The week of re-postings: Forced Conversions and Air Kisses

Faith and Reason and Forced Conversions

Originally posted September 5, 2006

Tina Brown; Our Lady of the Air Kiss
Originally published April 22, 2005

FAITH AND REASON AND FORCED CONVERSIONS

“Was not Nagasaki the chosen victim, the lamb without blemish, slain as a whole burnt offering on an altar of sacrifice, atoning for the sins of all nations during World War II?” – Dr. Takashi Nagai 1908-1951, on Martyrdom, from All Saints by Robert Ellsberg

It is the rarest of days when I disagree with my favorite blogfather Ed Morrissey, but after mulling over this post of his as well as others, and after thinking quite a lot about the forced conversion of Fox News’ Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig while under the guns and knives of their Islamofascist captors, I find that I do disagree with him.

Ed wrote: I, for one, am happy that Centanni and Wiig had the wits and the luck to get out of Gaza alive. That to me is a victory.

He is not alone in thinking this way. Indeed, I would bet he is among a fair majority (including an engineer friend) who are perhaps overthinking the thing.

Faith and Reason share a kinship, and within that kinship the natural and supernatural wave back and forth, like wind-stirred wheat in a field, but only to an point. The gift of faith is itself supernatural, but let’s call it a small-s-supernatural, one in which reason may be easily ascertained. I think once circumstances have led one – willingly or unwillingly – to confront capital-S-Supernatural, the waters become very deep, and reason must necessarily hang back near the shore.

The demand to “convert or die” is not a thinking demand, it is not born of reason. It is culled forth from a dark heart given over to something larger than a human sense or sensibility. It is an unnatural requirement; it is Supernatural. As such, it can only be properly answered through Supernatural means, through a heart that is not dark but which is equally given over to something larger than our rational and reductive imaginings. Can you reduce the response to a forced conversion into whether one “meant it” or not? Yes, you can, but in doing so you have taken your eyes off of something hugely in play but easy to miss – that the greatest feats of heroism written in the annals of human history have come about through a combination of faith and reason, but with reason bringing up the rear.

Firefighters on 9/11 asked a blessing from Fr. Mychal Judge before they headed into the burning towers of the World Trade Center. Reason cautioned that running into such a hellish conflagration was foolhardy – faith whispered something else, and it won.

Reason told Casper ten Boom and his spinster daughters Corrie and Betsy that it was risky-unto-madness to try to hide Jews in a bedroom wall while Nazis occupied their village – faith shrugged, “how can you not take the risk?”

Reason told the 16 Carmelites of Compiegne that renunciation would save their lives; after all, anyone would know they didn’t really mean it. Faith said, “trust in the Lord at all times,” and they went to the guillotine singing psalms and offering their necks for the defeat of “The Terror,” which, it must be said, came to an end some ten days later.

It has been mentioned that we are battling an enemy that “loves death more than life.” Certainly we have seen that they are willing to die for their beliefs. An enemy who does not care if he dies as long as he can kill you, too, is an enemy who cannot be reasoned with. This is an enemy thoroughly appreciative of the power of martyrdom, its ability to inspire, to convince and even to claim victory. We seem to have forgotten that martyrdom – a foolish waste, to Reason’s sensibility – is often the key componant toward changing social perceptions and even morals. The virgin martyrs, much derided in our “enlightened” era, were the first women to declare themselves set apart, meant to be more than chattel, able to declare themselves as belonging to no man or house, to “no one but Christ.” An unheard of concept!

To my knowledge, the pre-kidnapping religious beliefs of Centanni and Wiig are unknown. Some say that if the men had no particular faith to start with, their going along with a forced conversion was a reasonable tactic, and perhaps it was. If faith is meaningless to you, then a forced conversion will be too. Frankly, if you held me at gunpoint and told me to confess myself a Democrat, or even a Boston Red Sox fan, I’d do it in a heartbeat. Hollywood aside, political parties and baseball teams, with very few exceptions, are not the concerns of angels, who fight more pressing battles.

