Not Peace but a Sword: The Great Chasm Between Christianity and Islam

by Robert Spencer

  So the student scratched her head and said, “Last semester, I think.” “What month?” “February, I think.” “Aha!” said Zvai, “it was the Bundy money.” “What’s that?” Well, Zvai explained that McGeorge Bundy was the Secretary of State under either Johnson or Carter, one of the presidents, and there was a case that was going to come before the Supreme Court as to whether it violated the separation of church and state for Catholic schools to receive government grants. And the president didn’t want that case to come before the Supreme Court for some reason or other, so he had his Secretary of State negotiate an out-of-court settlement, if the school was not sectarian, divisive, or exclusionary, whatever that meant (it was vague enough to satisfy everybody). Zvai pointed out that in the semester following the ruling, every single one of the twenty-one Jesuit colleges and universities in America took down their crucifixes. “Is that a coincidence?” he said. So, none of the Catholic students knew that and they were kind of embarrassed and one said, “We wouldn’t do that for money.”And Zvai smiled wickedly and said, “Of course not, but I hope you got more than thirty pieces of silver.”

  (Laughter)

  Professor Kreeft: Half the students didn’t get it.

  (Laughter)

  Professor Kreeft: They’re biblically illiterate. They’re not Protestants, they don’t read the Bible.

  (Laughter)

  Professor Kreeft: So Zvai turned to them and said, “You see, the first Catholic to accept a government grant was Bishop Judas Iscariot.”

  (Laughter)

  Professor Kreeft: So they kept saying, “No! We didn’t do that for money, we did that to be ecumenical.” At this point, the Muslim chimed in and said, “What’s the meaning of ecumenical?” directing the question to me; I was the expert. So I opened my mouth and for the second time was about to utter some sort of answer to his reasonable question, when again, the Holy Spirit interrupted me, closed my mouth, and opened the mouth of the student next to him, another Catholic student who gave a really stupid answer to the question: “‘Ecumenical’ means we all love each other and we’re all equal and here comes everybody and we won’t offend others,” or something like that. So the Muslim said, “Oh, others, you mean like me, the Muslim, and my friend, the Jew?” Now they were friends. Now, as soon as the two words, Muslim and Jew, were pronounced, everybody got very quiet, as if a blasphemy or an obscenity had been uttered. Those are very concrete words. They have teeth in them. So the Catholic student said, “Yeah!”

  So the Muslim student said, “Well you have offended me.” “What?” “Yes, you have offended me by taking down your crucifixes.” “Why have we offended you, you’re a Muslim! You don’t believe Jesus died on the cross.” The Muslim said, “You took down your crucifixes to avoid offending me; you have insulted me.” “Why have we insulted you?” “Suppose you came to my country.” I think it was Iran. Not even sure. “Suppose you enrolled in a Muslim university knowing that it was a Muslim university. Now, we don’t have pictures of saints or statues. We think that’s idolatry, but when you are at a Muslim university, you know you are at a Muslim university. You may see quotations from the Qur’an. Would you be offended at seeing a Muslim symbol in a Muslim university?” “Of course not!” said the Catholic. “Who would? Only a bigot, correct?” “Yes.” “Now, you expect me to be offended at seeing a Catholic symbol in a Catholic university so you expect me to be a bigot. I am highly offended.” They were very quiet; I could smell the wood burning.

  (Laughter)

  Professor Kreeft: Then comes the important part. He didn’t stop at that, he turned around and faced the class like a fundamentalist preacher and he said, “How many of you believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God?” I said to myself, “Who is this? Jerry Falwell in disguise—? This guy’s a Muslim? Is he from central casting or something?” So they gradually put their hands up in a very embarrassed sort of way, and he said, “Well, I don’t believe that. I’m a Muslim. The Qur’an says that’s blasphemy, that’s ridiculous, that’s absurd, it’s awful, ‘Allah has a Son: the very mountains cover their ears before such blasphemy,’ and so on. But as a Muslim, I love Jesus. We don’t call him the Son of God. We call him one of the greatest men who ever lived. And the Qur’an says nothing bad about him, it says that he performed miracles, that he raised the dead, he was virgin-born, the Qur’an even has Allah rebuke Muhammad and say, ‘You must repent of your sins.’ It doesn’t say that about Jesus. And the Qur’an also says that Jesus will come at the end of the world to administrate the Last Judgment. So we Muslims have a deep love for the prophet Jesus, blessed be his Name. And, like Muhammad, we never say his name without ‘blessed be he’ or ‘peace be upon him.’

