Archbishop Cranmer: Islam, Islamism and Islamophobia: Our Culture has Lost its Reason, or its Capacity to Reason

Some much needed commentary on the growing problem of militant Islam in England. See what you think.

Where is the evidence that our society is capable of exercising reason in the face of these twin dogmatic fundamentalisms of political progressive propagandising and Islamic threat?

Emotion is calling out in the streets and on the internet in its apoplectic misery that our governing classes are more concerned to protect the hurt feelings caused by so-called Islamophobia, than protect our children from Rochdale rape gangs and Manchester bombers.

Reason asks if there is even such a thing as Islamophobia. Reason says that it is reasonable to be afraid of people committed to an ideology that uses violence and assassination against its enemies without theological or cultural constraint. Only the dogmatism of pseudo-therapy links this reasonable apprehension with a mental anxiety that is unreasonable of a fear of spiders (arachnophobia) or fear of being shut in small spaces (claustrophobia). If reason had any power in our society, Islamophobia, in its strict and etymological sense, would be a sign of sanity, not criminal intent.

Allied to a real anxiety, or even phobia, that Islam and the koranic practice of Islam means us harm and threatens our democracy and freedom of speech with the horror that progressive political dogmas of tolerance and inclusion have invented and legislated for double-speak that silences not only what we say but what we are deemed to think, we have the growing apprehension that our culture has lost its reason; or if not lost its reason and gone mad (though it might have) has lost its capacity for reason.

…Many of us believe that only full-bloodied Christianity has the passion, the moral force, the transformative power and the vision to counter the determination and inexorable forward march through Europe of Islam. Islam was once held off at the gates of Tours in the west and Vienna in the east, and it was held off by force. Since military force appears to be currently unimaginable, spiritual muscle, which is always morally and metaphysically preferable to military force, is the only other option.

Unless there is a better diagnosis of how the terror and inexorability of Islam can be countered in England, then let the Christians rediscover the confidence, and take their faith, their love and their voices into the public square, unashamed of either the mockery of the secularists, or the threat of the Islamists. Nothing in history has been able to halt the grim shadow of ‘the prophet’ across the face of human history except for the Risen Christ, who brings trust in the place of terror, forgiveness in the face of fanaticism, and culture and experience of life in the face of a culture and experience of death.

Read it all.