But whether Centanni and Wiig were men of faith, or not, their “conversions” were a sort of victory for our enemies. They displayed to the world what the West “holds dear.” I am not saying the newsmen were cowards, not at all. I’m only saying that in a clash of civilizations, their pronouncements about Allah and Mohammed, and their confession of new, Islamic names, was a real-time demonstration to the Islamofascists in our midst that “staying alive,” means the world to us. It can be translated as “look at these callow Western dogs, so in love with life, so beholden to nothing that they will say anything, do anything, even allow us to rename them, to cling to life…while we will give up everything…”

The re-naming of these two Western men is particularly telling. While it may mean nothing at all to a secularist, it means quite a lot to the Islamists watching the world over, and to the Christians and the Jews, as well, because they too understand it. Abraham, Noah, Jacob, Sarah, even the apostle Peter were all given new names by God, the new names had to do with relationship and covenant. “I shall give you a new name,” is one of God’s promises. To give up one’s name is to give up one’s self. To allow someone else to name you is to count yourself the lesser. It might all seem pretty innocuous to Reason. To Faith, however, this is fraught with meaning – this is all about surrender and the handing over of power. By proclaiming their new Islamic names Centanni and Wiig – probably quite unwittingly – were declaring themselves new men in Allah. They were also living metaphors for the surrender of “the lesser” West.

I wonder, in war, can any innocent captive live or die only to themselves? I don’t think so, not when our enemy is so fluent in the language of symbolism and imagery.

I am wondering whether these Islamofascists have ever considered that by forcing a conversion, by forcing someone to speak the names of Allah and Muhammed with lying hearts, they (the Islamofascists) themselves are precipitating a most sinful blasphemy, by their own lights. But that’s perhaps a topic for another column.

Martyrdom is not about justice – it is not about reasonable death. It is about exactly the opposite – it is about facing down what is completely unreasonable and unjust and offering oneself to the cause of what is just – is reasonable. And yes, there is victory in it – but belonging, as it does, to the realm of the Supernatural, that victory is not always obvious and clear. But we all know that simply because a thing is not obvious does not mean it is untrue. The Carmelites of Compiegne and Takashi Nagai knew that.

Am I urging the West toward martyrdom, here? No, I am not urging it. But I am suggesting throughout history, martyrs have spilled blood and it has made a difference. I am suggesting that down the line some may well be called to martyrdom, and we might be wise to anticipate it and understand its use. I am suggesting that when one is caught in a fight between darkness and light – a fight that is more super than natural – such blood might well be required. It always has been, before.

***

TINA BROWN; OUR LADY OF THE AIR KISS

I don’t know when I have read a snottier, snobbier, more relentlessly superficial, arrogant and bigoted piece of dreck than Tina Brown’s latest column in the Washington Post, Reverence Gone Up In Smoke.

Sigh…what a disappointment for Tina and her pals. Amid all of that glorious color and pomp of a papal funeral and a conclave, the solemn beauty of the chant – the whole mystical and mysterious sense of Other – they’d become attracted, mildly so, but attracted, nevertheless, to the whole “religion thing”. They’d admired the surface of the Lake of Faith, but, sniff, they’re much, much too smart to actually partake of the water without the right sort of lifeguard, darling, you know, one who looks good and tells us we are all holy and lovely and fine and let’s us go on our merry way. A lifeguard who will perhaps even join us at all those luncheons and dinner parties, darling, all those too-too tony gatherings, all the witty repartee, all the sweet and haughty laughter we may indulge in as we ridicule those who do not understand or appreciate our lovely educations, our lovely clothing, our lovely hairstyles, our lovely – so very lovely – things.

There is a lot going on in Brown’s column – an admission that for the folks on the left the papal election meant nothing more than yet another political defeat. Just as they had deluded themselves on election day (a day on which Kerry’s own pollster predicted a loss by 3% points) to believe that a man who had never actually led the presidential race, who had offered neither real ideas or real military documentation, was definitely going to win the White House back for them, this time they had decided to believe that somehow the “winner” of the papal elections would be “some youthful cardinal we hadn’t even heard of yet, some charismatic dark horse whom the joyful crowds, so many of them young, would immediately recognize as their own.”

Well…actually…NEWSFLASH, TINA…the man who emerged from the balcony was recognised, quite joyously, by the very youthful crowd in St. Peter’s Square, as “one of their own.” Those young adults, after boisterous cheering, began their first elated chant: Ben-e-dict-o, Ben-e-dict-o.