  “Now, if we had pictures of the prophet Jesus in our classroom, we would never take them down, not for anything. Not for money, not for prestige, not even if soldiers came into our classroom with fixed bayonets and said, ‘There has been [a] regime change; there’s a new law: you must take down pictures of your prophet Jesus.’ Every good Muslim in that class would get out of his seat, go to the front of the picture of the prophet Jesus, and say, “You take down the picture of our beloved prophet Jesus over our dead body. We would be glad to be a martyr for his honor.” And now you take down pictures of your beloved prophet Jesus simply to get money from the government. So I think perhaps we are better Christians than you are.”

  (Laughter)

  Professor Kreeft: I was the only one smiling. I said, “Thank you, Holy Spirit, for sending a prophet outside Israel to our midst.” Now, in the Old Testament, God does that very frequently. He sends pagans, either to be prophets or to be wise men or, more often, to be military generals who smash the Jews and teach them a lesson. They are agents of God. I think, therefore, since I believe everything in the Bible, that it is quite likely—I know Bob will disagree with this—it is quite likely that one of the reasons why Islam is growing so fast, especially in Europe and Canada and America—that is, in what used to be called Christendom, which is now apostate Christendom or Western Civilization—is that God fulfills his promises.

  And one of the promises he made in the Bible is that he will bless everyone who obeys his laws, and he will not bless anyone who disobeys his laws. Now, there’s one law through history that Muslims have disobeyed very badly: Thou shalt not kill. And Christians have a mixed track record there, and while it’s not a track record to be proud of, it’s certainly not as bad as the Muslim track record. But if you look at all the other commandments, especially the one that characterizes our society the most—Thou shalt not commit adultery—I think you can see why the Muslims are being blessed. Why are they conquering Europe? They tried to do it by force of arms for a thousand years and they couldn’t do it; now they’re doing it, why? Well, because they found a weapon much stronger than swords: It’s called mothers. They are having children. They are deferring gratification, they are paying forward, they are respecting families, and we aren’t. There’s the fruit of the Enlightenment, of rationalism, individualism, secularism. If I had to choose, therefore, between a Muslim and a secular humanist defender-of-the-sexual-revolution Enlightenment person—for instance, a Boston College theologian…

  (Laughter)

  Professor Kreeft: …I would certainly choose the Muslim. To say that Islam is more our enemy than the Enlightenment is to say that people who believe in, love, and worship the One True God, even though in ways that are defective and very seriously defective, are worse than people who don’t believe in God at all: That doesn’t make sense.

  Our primary enemies are not Muslims. Our primary enemies are demons, according to Jesus Christ. According to St. Paul, we wrestle “not against flesh and blood but principalities and powers.” Throughout our history we’ve forgotten that, and we have confused who our enemies are, whether it’s Protestants or Communists or Muslims or whoever, we have tried to convert souls by killing bodies. Now, we don’t do that anymore, and that’s good. But what we’ve substituted for that—we used to act
more like Muslims, that is—what we’ve substituted for that, unfortunately, is a kind of indifferentism and, “Oh, c’mon, let’s just get along” and “It’s not really that important,” which I think is worse.

  Indifferentism means you don’t even play the game; you don’t even take religious truth seriously. That’s different from playing the game on the wrong side, believing a religion that has very bad things in it as well as very good things in it, a heretical religion—which is all religions other than Christianity; every religion has some very good things in it and very bad things in it. (Buddhism for instance: They have a wonderful sense of peace and mind control and a terrible theology with no God at all or a pantheistic pudding.) To say that our fundamental enemies are people who, on a very deep level, believe in love and worship and try to obey the same God although in a much more primitive and a much more barbaric way and through a heretical communications network, but ones who’ve borrowed enough from Judaism and Christianity so that the attributes of Allah, the ninety-nine names of Allah, are all found in the Bible—to say that they are more our enemies than our own apostates, that strikes me as absurd. I debated an atheist once at the University of New Hampshire; they didn’t know who I was, and the atheist was one of those analytical philosophers who thought that the word God was meaningless, so we didn’t get to debate whether God exists till the last fifteen minutes. We spent most of the time trying to defend the meaning of the word God and describing what God’s attributes were, so I thought it was a bad debate. Afterwards, though, a Muslim came up to me and said, “You teach at Boston College?”

