The murderous radicals who set off bombs and killed hundreds on Easter Sunday in Sri Lanka chose their targets with ideological purpose. Three Catholic churches were bombed, and with them three hotels catering to Western tourists, because often in the jihadist imagination Western Christianity and Western liberal individualism are the conjoined enemies of their longed-for religious utopia, their religious-totalitarian version of Islam. Tourists and missionaries, Coca-Cola and the Catholic Church \u2014 it\u2019s all the same invading Christian enemy, different brand names for the same old crusade.<\/p>\n
Officially, the Western world\u2019s political and cultural elite does its best to undercut and push back against this narrative. The liberal imagination reacts with discomfort to the Samuel Huntingtonian idea of a clash of civilizations, or anything that pits a unitary \u201cWest\u201d against an Islamist or Islamic alternative. The idea of a \u201cChristian West\u201d is particularly forcefully rejected, but even more banal terms like \u201cWestern Civilization\u201d and \u201cJudeo-Christian,\u201d once intended to offer a more ecumenical narrative of Euro-American history, are now seen as dangerous, exclusivist, chauvinist, alt-right.<\/p>\n
And yet there is also a way in which liberal discourse in the West implicitly accepts part of the terrorists\u2019 premise \u2014 by treating Christianity as a cultural possession of contemporary liberalism, a particularly Western religious inheritance that even those who no longer really believe have a special obligation to remake and reform. With one hand elite liberalism seeks to keep Christianity at arm\u2019s length, to reject any specifically Christian identity for the society it aims to rule \u2014 but with the other it treats Christianity as something that really exists only in relationship to its own secularized humanitarianism, either as a tamed and therefore useful chaplaincy or as an embarrassing, in-need-of-correction uncle.<\/p>\n
You could see both those impulses at work in the discussion following the great fire at Notre-Dame. On the one hand there was a strident liberal reaction against readings of the tragedy that seemed too friendly to either medieval Catholicism or some religiously infused conception of the West. A few tweets from the conservative writer Ben Shapiro, which used phrases like \u201cWestern Civilization\u201d and \u201cJudeo-Christian\u201d while lamenting the conflagration, prompted accusations that he was ignoring the awfulness of medieval-Catholic anti-Semitism, and also that his Western-civ language was just a dog-whistle for white nationalists.<\/p>\n
Read it all<\/a>.<\/p>\n Are Christians persecuted or privileged? Well, both. Really interesting analysis in the light of the terror attack in Sri Lanka and the fire in Notre Dame.https:\/\/t.co\/o8atWDcgmS<\/a> via @NYTOpinion<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 Lindsey Hilsum (@lindseyhilsum) April 23, 2019<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n