Pope Urban Novak II

Michael Novak, without a hint of irony or self-awareness, argues for a willingness to declare pre-emptive war on Iran in order to protect "the Christian Holy Places" in Israel and the West Bank.

He seems oblivious to the fact that he is employing the language and the argument of the Crusades.

What if the mad leader of Iran fulfilled his pledge to wipe Israel from the map with the Iranian nuclear weapon, coming soon? What would we Christians do without the Mount of the Sermon? Without Capernaum? Without Nazareth? Without Cana? Without the lovely and mystical city of Jerusalem — without Golgotha, and the Mount of Olives, the Garden of Gethsemane and the tomb? Without Bethlehem? Without the Sea of Tiberius (the Sea of Galilee), where Jesus after his Resurrection had Peter and the others cast their net on the other side of their boat?

Back in the 1940’s … Reinhold Niebuhr … called for a new tough-minded Christian realism. …

Some things cannot be attempted without sounding very, very silly — without sounding like you don't understand at all what you're talking about.

One such colossal mistake would be to invoke the Sermon on the Mount in the midst of a call for a new Crusade to defend "the Christian Holy Places" in the Levant.

Another would be to appeal to Reinhold Niebuhr's realism as though it provided an endorsement for unrestrained, immodest, sectarian militarism.

Michael Novak tries to do both of these things. He has written a very, very silly post.

(Note to Novak: If you're looking for an elementary introduction to Niebuhrian realism, I'd recommend starting with this speech. If you're not looking for an elementary introduction to Niebuhrian realism, well, geez, you really should be lest you wind up writing more like what you've just written.)

Novak actually has given me a bit more optimism than I'd previously had about the prospects of a nuclear Iran. He inadvertently reminds me that Jerusalem is a holy city for the radical fundamentalist clerics of Iran no less than for the radical neoconservative clerics of First Things. Bombing al-Masjid al-Aqsa is not part of the agenda of militant Islamists. (It is part of the agenda of religious madmen subscribing to premillennial dispensationalist "prophecy" nightmares, but those madmen are American Christianists, not Iranian Islamists.)