Warning! Stop the "God Gap"

The WaPo reported today on a study sent to the White House by The Chicago Council on Global Affairs. The Council is influential not by its reputation or size but rather by its close relationship with President Obama since the days he was an ambitious state senator.

The substance of the study is the pernicious influence of secularism on American foreign policy and relations. The thirty-two member committee which authored the report sees this as having resulted in a serious diminishment of our "capabilities." As a result the committee recommended the Obama administration make religion an "integral part of our foreign policy."

Whew!

This view is, to use a Buddhist notion, both good and bad. Religion is a very powerful motivator and consolidator of political action. The world has seen this reality more times than one cares to think about over the past several thousand years.

The world certainly sees the power and pertinacity of religion today. There is no way that an individual, let alone a responsible government, can say that any factor other than religious belief systems has been responsible for the vast majority of killing and dying the past decade.

The American political, academic, and chattering class elite has been flatly schizo about religion and its effects on human behavior--particularly since the potency of religiously predicated fear and loathing was demonstrated so vividly on 9/11. On the one hand the elite of this country (and most of the West generally) has sought to uphold the secular ideal of separation between the instruments of state and the communities of faith(s). On the other they have sought to hold Islam qua Islam harmless against the charge of any linkage between its beliefs and the consequences seen on and after that fateful September morning.

The attempt to remove Islam from the realm of political expression--including violence and terror--is both a disservice to our country and an insult to Islam. In short, insofar as there is a "God gap" in this area, it comes from our willful and repeated insistence that somehow Islam has no political dimension, and thus Muslims who engage in violence, terror, jihad, are somehow misunderstanding and misinterpreting Islam.

The reduction of the resulting "God gap" and its impact on US foreign policy consists simply of acknowledging the reality contained in the Koran and the other sacred writings of Islam. It means accepting the fact that Islam contains at its very heart the justification for suicide bombings, terror, and a constant screen of intentional prevarication meant to mislead and discommode the opposition: the infidels and apostates. It means taking Islam at its sacred word: of Islam's division of the human race into the house of peace (Islam) and the house of war (everybody else) as well as the need for constant warfare until the house of war is bought into complete subjugation.

This necessary adjustment of view does not imply a couple of important things.

The recognition of the role of Islam per se in the acts of Islamist jihadist warfare does not, for example, imply that all Muslims are ready, willing, and eager to strap on a suicide vest, or pick up an AK, or even provide money to those who are doing so. Most Muslims are not unlike the majority of adherents of other faiths. They are compartmentalized in their thinking. Some matters are for the mosque, for prayers, for the sacred days; others are secular, for this world and not the next, for today and for the individual or his family not for tomorrow and the entire Muslim "community."

Most Muslims are not willing to risk all in the hopes that by doing so they will find paradise or at least avoid hell. The same may be said of most Christians, most Jews, most Hindus and so on. But, at the same time, honesty requires that we all acknowledge that the sacred soul of Islam unlike the other major religions provides rich justification, even provocation for war and its nasty ancillaries. To do less is not only to create a "God gap" but to denature Islam, to diminish it and the power the faith has for its believers.

The second implication is simpler. The US would be ill-advised to say the least if it were to hawk its presumed Christian or (much as the Geek hates this circumlocution) the "Judeo-Christian" heritage and foundation. It does not matter how "godly" we Americans proclaim ourselves to be now or in our past, the fact remains that it is the "wrong" sort of "God" to whom we offer our thanks or our importunings. To the Muslim and even more to the political Muslim, the Islamist, Christians and, to a greater extent, the Jew is misguided at a minimum. The Christian, the Jew follow incomplete revelations, revelations polluted by man while Islam is pure and complete, the final revelation given to the "Perfect Man," the Prophet Mohammad.

In short, saying, "See, we Americans are godly," won't cut the mustard with the adversary. Our propensity for political "God talk" will be of no avail in the Manichean world of the Islamist, the political Muslim. It may play well in Peoria but it is a no-sale in those many areas of the world which give rise to Islamism and its armed twin, jihadism.

However the emphasis on the "God Gap" does require that we Americans and our European cousins both think about and talk about just what it is we believe in, just what moves us, just what our collective aspirations might be. Do our fundamental predicates transcend the purely material, the transitory fulfillment of today's needs and desires? What verities do we subscribe to, promote, stand for?

If nothing else the Chicago Council's paper may cause some thinking in and around the Oval as to what and whom we are fighting. More, some thinking as to just what we are fighting for beyond keeping our country safe from the jihadists.

At the very least the paper might cause the Nice Young Man From Chicago to go beyond the glittering generalities and distortions of history which marked his Cairo address last year and put forth a clear picture of what we Americans are for--and against. This is critical even if when all is said God is conspicuous by absence.