What's With Us?

A couple of days ago the ever lovely Lady Nib asked your correspondent, "Will Christians ever get around to resisting the encroachment of Islamism into Christian countries? Will Christians fight for survival?" I thought about the question for a few minutes and decided that the answer was "Probably not. A minority will, those considered quite conservative or fundamentalists. But those Christians in the mainstream, having been raised with a 'We are the world' theology (when they have been taught any theology), or who subscribe to a 'name it and claim it' Christianity will do nothing."

It was an answer that I hated to come up with. But the history of the reaction of Christianity to the invasions of Islamism in the late twentieth century has shown that modern Christianity, for the most part, does not seem to have the will to fight back.

Consider the case of Lebanon, for example. Up until the 1970s Lebanon was a Christian nation in the Middle East. It was, by Middle East standards, democratic and modern. Beruit was called the Paris of the Middle East. Then the civil war broke out. Muslims poured into Lebanon from Syria and a great number of Lebanese Christians pulled up stakes and left the country instead of fighting. The result was that Lebanon became a Muslim country, the infrastructure collapsed and Beruit became just another big Islamic city hat no one in his right mind wanted to visit, let alone invest in. The country became just another Middle East Islamic nation living in the sixteenth century with color television and running water.

The Turkish genocide of Armenians (the oldest Christian nation in the world) in the early part of the 20th century has been pretty much accepted by the civilized world as a fact, but the Turks insist that the incident never happened and the kumbaya crowd in the West don't want to bring it up because they don't want to hurt the Turks' feelings. History, for some, has become completely subjective in the interest of appeasement. And many of those who subscribe to the appeasement philosophy are liberal Christians who are reluctant not only to state a truth, but are also reluctant to proclaim The Truth in deference to the feelings of their opponents who wish them no good

The following links may be better able to illustrate the matter better than my natterings:
Gates of Vienna: Cultural Amnesia
FrontPage magazine.com