Which kind of Christian are you?

During the thousand years that included the careers of the Frankish soldier and the Polish king, the Christians of Asia and Africa proved unable to wage successful war with the Moslem conquerors; and in consequence Christianity practically vanished from the two continents; and today nobody can find in them any "social values" whatever, in the sense in which we use the words, so far as the sphere of Mohammedan influence. There are such "social values" today in Europe, America, and Australia only because during those thousand years the Christians of Europe possessed the warlike power to do what the Christians of Asia and Africa had failed to do - that is, to beat back the Moslem invader.

~ Teddy Roosevelt.

If your answer to the question is that you're not a Christian and we're, like, so past that, then you have taken a position that ensures that our fate will be that of the Christians of Asia and Africa. They disappeared or were subjugated -- along with all the other people of their lands who rejected Christianity.

When the chips are down, there is, friend, very, very little that divides Christians from you who think of yourselves as non-Christians.

If you think that your generic Christian longs for the establishment of a theocracy then you simply have watched that greasiest of movies, The Handmaid's Tale, one too many times. If you think that Christian churches are the sole repository of U.S. hypocrisy then you are just too young to remember Bill Clinton's telling us he didn't have sex with Monica.

Thus, honest secularists' fears about Christianity are ill founded; their faith in secularists misplaced. We are joined to each other far more closely than many people realize by the mystic chords of memory our common cultural experience.

If an American secularist and a believer in papal infallibility were to have to spend a six months together in Mongolia or Iceland they would be grateful for their good fortune in running into each other. I once spent some time on Taiwan and tried hard to immerse myself completely in Chinese culture in aid of my language studies. It was nevertheless a great pleasure to get together with other American students and hear American accents and American chit chat. It was great to go to the local U.S. Navy facility and enjoy a cup of coffee and some apple pie instead of green tea and fried rice.

Do you think that your own sense of who you are is on a plane that is somehow more elevated than that? These are the bedrock experiences of people from the same culture who voluntarily or involuntarily deal with other people of other cultures: language, humor, food, dress, manners. Sooner or later you will miss people of your own kind.

Do not believe the fairy tale that mankind is united by fidelity to abstract philosophical doctrines. Not an American in a 1,000 10,000 can give an accurate account of our country's constitutional foundation. What makes us Americans is a lifetime of informal experiences with each other involving a direct handing down of traditions and values one to the other.

You are of and from a Christian society regardless of your belief or your opinions on theology. All your life you have drunk from a Christian well. You can reject Christian theology and yet base your life on Christian precepts. And you can do so without hypocrisy and without rejecting the immense value of the source. And you can appreciate our Christian heritage and know at the same time that Christians often fall short of their professed ideals and taken many ridiculous positions. (Much like yourself, perhaps, or are these only Christian failings?)

When all is said and done, however, the essential core of our Christian civilization is one of decency and caring for others. You would long for a nation founded on its values if yours were ever taken from you.

We are faced with every manner of Islamic terror and subversion. Faced with this distasteful reality, it is better that we adopt the view that we must hang together or most assuredly we will hang separately. "Us versus Them" works a lot better when the swords are slipping slowly from their scabbards. It is a useful beacon to help us see clearly through the fog of multiculturalism and political correctness that the bien pensants are work so hard to generate.

Differences between Christians and secularists are trivial in the face of this deadly threat from Muslim totalitarianism.

Survival, historically, was reserved to people who were fighters. Muslims among us attempt to hide their aggressive agenda behind our legal institutions that they despise and would instantly abandon were they victorious. For all of the Western nations that now have to deal with large numbers of Muslims on their own soil, it is important to realize that Muslims among us attempt to hide their aggressive agenda behind our legal institutions that they despise and would instantly abandon were they victorious. This battlefield is every bit as serious as an actual battlefield. We must fight this battle at home now, not just overseas.

Which, then, are you? Are you a fighter, or a lover of servitude and national extinguishments? The clear historical lesson is there for you to learn. And Islam, with its jihad, its totalitarianism, and its utterly closed intellectual system, is intent on the continuation of its 1,400-year attack on infidels everywhere. To them what matters is not that you are not a Christian; it is that you are not a Muslim.

Because you are not a Muslim, you are an enemy. If Muslims take over your country, your choice will be conversion, subjugation, or exile. That is the long and the short of it.

"Theodore Roosevelt On Islam." The New English Review, 12/19/07 (emphasis added).

Revised 12/22/07.