Days of Reckoning

I share this article because it underscores the point being made on the blog. Secularism arises only when it is filling a vacuum left by the retreat of religion. In America, that religion is Christianity. We see the rise of secularism in every institution driving the culture. This is only allowable by the voluntary retreat of Christians and the church in this country. Western Europe is 50 to 100 years ahead of the United States on this retreat, and it shows.

Ironically, the retreat of Christianity not only allows for the rise of secularism, but also for the expansion of Islam, particularly militant Islam. This is not because Christians are great soldiers, but the Christian foundations that fostered the building of the United States created a bulwark against Islamism. Those foundations were physical in our laws and actions and spiritual in our prayers. That, too, is in retreat.

So here is an article on Andrew McCarthy in National Review that is an example this reality without going into the underlying causes that we are discussing.

“The president is a movement leftist who sees in our society a condemnable legacy of racism, imperialism, and economic exploitation that cries out for “fundamental change.” That is not meaningfully different from the Islamist perspective of America: The Brotherhood’s self-proclaimed mandate to “eliminate and destroy Western civilization from within” by “sabotage” is, in effect, a cognate summons to “fundamental change,” even allowing that Islamists are driven to statism by sharia rather than Marxism. The Brotherhood’s American mouthpiece, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, brags that the president nabbed 85 percent of the Muslim vote on November 6 — larger even than Obama’s lopsided share of the Hispanic vote, which has GOP strategists hyperventilating. You wouldn’t want to take CAIR claims at face value, but their ardor for Obama, like the Brotherhood’s, is palpable. And as we’ve seen for four years, it is not an unrequited love.”

This is about what the re-election of Barak Obama represents. “Fundamental change,” in the President’s words, has always represented at its deepest roots changing the foundations of the country and leaving Christianity in the dustbin of history. Watch how things are playing out in the Middle East now that the United States, and even more so Western Europe, are distancing themselves from Israel. The Islamists are emboldened everywhere because they see in the weakening of the West, the weakening of Christianity.

This is a fate that Christians have brought on by active indifferences to the fundamentals of the faith, with the church following on as an increasingly empty institution. The good news is that the real church is not an institution, per se, but the mystical body of believers in Christ. And, I believe, there remains a very large remnant of those in this country.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/333595/along-comes-hamas-andrew-c-mccarthy