  (Laughter)

  Professor Kreeft: He said, “You’re a Muslim, aren’t you?” I said, “No. I’m a Catholic.” “Oh, oh, I was confused.” “Why were you confused?” “Well, your theology is perfect, you know Allah exactly.” Now, at that point I’d never even read the Qur’an. It is obvious the Catechism is right: We worship the same God in very different ways. And there are very serious differences between Christianity and Islam, and I don’t want to minimize them at all, therefore I agree with almost everything Bob said. But let’s get a sense of perspective. Who is Jesus’ real enemy? Is it Caesar? Is it the Roman soldiers? Or is it Judas Iscariot? Once we get the Judas Iscariots out of the Church, I think we may be able to convert Muslims, and I would love nothing better than to convert Muslims. But the way you convert people is by holiness, by sanctity. Now, if we could meet on a fair battlefield here, in which the weapons were not swords but hearts, if we could send saints to Muslim countries and they send their saints to our country and we tried to convert each other by the power of sanctity—that would be a wonderful battle, because nobody would lose. And I think we’d win more hearts than they would.

  Professor Zmirak: Thank you.

  (Applause)

  Mr. Spencer: Well, I understand, Dr. Kreeft, your point that the Enlightenment is a greater enemy and we need to have some kind of a convergence or a cooperation between people with a shared morality. So I suppose what I would ask you is: How can we find an accord when there are elements of Islamic morality itself that are so deeply problematic? For example, Muhammad, when he was fifty-four, consummated a marriage with a nine-year-old girl. As he is the “excellent example” of conduct, that is something that is considered normative, such that the Ayatollah Khomeini, when he took power in Iran, lowered the legal marriageable age of girls to nine; when the aid workers went into the refugee camps in Afghanistan in 2003, they found that half the second-grade-age girls were already married and virtually all the girls older than that were already married. So this is something that is essentially rampant and very hard to eradicate. You mentioned also adultery. I think about Islamic marriage law, and the fact that a man can have four wives, all he has to do is say talaq,“You are divorced,” and she’s gone and he can get another—as well as sex slaves he’s conquered in battle, which is specifically allowed for in the Qur’an (chapter four, verse three). And so there’s kind of an appearance of morality that I’m not sure really squares with the morality we might want. I remember the great Oriana Fallaci—who was an Italian journalist internationally famous, and a great hero for freedom and human rights. I had the great privilege of knowing her towards the end of her life, and she told me that when she did a very famous interview with the Ayatollah Khomeini, she was preparing with the translator in a room in Tehran before they went to meet Khomeini. And suddenly a mullah burst in and said, “It’s a scandal! It’s terrible! You’re sharing a room and you’re not married! And you’re in a room alone with a man!” And so he forced her to marry the translator. They have in Shi’ite Islam temporary marriage, which is essentially, usually—not in Fallaci’s case—but usually prostitution: a marriage contract with a deadline. You can marry somebody for an hour, or for a weekend, and then it expires and you’re not married anymore. So there’s no adultery, sure! Why should there be?

  (Laughter)

  Mr. Spencer: But it’s not really anything that I would say is really preferable, even to Enlightenment “anything-goes” morality, which is a corruption of Judeo-Christian standards. How can we square that with the idea that there should be some kind of an accord between moral people?

