Actually, we all knew it would happen, we just didn’t know when or where. Well, we’re at the where and the when now. The city of Houston, Texas, led by their lesbian mayoress Annise Parker, is not going to take it anymore. Take what anymore, you ask? American citizens freely expressing themselves openly about, well, we’re not sure just what yet. At the top of the list, for Houston City Hall, are references to homosexuality and “gender identity.” That kind of speech, we are told, violates “non-discrimination laws,” and so some preachers, suspected of having verbally crossing the line, have had their sermons summoned by City Hall for perusal by self-appointed language police. Yes, you heard it right. No, we are not in Tehran. 

The logical progression of such ordinances would include a lengthy laundry-list of forbidden subjects: not only anti-city-administration talk, but anti-county-state-nation-world talk. Maybe no more free speech on any subject between Islamic-Jihadism and, say, gender-colored soccer balls. And maybe everything in between. After all, sufficiently sensitive people can spot gender connections in the strangest places. In the end, every piece of clothing will be categorized as Discriminatory or Non-discriminatory (hereafter D and ND), every gesture, every look, every word, every product, etc., etc., ad infinitum, ad nauseum. Left-handers seriously offended by the right-handed majority, with ambidextrous folk screeching for laws against both. And demanding tomes of laws defending their “rights”. Maybe red-haired Irishmen venting their ire for being D’d against, like a billion other categories of minorities. Little-tree defenders against large-tree defenders.

For obvious reasons, sign-language is no solution to it all.  Alas for that which alone distinguishes humans from the jungle: human speech.  But, on the positive side, think of the windfall for the N and ND label-makers!

Consider one (there may be 578) simple unintended (?) consequence: this ordinance legally opens every woman’s restroom, every women’s dressing room, every YWCA swimming-pool shower-room to every cunning cross-dressed male pervert (or murderer) in America. That is true because the law is reported to “allow men to use the ladies room and vice versa.”

“You can’t yell ‘FIRE’ in a crowded theater when there is no fire,” broadly applied, once covered the waterfront of free and unfree speech in America. Takes two law libraries now.

My counsel? (a) Realize that it is a complex situation. (b) Understand that It’s made vastly more complex by the proliferation, myriads now, of mental midgets being outraged by every opening of a new Wal Mart because blue, to them, represents a male baby, and offensively so. (c) Know that it would be good if all humans would kindly consider the feelings of all other humans. (d) Let every American fall in love again with the entire Constitution, especially the first amendment. (Check it out.) (e) Let nobody expect to speak (or act!) like a moral imbecile in public and think he/she (can’t use the generic anymore!) is going to get away with it. Get thee to thy closet! (f) Know that none of this is new and its result is predictable. Over 2000 years ago a keen observer of humankind said, speaking of people-types like those who now yelp for affirmation of their outre lifestyles:  “For many walk (in such a way that) their “end is destruction, whose god is their belly (sensual lusts), and whose glory is in their shame.” There have always been those who glory not in their virtue, valor, or victory, but in their vice. Bad as that is, it would be tolerable if they did not try to force me to revel with them in their shame. That, however, would have the salutary effect, they tell me, of my staying out of jail!

In the late1860s, there was much talk about the US congress (Stephen Douglas was a leading figure) about passing legislation prohibiting the mention of slavery from pulpits in America. Preachers, on both sides of the issue, went right on their vociferous way, defending both sides, paying no attention to politician’s threats. As preachers will do, infallibly, on the current subject of debate.  They are writing sermons on the subject as we speak.  Sermons based, hopefully, on the First Book and the First Amendment.

The celebrated historian Arnold Toynbee said it plainly: civilizations come and go. From his life-long study of the subject, he concluded that (conceding the difficulty of drawing neat lines around, or even defining, such entities) over twenty civilizations have existed, and all are now in history’s cemeteries except four—the Oriental, the Hindu, the Muslim, and “western Christendom.”  He also observed that, in principle, that which determines why some live and some die is what he calls “challenge and response,” that is, the continued existence of  a given civilization depends on how it responds to the challenges to its life and health in its own particular historical context.

What about us, “western Christendom?” Is what we in the west are experiencing today vis-à-vis Islam epic or episodic, all-encompassing or anecdotal, a burial ground or a bump in the road?  To put it another way: at what point in the trajectory from birth to death do we stand today, specifically, in the light of our confrontation with Islam.

Many voices (Oswald Spengler, Jacques Barzun, Arthur Koesteler, the authors of The Columbia History of the World, Toynbee are notables, along with dozens of lesser lights) say western civilization is obviously and measurably in a decline mode. We see such things clearly only in retrospect, when both the apogee and the nadir of a civilization have passed which, among other factors, makes our question difficult to answer.

But it remains: of what significance is our confrontation with Islam? It all began early in the seventh century when the Muslims arose from the Arabian Peninsula, over-ran the entire Mediterranean world and a sizable slice of Europe, being stopped in their northward march in France in 732. Its ultimate aim, from its beginning, has been to establish a world-wide caliphate under Sharia law. Allah must reign. (Remember: of all the world’s religions, only Christianity and Islam seek world-wide acceptance.) We are told that no one can correctly call himself a Muslim who does not want, by one means or another, that end-game. That fact, if Islam is not altered fundamentally by Muslim “moderates,” promises that the confrontation can be expected to last for perhaps the next half-century. Or even longer. And if it does moderate, immoderate Jihadists will assuredly continue, endlessly, to arise from its midst.

Islam may well possess a long-term life-or-death commitment to establish a global caliphate, but it is not certain that the west (like our forebears, the Greeks and Romans) has sufficient will-power to save itself. Some (not all) of our leaders talk as if they do, but then, they must. In any case, leaders alone can never compel a civilization to care enough to preserve itself. The western “coalition of the willing” is, at this writing, vacillating and equivocal. Time, maybe a little, maybe a lot, will finally tell. Toynbee again: “Every dead civilization died by suicide.” And Churchill is apt here: “An appeaser diligently feeds the alligator hoping he’ll be the last one eaten.”

Your personal response? (a) Do all you can to positively affect the larger culture, remembering Thomas Carlyle’s word, when asked who caused the French Revolution. It was every Frenchman, he said, who didn’t do his duty to his country. Individuals can make a difference. (b) Invest in the civilization of your church. After all that is what it is. Or ought to be! (c) By all means, work for the health of that yet smaller but more important civilization, your family. (Civilizations have language, rules, morals, beliefs, celebrations, symbols, etc., and thus your family constitutes a civilization writ small. But very large in significance!)  (d) Of greatest import is the civilization of you, your own self. If you and I cannot civilize anybody else, we can choose to become civilized ourselves. And only civilized people can become civilizers of others!

Bill Anderson

Grapevine, Texas

PS: Every student of civilization will enjoy two recent books by Rodney Stark, recently recognized as one of the “25 most influential Evangelicals in America,” by Time. They are “For The Glory of God” and “The Victory of Reason.”  Both are serious, and seriously interesting, and demonstrate conclusively that—although he doesn’t use the precise words—the Judeo-Christian God is the only God in history who ever did, or can, civilize human beings.

PPS: For all pessimists regarding our civilization, get Peter Kreeft’s “DARKNESS AT NOON”: THE ECLIPSE OF “THE PERMANENT THINGS” from the web.  It is a treasure, a gold-mine of ink on paper. God, he said, may not be through with us in the west just yet, and suggests several surprising possibilities in that regard.