets the primary reason and then offer two examples of their dilemma.

• First, the problem.  The mainlines believe that God can only be known in feeling, in ways that transcend the language of God or about God.  They argue for a mystical sense of the Divine.  This feeling is beyond language since language refers to objects in space and time; and God is not an object like other objects.  Robert Sanders calls this “The Ecstatic Heresy.”  Allow me to summarize his argument:  This “ecstatic” approach to faith means that God in Himself or in His revelations as Word or words cannot be verbal.  He always transcends language.  But this is not the position of the Bible or of historic biblical Christianity.  Language applied to God, therefore, they argue, is always symbolic.  For the “ecstatic” version of Christianity, Scripture is the history of ecstatic experiences given verbal content according to the social context of the biblical peoples.  In short, experience trumps the written Word.  Therefore, the “ecstatic Christian position says that the content of faith evolves since culture evolves.  For the “ecstatic” Christian, God is not personal so much as He is an energy to be experienced.  Finally, for “ecstatic” Christianity, all religions are ultimately one since the faith of each is an expression of the Holy or Ineffable in the concrete forms of a particular culture. 

• Second, now two examples of the bankruptcy of “ecstatic” Christianity.  (1)  Leaders of the United Church of Christ are incensed that two TV networks, CBS and NBC, are refusing to air a commercial celebrating the denomination’s “all-inclusive welcome.”  The 30-second ad shows a beefy bouncer working a rope line outside a church.  He is keeping various people out:  Latinos, African-Americans and gay couples.  Words flash across the screen: “Jesus didn’t turn people away.  Neither do we.”  The scene shifts to the outside of a UCC church, with an obviously diverse and happy congregation.  Two women embrace in the final scene, an obvious allusion to a happy gay couple.  Clearly, the UCC wants us to assume that churches that uphold traditional marriage are on par with the racists of the Jim Crow South.  As Joseph Loconte has argued, “the UCC ad symbolizes the mischief created by the partnership between liberal religion and ‘progressive’ causes. . . In their attempt to make the gospel ‘relevant’ to contemporary culture, progressive [ecstatic Christian] churches have appeared irrelevant to more and more Americans.”  William Inge, dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, said it well:  “He who marries the spirit of the age will soon find himself a widower.”  (2)  The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, commissioned Robert Eames, an Irish archbishop, to produce a report on the Anglican Church’s struggle with gay bishops and same-sex marriages.  Eames has issued his report and he calls for all involved to express “regret” for their actions.  For those involved in the ordination of Gene Robinson, a practicing homosexual, to the bishopric of New Hampshire, “regret” meant sadness over the fact that their righteous decision to ordain Robinson should have been taken so badly by a “church of Bible-thumping zealots.”  Eames’s committee advises more discussion and closer adherence to rules; and if that does not work, liberals and literalists must “walk apart.”  Since the “literalists” are increasingly from nations outside of liberal Europe, this will mean the vast majority of people will leave.  How tragic that a once great church has fallen to such depths of depravity.

• The point of all this is simple.  The mainline churches have departed from historic, biblical Christianity.  For them faith is “ecstatic,” rooted in feeling not truth.  Once the mainline denominations gave up the tenet that the Bible is God’s authoritative, verbal revelation to the human race, they were destined to change into something else.  These denominations name the name of Christ, but, if they cannot accept His revelation, they should not adopt His name.

See Sanders’s article in Christianity Today (October 2004), pp. 55-58, Loconte’s article in the Wall Street Journal (3 December 2004), and The Economist (23 October 2004), p. 57.

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