The headlines announced that 21 Egyptians were beheaded in a rebel-controlled portion of Libya this week, but it usually required reading several paragraphs into the stories to learn that the men were so cruelly executed by the Islamic State not because of their nationality but because they refused to renounce their Christian faith.
Much of the media and all of the administration officials they quoted are clearly uncomfortable reporting these rather crucial details, for various reasons. The murderous presence of the Islamic State in Libya does not confirm the administration’s reassuring claims of a “jayvee team” of terrorism being routed by coalition forces, the terror gang’s name and Koranic methods of execution make it harder to convince a skeptical public that none of this unpleasantness has anything to do with Islam, the numbing frequency of such atrocities suggest that there’s something more historically significant to it than those routine murders and car wrecks that the ratings-hungry local stations prefer to cover instead of climate change, and the spectacle of Christians dying for their faith poses all sorts of problems to the modern liberal worldview.
Those of us in the west who still who profess a Christian faith at Sunday worship services and struggle unworthily to live according to its teachings through the rest of the week have been long accustomed to the blessing of doing so without risk to our fortunes or personal safety, but we all still wonder from time to time if we’d be willing to pay the same ultimate price of discipleship as those 21 Egyptians. Anyone outspoken about traditional Biblical views on sexual morality can expect to be stripped of a beauty queen title or denied a high-level position in the high-tech business or have their reality show knocked off a cable network or be denied the right to sell a chicken sandwich in Boston, and even the most quietly and inconspicuously observant Christians will be subject to frequent ridicule on the sit-coms and talk shows, and their kids are going to get an earful of sneering during four years of college, and any presidential aspirants who espouse a Christian faith should expect all sorts of pointed questions about evolution and contraception, but being beheaded or burned alive is not as of yet a concern to the western Christian. Hearing from those parts of the world where Christianity does entail such risks, and of the brave and fervent women there who gladly face that danger for the faith, we cannot help but admire their courage and be humbly thankful we have not yet been called upon to face the same test.
Surely the unchurched are similarly moved to self-examination about the strength of their own convictions, and we suspect that in many cases they find it all the more discomfortingly humbling. Most of our outspokenly atheistic friends are unembarrassed to say they would immediately renounce their non-beliefs to avoid a beheading or some other grisly death, and reasonably argue that this is entirely consistent with their belief in rationalism, but none can be proud that they would be furthering the cause of an extraordinarily evil ideology. That the Islamic State’s evil is murderously misogynistic, anti-homosexual, anti-intellectual, and imperialist, all to an extent that even the most fevered imaginations of the left cannot claim the Republican Party to be, requires some some condemnation that a secular liberal would be embarrassed to recant in any circumstances. The Islamic State might be another Viet Cong or Shining Path or similarly beloved guerrilla movement if they’d only stick to killing Christians and start insisting on unisex bathroom facilities and a low-carbon-footprint economy in the areas they conquered, but the sex slavery and the internecine slaughter and all that God talk make it a hard sell to the sensitive left. No one on the left seems to have anything kind to say about the Islamic State, and one can’t help noticing that they’d therefore rather not say anything at all.
Secular liberals find it hard to comprehend why a Christian would prefer death to apostasy, or why the men and women of our military voluntarily put their lives at risk in defense of the nation, and like John Lennon in his obnoxious secular liberal anthem they try to imagine a world where there’s nothing to live or die for, and this failure of imagination inevitably leads to bad policy. It’s why State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf is on television talking about poverty and discrimination and the other “root causes” of terrorism that can only be combatted with some all-out community-organizing and Keynesian economics, as if thousands of Muslims weren’t fleeing the material comforts and multi-cultural blandishments of the European welfare state to join the Islamic State in its slaughter across a blighted desert, and as if some Peace Corps volunteer could reach into a card file and some private sector opportunity for a jihadi’s head-chopping talents. It’s why the President of the United States is addressing a “summit” on “violent extremism” without specifying any particular ideologies that might be causing such a nasty thing, and warning Christians against “getting on a high horse” about anything the Islamic State might be up to, and ruling out the option of any prolonged combat operations in his request to Congress for ta mere three years’ of the use of military force. The thought that some Great Society programs and soothing words and a few well-placed airstrikes will dissuade the Islamic State and like-minded self-professed Muslims from chopping the heads off Christians and Jews and anyone else standing in the way of their global domination could only occur to someone who does not understand religious motivation.
Nor does the secular liberal understand the crucial distinctions between the various religions, or take notice of the results they motivate. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are all the same Abrahamic hooey as far as a modern sensibility is concerned, and Buddhism is accorded a self-congratulatory respect except when it bumps up against Chinese communism and Hinduism is tolerated with certain sense of intellectual superiority except during its frequent conflicts with Islam, but the whole notion of religion and a faith that looks through death and powers greater than one’s self or even the federal government during Democratic administrations is regarded with an eye-rolling suspicion. If only all the world had the same enlightened rationalism as Stalin, Mao, and Hitler, the theory goes, surely the world would be a more peaceful place. Over at CNN they reported on seven days of carnage as “Religion’s week from hell,” noting that “Christians, Muslims and Jews alike fell prey to assaults,” then having an editor of the “Oxford Handbook of Religion and Violence” explain that “if you want to rally troops to your side, few tools are more powerful than religion,” and only then obliquely admitted that each of the acts of violence were carried out by people proclaiming to act in the name of one particular religion. They threw in the case of the self-proclaimed secular liberal and “anti-theist” who allegedly killed three Muslim neighbors in North Carolina, apparently over a parking dispute, but it still seems odd to attribute all the mayhem to “religion” generally, as if all those symbols on the “co-exist” bumper stickers were equally prone to beheading or setting afire anyone they regard as infidels.
The failure to make such distinctions will make it impossible to deal effectively with such fiercely religious foes as the Islamic State and like-minded organizations. The people of more peaceable religions will be needed in the fight, and the fight must offer something worth dying for. Like all other faiths secular liberalism prides itself on its martyrs, from Joe Hill to Goodman, Schwerner and Cheney to the Kennedy Brothers and all those Hollywood screenwriters who had to work in television during the blacklist years, but we expect its foot soldiers would rather serve on the safer battlefield of the Republicans’ “war on women” than engage “violent extremism” selling women into sex slavery. The sense of moral superiority that such politics affords the secular liberal has no more appeal to the religious nature than a life of welfare dependency or a Great Society make-work job, and the west will need more if it hopes to win the hearts and minds of those drawn to a theology of slaughter and conquest.
Whether they’re Islamic or not, the Islamic State and like-minded organizations are waging war on the west, its gay bars and health clinics as well as its churches and synagogues, convinced that they’re doing it according to the most careful reading of Islamic scripture, and will not stop until they have been militarily defeated. Even then an evil impulse will lurk in the heart of man, and something better in our nature will be required to defeat it. Perhaps secular liberalism will yet find something it can effect through government, but for now a higher power seems required.
— Bud Norman
The Central Standard Times 
Having no particular metaphysical beliefs, I readily lie about believing whatever is appropriate at the time. But in the scenario presented I like to think I would nonetheless work against those imposing their beliefs upon me.
we are at the moments when religious factions try to dominate one another. too bad it had to be that way but it should serve as an eye-opener to us.