Well, shoot. I should’ve known that John Mark Reynolds would have more to say and say it better. I’ve been mulling over this three-sided war in the making — Muslim vs. Secular “global community” vs. Christianity — and doing a rather Miss Marple job of it. (Miss Marple is one of Agatha Christie’s detective heroes, an elderly spinster who applies the lessons learned about people from her small life in a small village to solve great mysteries in the world at large.) For those who get out more, Reynolds is definitely more the thing. Plus, he’s much more optimistic in the end than I am, and makes a persuasive argument for that optimism.

The article is “On Islam, Secularism, and the Church”, and it’s a wonderful flight through the centuries and around the world. Reynolds notes that there are strengths to Islamic fundamentalism that we would do well to notice, among them a rejection of Western naturalism and radical feminism, as well as a faith in the inerrancy of their book of faith that many Western and Eastern theologians would do well to emulate.

“It is here that I am concerned about much of modern Catholic theology and some Eastern theologians. They act as if one can easily attribute errors of history, fact, and ethics to the saints who were the human agents of divine inspiration. This smacks more of modernism than of a theology of the incarnation. The text may be fully human, but it is also fully divine. The two work in synergy.”

Though there are reasons to look hopefully at new areas of Christian expansion in China and sub-Saharan Africa — and to think about what Catholics and Orthodox stand to gain and have to offer in this area — Reynolds notes that we may be underestimating the Muslims if we think that they are being won over to Western values because they’ve proven susceptible to a few Western vices:

“Nor should we take hope in the secularization of some portions of Moslem leadership in Western countries. Some commentators seem to think that sex and liquor will be the great salvation of the West. They see seeds of decadence in the Moslem youth of Holland or other Western countries and become quite hopeful. Vice is a weak defense for the virtues of the West to say the least. Again the Eastern experience is illuminating. Many Turks and Egyptians drink or fail to live up to their Islamic social beliefs. However, they continue to vote for social repression. You might be able to get a drink in Constantinople pretty easily, but you cannot set up an Orthodox seminary.”

But he notes that Christianity is coming from a historic foundation that provides a stability and a foundation for tolerance that beats anything in either the Muslim or secular worldview:

“Moslem are free to preach in London not because of secularism, but because Christianity developed there. The good ideas of the Middle Ages, became the better polity of the Victorian era. The bad ideas of the Victorians, including their smug colonialism, were slowly giving way to better ideas at the dawn of the twentieth century if secularism had not short circuited their development. The long struggle against Darwin, Marx, and Freud distracted us from being able to make further progress. However, even in that fight we stayed true, for the most part, to the theological lessons learned. Christians did not kill Darwin, but let him live in great comfort. We may not have liked Freud’s views, but did not declare a jihad against psychology. Instead, we (for the most part) listened, learned and argued. We had created a culture that made it possible for Darwin to attack the views of ninety percent of the English world and we stuck to the liberty even when we did not like the result.”

All of which leads to an underappreciated historic source of Christian strength …

“Christians were content to compete in the marketplace of ideas and became stronger as a result. You cannot open a church in Mecca today, but you can open a mosque in Rome. As a result Western Christians are genetically more resistant to Moslem ideas. We have heard them for centuries. If a new crusade would ever be launched from Christendom, it would not contain bombs and bullets for we have justly given over the sword to the state, but in the form of books and ballots. Secularists and Islamic radicals are both monists. One reduces everything to this world and the other to the world to come. Christianity is simply more sophisticated, recognizing two great powers in the minds of men: church and state and allowing them to exist in synergy (never alone!) with each other.”

… and arrives at a much brighter prognosis than your Ms. Marple did(!):

“This is (in part) the ground for my confidence in our battle against both secularism and radical Islam. We are not afraid to fight for human justice and have grounds for doing so. We do not seek utopia, but the best possible civil society in this fallen world.”

Well, from his pen (or keyboard) to God’s ear, as they say. I’d be happy to be proved wrong in this instance. Which is probably just as well.