Posted on 03/26/2008 3:55:33 PM PDT by forkinsocket
Last September Jim Pinkerton penned a brilliant cover story for the American Conservative entitled “The Once & Future Christendom,”1 wherein he argued that Western civilization could only be saved from the onslaught of global radical Islam by uniting under the umbrella of its shared Christian heritage. He illuminated his thesis with trenchant examples taken from Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and in fact named his plan the “Shire strategy,” after the homeland of the hobbit heroes of the trilogy.2 This essay constitutes a sequel, fine-tuning of Pinkerton’s ideas and a further laying of the groundwork for re-establishing a political Christendom.
One major reason that immediately springs to mind for doing so is the threat of the creeping Islamization of Western civilization’s original home, Europe—a process no less a figure than the Archbishop of Canterbury deems inevitable.3 How much solace, then, might be found in the fact that on a global scale the world’s largest religion will continue to be, for many years, Christianity? Apologists with their incessant braying about “Islam, the world’s fastest growing religion” fail to recognize the explosive growth of “Southern Christianity” in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. Currently there are some 2.1 billion Christians and 1.3 billion Muslims, worldwide. By 2025 Christians will number about 2.6 billion, still hundreds of millions ahead of the Muslim headcount.4 Even so, as Pinkerton points out, an Islamic Europe would be a serious, if not mortal, blow to the political survival of the West.5 What would it profit Christian civilization to hold on to (most of) the whole world and yet lose its European soul?
But is a modern-day Holy League—originally created in the 16th century to stave off the jihad-driven Ottoman Empire—really necessary to save Europe and defend the Christian West?
(Excerpt) Read more at hnn.us ...
This is a good thing.
Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven.
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Good post
The only words the come to mind are "pie in the sky"
That being said, it is a great idea, but completely unattainable
Thoughts?
Interesting idea, but it would never work. First off the Western view of Christianity has been deluded beyond man’s ability to fix, let alone fight a spiritual war against Islam. We are living in post-Christian civilization. One needs only to look at Europe.
Also, Islam is as much a political system as it is a religious one. As such Christianity will never muster the collective will of Western geopolitical institutions to successfully wage a cultural war against the Islamists.
Without intervention from above Islam will either win the war over time or it’s own glaring flaws will cause it to collapse from within.
IMHO
This is correct as stated. But do you really think that Christendom had no resources to defend the Western Roman empire in the beginning of V century? Or Constantinopole a thousand years later? Spain fell to the Berbers in the beginning of VIII century because the Christian kings were fighting each other. Iberian peninsular remained largely Muslim for almost 800 years.
Our withdrawal from Vietnam was caused not by our military weakness but by the lack of unity as a people. Today, this inity is even more weak.
Does the author really think that the Christendom, which failed to present a unified front against Islam centuries ago, will do so now, when less than 5% attend churches in Europe?
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