Ecumenical Jihad: Ecumenism and the Culture War

By Peter Kreeft

Juxtaposing “ecumenism” and “jihad,” two words that many would consider strange and at odds with one another, Peter Kreeft argues that we need to change our current categories and alignments. We need to realize that we are at war and that the sides have changed radically. Documenting the spiritual and moral decay that has taken hold of modern society, Kreeft issues a wake-up call to all God-fearing Christians, Jews, and Muslims to unite together in a “religious war” against the common enemy of godless secular humanism, materialism, and immorality.

Aware of the deep theological differences of these monotheistic faiths, Kreeft calls for a moratorium on our polemics against one another so that we can form an alliance to fight together to save Western civilization.

• Language: English
• Publisher: St. Augustines Press
• Release date: Jun 10, 2014
• ISBN: 9781587312175

Peter Kreeft

Peter Kreeft (PhD, Fordham University) is professor of philosophy at Boston College where he has taught since 1965. A popular lecturer, he has also taught at many other colleges, seminaries and educational institutions in the eastern United States. Kreeft has written more than fifty books, including The Best Things in Life, The Journey, How to Win the Culture War, and Handbook of Christian Apologetics (with Ronald Tacelli).

Book preview

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Chapter One

Ecumenical Jihad

The Problem: Today = Decay

Picture to yourself the scene. You are Augustine, and you have just heard the news: the unthinkable has happened. Rome, the Eternal City, the heart of the world’s first and only unified global civilization, has fallen. The brink of a long Dark Age is opening up before your feet. What do you do?

You do one of the most radical things a man can do: you write a book—the world’s first philosophy of history, The City of God, a book that would be a lantern for millions through the darkly twisting roads of history for the rest of time, a book that demands to be dusted off and reread almost sixteen centuries later, now that another and far more formidable Dark Age looms ahead: not the Age of the Barbarians, but the Age of the Antichrist.

As Augustine lay dying in North Africa, he could see the fires of his burning city, an echo of Rome’s fall. When the queen bee falls, the other bees in the hive cannot survive. Rome was the queen bee then; America is the world’s queen bee today. Our empire is cultural, not military, but most of the world is becoming increasingly Americanized. What happens here happens everywhere. And what is happening here is very clear. Increasingly, Americanized is coming to mean adulterated, sodomized, contracepted, aborted, and euthanized. Pious Muslims call us the great Satan and see us as a necrotic tumor in the body of humanity.

What we are seeing happening here with increasing clarity is exactly that spiritual war between the City of God and the City of the World that Augustine detected as the fundamental plot of human history. For the first time in the history of America, the term culture war is now becoming familiar and accepted.

The war is very old, of course—as old as Eden. What is new is the global strategy of the City of the World. It is more and more coming out of hiding. The battle lines are becoming clearer. The war on earth is more closely resembling the war in Heaven. Time is more closely mirroring eternity, as if Platonic archetypes were incarnating themselves, inhabiting their earthly instances, like ghosts haunting houses.

At Armageddon there will be no more uncertainty, no neutral corners. Armageddon is approaching. It may be a million years away—or a dozen—but it is approaching, like a wave from the invisible other side of the world. If you listen, you can almost hear the sound of millions of troops being moved, like cosmic chess pieces, jostling for position, spirit-wings opening and closing.

This is not fantasy or mythology. The spiritual war is literal. It is fully as real as any physical war. It has real casualties: eternal souls. It also has physical casualties that already surpass in number those of any war in history. In America alone, the blood of thirty million unborn babies has been spilled into the thirsty maw of Moloch.

Why now? Why so suddenly? A modern Rip Van Winkle falling asleep in 1955 and waking up in 1995 would simply not believe his ears when he heard the statistics of our decay. What moralist, complaining of the 10-percent divorce rate then, foresaw the 50-percent divorce rate now? Who foresaw a 500-percent increase in violent crime and a 5000-percent increase in teenage violent crime? When Black society was being declared beyond repair because of a 30-percent illegitimacy rate, who thought that by 1995 white society would equal it, while the rate would climb to nearly 80 percent among Blacks? Who would have thought even ten years ago that Russian public schools would be showing films about Jesus and American schools would be outlawing them? If the next forty years continue the movement of the last forty, does anyone have the slightest hope for the survival of anything resembling civilization? What would another 5000-percent increase in teenage violent crime mean? Or another tripling of the illegitimacy rate? Or another administration that would be to the Clinton what the Clinton was to the Eisenhower, one that would make the Clinton years look like Ozzie and Harriet? Just extend the line, follow the road, and you will see the cliff.

Many of our citizens simply have not heard the statistics of decay, though they live them; and most of those who know the symptoms do not know the disease that is causing them. They wonder what the source is of the massive destruction of morality and safety and families and marriages and trust and the sanctity of life and sex, and even belief in objective truth and goodness—all these things at once! The root cause of all these poisonous fruits is not obvious, because it is invisible. It is spiritual, not political or economic or military or criminological. No such partial cause can account for such a massive darkness descending over everything at once, like the night sky, spread over the whole world like an eclipse of the sun, or an eclipse of the Son of