By Bob Allen
Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., said in a podcast briefing Jan. 8 that U.S. Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.) was on target in an interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt about Wednesday’s attack on a satirical newspaper in Paris known for publishing cartoons lampooning world religions including Islam.
“We’re in a religious war,” said Graham, a Southern Baptist who attends Corinth Baptist Church in Seneca, S.C. “These are not terrorists, they are radical Islamists who are trying to replace our way of life with their way of life. Their way of life is motivated by religious teachings that require me and you to be killed, enslaved or converted.”
Mohler said he agrees with the senator that America faces a religious war, “but that doesn’t mean a war between Christianity and Islam.”
“It does mean a war between Western civilization and the challenge of a resurgent and terroristically inclined Islam,” Mohler said.
Mohler said Graham’s sentiment is not echoed in other government sectors. The U.S. State Department goes out of its way to avoid mentioning religion in referring to the terrorist group that calls itself the Islamic State, he said. Similarly, the government of France has been on the front line of the military dimension of terrorism but “unwilling to take on Islam as a cultural challenge, a theological challenge, an ideological and, more importantly, a worldview challenge.”
Mohler, who has a Ph.D. in theology, said Islamic teaching is based on a theological worldview that separates the world of Islam, which is under submission to the Quran and Sharia law, from what is defined as the “world of war,” which is not yet under Sharia rule.
“It is true, of course, that not all Muslims are radicalized or extremist,” Mohler said. “It is true that many Muslims, especially in the West, have nothing to do with this kind of terrorist attack, either in plotting it or in supporting it. It is also true that most of the Muslims around the world, even if they hold to a theological worldview that justifies this kind of action, will never be involved in it.”
“But the other side of the equation is profoundly true,” he continued. “And that is that the Western world now finds itself at war with at least a very large sector of Islam, and a sector of Islam that the larger Islamic movement has been either unwilling or unable to limit in terms of its terrorist reach.”
Mohler said such logic “is simply something that the modern secular mind really cannot understand, and the American government seems almost resolutely determined to ignore or even to deny.”
“From the 18th century onward, the Western civilization elites have been determined to try to create a world order ruled by reason and rationality,” he observed. “There’s good reason to believe that in much of the world that has succeeded, but the reality of what took place in Paris yesterday is a very cruel and undeniable reminder that the rest of the world isn’t going along.”
Mohler said it will continue to get harder for intellectuals to deny the worldview element of terrorism.
“French intellectuals, European intellectuals and their American compatriots are finding themselves hard-pressed to deny that this is indeed a religious war,” he said, “that there is a theological dimension here that simply must be accepted.”