Boilerplate Neocon Hagiography

One of the standard patterns for which way too many Faithful Conservative Christians[tm] fall is the habit of being herded into cheering for toxic secularism on the grounds that it is opposed to Radical Islam. Recall the wisdom of uncle Screwtape: the devil always sends errors and evils into the world in pairs in the hope that, fleeing one, we will embrace the other.

Here in the West, the trick is accomplished by offering us hagiographies of brave opponents of Islam whose brave opposition turns out to consist of, “Let’s all uncritically accept the standard nostrums of post-Christian relativist hedonism that now passes for Western “culture”. Articles like this are fairly typical samples of this pattern and Christians tend to join the cheering throng with remarkably few critical faculties being brought to bear. That’s how we wind up with the spectacle of Michael Novak hailing a sworn enemy of God like Christopher Hitchens as “a treasure” and treating him like some sort of hero.

The enemy of my enemy is not my friend. Many of the enemies of Islam who get the hagiography treatment from the End to Evil crowd would also like to see the destruction of the Christian tradition in general and the Catholic Church in particular. As far as they are concerned, if you’ve seen one Abrahamic religion, you’ve seen ’em all.