  Professor Kreeft: We can’t. However, I don’t think most Muslims would defend that. Although that may be wrong, I think it’s parallel to our attitude toward the Mormons. Can we tolerate polygamy? Certainly not, but most Mormons don’t like polygamy anymore, either. And most Muslims don’t in fact, especially those in the West, have more than one wife, either. Can we tolerate African Animism? No. Can we tolerate polygamy in Africa? No, the Church has a big problem with that. Nevertheless, we can still learn something from the Mormons; we can learn something from the Africans, and we can learn something from the Muslims. George Weigel says that the Catholic Church could get its social agenda through Congress if it just did one thing: kick out every single Roman Catholic and replace them with a Mormon or a Muslim. In some areas, they are better than we are at preaching and practicing morality; in other areas they’re horrible. But we can still learn something from them, and the thing that I try to point out in this book that we can learn from them—it’s a difficult concept, it’s not formulatable in just one concept, really, it’s a set of concepts—I call it the primitive. Certainly Muslims have a more primitive concept of God. It’s not a God of Love, it’s not a Trinitarian God, it’s not a God who has a Son or who does an Incarnation or who saves you, it’s a very early Old Testament God. But if we repudiate those roots entirely, as the Enlightenment does, we don’t really have a God at all.

  Here’s a passage from Chesterton, from Saint Thomas Aquinas—and this I think we can learn from Muslims—and we’d better, because we’ve forgotten it. It’s a defense of the fear of God as the beginning of all wisdom, which most religious teachers say is a very bad thing and the beginning of all foolishness. But it doesn’t say that fear of God is the whole story, just the beginning of the story.

  (Reading aloud:) “The Fear of the Lord: that is the beginning of wisdom and therefore it belongs to the beginnings and is felt in the first cold hours before the dawn of civilization; the power that comes out of the wilderness and rides on the whirlwind and breaks the gods of stone, the power before which the Eastern nations are prostrate like the pavement, the power before which the primitive prophets run naked and shouting, at once proclaiming and escaping from their God. The fear that is rightly rooted in the beginning of every religion true or false, the fear of the Lord: that is the beginning of wisdom. But it is not the end.”

  Now, religion is an organic thing, like a tree, and if this primitive fear of God is its roots, and if we have detached from our own roots, and if a religion like Islam is clearer and stronger about those roots even though it has corrupt branches, we can learn to our own use some things from Islam about those roots. We can learn the same thing from primitive Africans.

  Mr. Spencer: There are certainly things we can learn from any given individual. There are certainly wise
people in all religious traditions. That’s really, I think, not at issue here; the question before us is, “Is the only good Muslim a bad Muslim?” and you mentioned earlier that you know that there are good Muslims who are good Muslims because you’ve met them. And I think, “Well, sure, I know good Catholics who contracept,” and yet they will tell you that they are perfectly good Catholics and they’re completely observant. This is, of course, in defiance of Catholic Church teaching, and there are other people who would say, “Well, no, you’re not actually good Catholics.” And how is one to determine that? You go to the sources; you go to the teaching of the Church. And so I would submit that you only know whether a Muslim is a good Muslim or not by Islamic standards, and we have to look at what their own texts and teachings say.

  And so, for example, that very charming story you told about the crucifix and the pictures and the Muslim student—there are several very notable things that I think ought to be added for our edification tonight. One is that, in Islamic tradition, Jesus will indeed come back at the end of the world, not Muhammad. But Jesus will return at the end of the world and he will break all the crosses: that’s Islamic tradition. In other words, he will destroy Christianity, which is believed to be a perversion of the true teachings of Jesus. And so he will break all the crosses, kill the pigs—because of course the Christians are the ones who eat the pork—and abolish the jizya, the tax that I mentioned before. In other words, He will destroy Christianity and Islamize the world; that’s obviously one of those people St. Paul mentions in Corinthians when somebody comes to you with another Jesus, “other than the One we have preached to you,” you receive him readily enough, but it is not remotely the Jesus of the New Testament. And further, in regard to the pictures, while I applaud and appreciate this gentleman saying that he would protect a picture of who he terms as the Prophet Jesus and would revere in other words these religious figures, actually, unfortunately, his co-religionists in the Balkans in particular, in Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, there are videotapes—you can find the tapes on YouTube—of them going into churches, going into Orthodox and Byzantine Catholic churches and kicking down the icons of Jesus and of his Mother and burning the church, pulling down the cross off the top, destroying any representational art. Now, which one of these is really the good Muslim? Well, Islam does teach that representational art, particularly of prophets and religious figures, is a blasphemy and ought rightly be destroyed. And thus, the people who are actually being the pious, good Muslims were the ones who were destroying the icons of Jesus and his Mother in the churches in the Balkans.