They get it, the young Catholics. And you and your friends, who seem not to understand what was truly taking place in the Sistine Chapel, or what the papacy means – or what, for that matter, Christianity means – do not. To you, it’s all a great big Church of NO that won’t let you just do what you want and pet you and say, “why, how clever and wonderful you are, dear, here, have a cookie! But not two! Mustn’t get fat now, because otherwise no one will ever love you or think you are a good person…be like the Italians! They are not fat!”

I am a little puzzled as to why, exactly, you and your friends feel this poisonous need to go rather overboard in your bigoted nose-wrinkling. I mean, yes, I DO understand to a point. You and your whole generation have had a difficult time moving from childhood of “gimmee what I want…” to the adulthood of “take what you need…”

How you must have truly hated to hear Cardinal Ratzinger, a day before he became Benedict XVI utter those terribly divisive words: We should not remain infants in faith, in a state of minority. And what does it mean to be an infant in faith? Saint Paul answers: it means “tossed by waves and swept along by every wind of teaching arising from human trickery” (Eph 4, 14)

No. You could not have liked hearing that, beholden as you are to the age in all of its furious fashion and requirement to conformity. So, I DO understand, to a point, why you need to do the “sniff and giggle, mock those unsophisticated Christians” thing. It’s hard to break those habits from high school.

But, you know, you do have your own church, so I don’t really know why you have to be so concerned about anyone else’s. You have what Flip Wilson used to call “The Church of What’s Happening NOW.” The Church of Me First. The Church of Cackling Condescension, The Church of Blithe Nobility: I wrote a check, darling, to each of the “right” causes. You don’t expect me to actually go down into that smelly soup kitchen and dish out hash to those people, do you?

Not all of your friends are like that of course. Some of them do fund raising for charities and the arts, and hospitals and museums, which is very nice – although very often the fund-raisers net very little after expenses, still it’s something. And some of your friends do make a point of only flying in private jets which are already heading their way, to – you know – conserve energy. And some of them step into limos only after they’ve pressed a buck into someone’s hand and congratulated them for keeping it real. Sometimes, they even make a “black power” fist after they do it, even if the bum they’ve treated to coffee is not black.

It’s part of the liturgy of your church, I believe. All those gestures. All that pretty ritual.

What I do think is so funny is that you spend so much time huffing and puffing about how the Christians are trying so hard to suppress, and to close down. And you do not see for a second that you, and all of your co-religionists are the leading proponents of silencing others (I don’t remember it being the religious folk who came after Larry Summers or Jada Pinkett Smith because they dared to speak at Harvard Temple in the vernacular of plain speech, rather than in the exalted language of political correctness. I don’t recall the religious folk attempting to get the medical records of actors or artists who dealt with addiction to pain killers, or more.)

Your church shouts down, throws pies, mocks, “scorches the earth” and openly wishes for the violent deaths of others.

It is not a church that walks into leper colonies, or soup kitchens to try to help (that’s what taxes and government are for!) It is not a church that prays for the good of others, unless they are the “right sort” of others, meaning, COWHN church-members, only.

There IS a church out there, that is cause for serious concerns about personal and spiritual liberty. But it is not the Christian one.

I read your column and I remember a prophecy I had read long ago. I don’t remember if it was a Fatima prophecy or Lourdes, or some other. Maybe it’s some silliness that I am confusing with personal revelation; it’s late and I am tired. But I remember what the prophecy said. It said that an event would take place “which will be seen by the entire world,” and that the event would have the effect of making everyone look into their own hearts, examine their consciences, so to speak, and that there would be many who return to the faith, and others who resist or simply choose to turn away.”

Perhaps the funeral of John Paul II (whom you did not love any more than you love Benedict, but who was so beloved by others he could not be forcefully opposed) was that event. Over a million people at prayer, on their knees on cobblestone, in Communion with the Lord Jesus. The attraction – the admittedly superficial attraction – of the beauty and pomp, and the deep mystery at its core. It was an event seen all over the world, as was the naming of the new pope.

People are choosing. Choose wisely, Tina. If you found yourself “attracted” to the Lake of Faith, no matter how superficially, consider dipping in a toe. Don’t be afraid of the water. It doesn’t burn.