Former House speaker Newt Gingrich has given an important speech on the threat posed to us by Sharia law and the encroachments of Islamic fundamentalism. He was right to do so, but like so many, the ground where he wants to stand in this fight is ground that gives way under his feet. Sharia law is “abhorrent to Western values.” So? Who cares about that?
The Islamists are driven by what Allah has revealed. The answer to this is not what the people of the West think at the present moment. If you want a good example of the voice of that god, then take a gander at the House of Representatives. A transcendental appeal, even if it might be false, appears to outrank a horizontal appeal that is known by everyone to be false.
Here is the basic problem. Why should we resist the encroachments of Sharia law based on our Western values? What is the opposite of Western values? That would be Eastern values, and can anybody give me a reason why we should prefer one position over another on the basis of geography?
Western values only have value if they are a coded way of referring to something else. And that something else cannot be another horizontal fact, like representative government, or womens’ rights, or anything like that. That just pushes the question back a step. Why should we prefer those? And if we say that Western values simply means “our values,” then why should those outrank “their values”? In the ebb and flow of Darwinian struggle, ours sometimes loses to theirs.
“Western values” as an appeal works only if it is a coded references to Christendom, and that only works if Christ is still there. Anything else is arbitrary, jingoistic, and stupid. Anything else is a couple of dogs fighting over a piece of meat.
The problem is illustrated by secular or atheistic Zionism, which is racism, straight up. If you make a theological argument for Jews in the land of Palestine, that argument is based in the will of God and not in the inherent right of a certain DNA imprint to hold the rights to a certain bit of territory. Even if that theological argument is wrong, the appeal it makes is not to race (Dt. 7:7-8). But if there is no God, and hence no theological argument, all you have left of your Zionism is race. “I can have this, and you cannot have it, because I am a Jew and you are not.” Zionism of that sort, Zionism with no God, is racist pure and simple. Of course, if there is no God, there is nothing wrong with such racism, and nothing wrong with answering it in kind, but that is another point for another day.
In the same way, Western values are a bundle of wind, a bunch of nothing. The postmodernists have pointed out to us that there are different communities out there, and they all have their values, and so now these communities careen around in our global village like so many bumper cars. Who’s to say?
Western values are only to be preferred in a conflict like this if they are grounded in some way in the will of God. If they are not, then they will go down before the will of Allah like dry grass before the scythe. Islamism will go through deracinated Western values like a hot knife through butter. It goes back to Chesterton’s adage — if you don’t stand for something you will fall for anything.
Now there have been times, times of unreflecting youth, when a people with their false little democratic gods on a shelf might successfully stand against another people with their false allah-god up in the air. Sometimes Jupiter prevails over Mithra and sometimes it goes the other way. That kind of thing has been done, and it has actually been done by the people of the West to the Muslims. Think of the Western democracies of the early twentieth century carving up the Middle East like it was a pie. Yes, it has been done.
But that was before the rot of postmodernism set in, the reductio that made all our crackerjack thinkers realize (some of them reluctantly) that our great Kantian sky hook wasn’t actually bolted to anything, and one man’s guess was as good as another’s.
So this means, in short, there is now no way to defend the West without rejecting, root and branch, the last one hundred years of Western intellectual history. That’s fine with me, and all my modest proposal entails is that we undertake to defend the West by rejecting the last two hundred and fifty years of Western intellectual history. I am willing to defend the next Christendom, and am in fact eager to do so. I am not willing to take my stand on the basis of the dregs of the last Christendom.