ABC - Anything But Christianity

David Aikman has an insightful piece on the Trinity Forum online journal Implications. In it he writes:

In the summer of 2006, following the uncovering in the UK of a plot to blow up several US-bound aircraft flying out of London’s Heathrow airport, President Bush used a closely similar phrase, “Islamic fascism.”

In Europe, the term was bleeped out of media discourse. When one critic of Islamist militance used it on a BBC interview, the interview was promptly terminated.

Try to image anything remotely comparable happening when what is being criticized is Christianity or any of its cultural manifestations.

The fundamental mistake of the European Enlightenment was to think that humans were hardwired with the moral, social, cultural and spiritual sensibilities which were in fact the fruits of centuries of Christian influence. Western culture continues to make this mistake. "European intellectual elites," Aikman writes, "assumed that 'tolerance' was a self-evident social virtue, the natural outgrowth of a secular society that, by and large, had come to reject the absolutes and the certainties of Christianity — and indeed of all religions. But with every concession to Islamic demands for the Islamicization of institutions and traditions in Europe, they discovered that no concession was ever adequate."

The truth is, however, that: "In the entire world today there is not one Muslim-majority country that is genuinely pluralistic." And Europe's pluralistic spirit is being seriously compromised by those who are its supposed beneficiaries. As Stanley Kurtz put it in a recent piece in NRODT: "the West's watery multiculturalism has proven incapable of inspiring loyalty among immigrants, who are assimilating Europe to Islam instead."

David Aikman:

Islamic aspirations for Europe, whether voiced by Islamic leaders outside of the continent or by Islamic community leaders inside it, are unabashedly to Islamicize the entire continent little by little.

Europeans cannot be expected to "tolerate" the intolerant forever. Another problem arises, and Aikman points to it:

Of course, there is always the danger of a xenophobic, nativist backlash against immigrants in general. In the past, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who founded France’s extreme right-wing National Front Party, targeted immigrants with his inflammatory rhetoric. Those immigrants, of course, included Muslims. But as French society turned more openly against Israel — and more surreptitiously against Jews in its midst — than against Muslim immigrants, Le Pen began to move towards a de facto alliance with France’s most militant Islamic groups. They, after all, were most vociferously against Israel and the Jews of France.

These are perilous times, and those who take a rosy view of developments in Europe and elsewhere in the cultural West are diminishing in number and snatching at straws. For except for an intelligent and compassionate reawakening of the Christian faith that shaped Western civilization in the first place, all else is straw. Aikman:

From the refusal to acknowledge the Christian ingredient in Europe’s cultural evolution in the European Union’s proposed constitution to an almost breathtaking public disdain for any religious discourse throughout the continent, European intellectuals appear to have made a philosophical choice: anything but Christianity.