We Lack The Language Of Faith To Win This War…

… I wish I could write but everything I read online and see on the news has me filled with anger, rage, and helplessness. It leaves me depressed and makes me feel like my complaints are trivial and my joys undeserved.

I am in mourning.

What’s there to do other than pray and helplessly watch the news reports come in?

Elizabeth Scalia is right, you know. The West lacks the tools to defeat ISIS because ISIS is evil and the West refuses to believe in evil. You cannot defeat something you refuse to accepts exists. Elizabeth writes,

[The West] no longer contains one essential component necessary to fight the evil that instigates human savagery on this level, that of a faith; a language and method of engaging with the supernaturalism that lies beneath, and sustains a movement like IS.

Consider that when the Nazis were barreling through Europe, the majority of the western world professed – with no fear of ridicule or of giving insult, anywhere – a belief in something greater than itself. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill were conventionally religious men of their times, not overly prayerful. But they were imbued with enough faith to recognize that some occasions called for more than even the most sublime rhetoric; some things called for enough humility to make a prayer of supplication, one calling on the Deity to guide, to bless, to sustain – to, as Lincoln said, have “firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right.”

Roosevelt led the nation in prayer on D-Day. In Britain, Churchill openly spoke of “a miracle of deliverance”: “A guiding hand interfered to make sure the allied forces were not annihilated at Dunkirk.”

Our post-Christian, post-faith western leadership is no longer capable of making public prayer, or willing to credit heaven with anything but twinkling stars.

And now that the West has fully embraced secular humanism and driven God from the public forum, even making mention of Him criminal H8 speech, we find ourselves a nation completely ill equipped to battle evil, real evil.

In 2008 Elizabeth prophetically wrote,

The West loves its court systems, its bureaucracies, its diversities, but jihadists use these tools to further their ends. They will not be legislated, jailed, sued, or celebrated out of existence. Appeasement and the stodgy language of diplomacy will not stop them, either, because “diplomacy” is not the language being spoken in these attacks. The fundamentalists who endorse and commit terror believe they are heaven-bound heroes. First and foremost, they “believe.” Their rhetoric of jihad rides the language of faith.

It is with the language of faith that Islamic terrorism must be engaged and defeated, and therein lies the disconnect for the diplomatic West. Having reasoned itself out of faith, its incomplete arsenal is fit for battle, but not for victory. The West can speak only of borders, boundaries, markets, and measurement. Faith exists beyond boundaries and borders; it defies markets and measurement. The negotiables of the West are worldly and “the world” means nothing in the face of paradise. Islam, like all faith, is not of this world but of the world to come. Islam’s extremists, like all extremists, would like to speed their agenda along.

Jihad is not interested in acquiring land, or money, or even control, which faith understands to be illusory. What these extremists want is submission. To their book or to their sword.

We should consider that Islamic terrorism may not be defeatable, except on its own terms, on the battlefield of the supernatural.

This is a battle we are going to lose because we have nothing in our supernatural armory. As a nation even our language is defeatist — we no longer conquer the enemy, we simply have conflicts with them.

We are not going to win this and the problem isn’t going to remain thousands of miles away for much longer. Nineveh has fallen.

“Nineveh is destroyed; who can pity her?
Where can one find any to console her?”

My silence on the matters was due largely to the fact that there’s really nothing to say. Words won’t fix this problem. Only action will — the action of prayer, the action of recognizing evil and acknowledging evil exists.