Ain't No Denying Him

Now Peter was sitting outside in the courtyard, and a servant-girl came to him and said, "You too were with Jesus the Galilean." But he denied it before them all, saying, "I do not know what you are talking about."

When he had gone out to the gateway, another servant-girl saw him and said to those who were there, "This man was with Jesus of Nazareth." And again he denied it with an oath, "I do not know the man."

A little later the bystanders came up and said to Peter, "Surely you too are one of them; for even the way you talk gives you away." Then he began to curse and swear, "I do not know the man!" And immediately a rooster crowed.

And Peter remembered the word which Jesus had said, "Before a rooster crows, you will deny Me three times." And he went out and wept bitterly.

- Matthew 26:69-75

I don’t think Ed Morrissey truly grasps the true meaning and importance of this passage. Otherwise he wouldn’t have eviscerated syndicated columnist David Warren for his justifiable criticism of Fox News journalists Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig for going through the motions of converting to Islam just to save their own skins.

Warren doesn’t stick to one consistent theme in his critique. At times he berates Centanni and Wiig as cowards willing to do and say anything, to prostrate themselves and disgrace their entire civilization in the hopes that their captors – now known not to be Hamas or Islamic Jihad, but the secular Fatah – might spare their lives. At others he quite reasonably dismisses the possibility that the two men are Christians because of the alacrity with which they donned Arab clothing and mouthed propaganda conversions before the terrorists’ cameras.

As to the first criticism, I’m of two minds. On the one hand, it’d be easy for me to sit here in the comparative comfort and safety of my den and say that the Fox News duo should have spit in their captors’ eyes instead. I’ve never faced a life or death situation like that, and don’t know how I would intuitively respond to it. I know how I hope I would respond – with courage and defiance, willing to, if it came to this, die for my country and my faith. But theory is one thing, and practice oftentimes another.

On the other hand, it’s difficult to argue with this Warren graph:

The[kidnappers] didn't make [the propaganda film] for face value. They made it to show the whole Muslim world, via satellite television, what wimps these Westerners are. That they'll do anything at all to save their lives, that they don't think twice about it. That is the substance of most Islamo-fascist propaganda: that the West consists of straw men, of men without chests, of men easily pushed over.

Put another way, Centanni and Wiig showed that they had no honor, nor the courage to defend such if they had. They, individually, personified the very caricature of Westerners that convinced Osama bin Laden after Mogadishu that the West, and in particular the United States, could be beaten with a minimum of effort, and thus ignited the current war.

Warren’s second criticism, however, is, to anybody who understands the Christian faith, inarguable:

I assume they are not Christians (few journalists are), but had they ever been instructed in that faith, they might have grasped that conversion to Islam means denial of Christ, and that is something many millions of Christians (few of them intellectuals) have refused to do, even at the cost of excruciating deaths. Christianity still lives because of such martyrs. Not suicide bombers: but truly defenseless martyrs. [emphasis added]

The apostle Peter wept bitterly because he knew he had committed the ultimate betrayal – denying his LORD repeatedly for no more noble reason than to save his own ass from suffering the same fate Jesus did.

Whatever Centanni’s and Wiig’s grasp of Peter’s experience is, it appears that the Cap’n’s is a lot weaker than it ought to be, for he commits the vile slander of equating Christian martyrdom with the Islamist death cult:

I'm not going to do a point-by-point fisking here, because I doubt it would do much good, but Warren makes unsupported assumptions and then builds on them to a conclusion that seems almost as bad as anything radical Islamists say about suicide bombings.

Warren wants kidnapped hostages to die for Christianity and the West rather than jolly along their kidnappers to gain their own freedom. That may be a splendid sentiment, but it results in dead Westerners rather than dead Islamists, and I fail to see how that represents any kind of victory. One of the reasons why Western culture is superior to that of radical Islam - and I say superior deliberately - is that we value individual human life. Dying needlessly and purposelessly for the West doesn't gain us any converts in this conflict.

Warren said no such thing. To the contrary, his contention is that the Fox News pair, unlike Italian hostage Fabrizio Quattrocchi, who made a heroic stand in the face of death against his al Qaeda captors two years ago, did not know for a fact that their lives were in mortal danger and were not explicitly threatened with death if they did not convert to Islam. They just assumed this to be the case, and instantly knuckled under. Which, as a practical matter, is morally indistinguishable from the generally disdained notion of negotiating with terrorists to secure hostages’ release, something that has been the antithesis of Western anti-terrorism policy for the past generation. How quasi-Stockholm syndrome becomes less reprehensible or counterproductive when embraced by hostages themselves is something that Morrissey never gets around to explaining.

Indeed, and astonishingly, the Cap’n gets the equation entirely backwards in this graf:

Warren complains about the image that Centanni, Wiig, and others who beg for their lives leave on the Muslim world. He says it makes Westerners look like wimps. That, however, is an indictment on their culture, not ours, that they place individual people in situations where they have to beg for their lives. Warren wants to play by Muslim rules, and he wants to do it with other people's lives. It's pretty damned easy to criticize hostages who have no idea how to stay alive except to cooperate and hope things work out well - if the critic is heartless enough to do it.

Sure, it’s an indictment of Muslim culture. But would Islamists be so encouraged to kidnap Westerners if they didn’t believe that "begging for their lives" instead of resisting, to the death if necessary, is precisely the reaction they were going to elicit? Indeed, this gets at the heart of why the enemy believes that they can conquer us – our very sanctification of individual lives, both our own and theirs, is what they see as our Achilles heel. If Western hostages would be more like Quattrochhi than Centanni & Wiig, and if their governments would follow suit, Islamic fundamentalists would be far less emboldened to press their attacks against us, whether at the level of nuclear blackmail or kidnapping journalists in Gaza. That IS an indictment of our culture in that it makes us vulnerable in a clash of civilizations that is, at its core, a battle of wills, and as such one in which we are seriously overmatched.

The core of that comes in Morrissey’s next graf, which is colossal in its historical ignorance:

Christianity did not survive because of martyrdom; it survived despite it, and the martyrs prepared themselves for the task. The church survived the oppression of the Romans in its first centuries, not by mindlessly dying for Christianity but for living for it. Romans did not seize people randomly off the street and tell them to deny their faith, but instead arrested and tortured the leaders of the Church. Had Warren spent any time researching the age of martyrdom, he would know that the early church cautioned the unprepared not to attempt it because of the risk of apostasy. It's hardly analogous to the terror of fanatical Muslims today, and Centanni and Wiig never volunteered to be the banner-carriers of Christianity or the West.

The Cap’n, once again, has it completely backwards. In the first three centuries of the church era, to be a Christian meant almost certain martyrdom at Roman hands; to live for the faith meant being willing to die for it, and millions of the brethren, not just church leaders, did so.

There is a legend from those dark times of a martyr named Antipas, who was given the choice of denying Christ and acknowledging Caesar as Lord or being roasted to death inside a metal cylinder. Antipas could have taken the easy way out, as Morrissey suggests and as the two Fox journos did, and mouthed a false "conversion" to paganism; indeed, as John 21 illustrates, Antipas would have been forgiven for doing so. It would, however, have been a crappy witness, and, if that example had become widely emulated, would have led to the death of the church if its adherents had made such a cavalierly public display of taking their faith so casually. Antipas was not willing to be a fair weather Christian, and told his Roman persecutors as much. One of them, exasperated, exclaimed, "Antipas, don’t you know that the whole world is against you?" The bold believer is said to have retorted, "Then Antipas is against the whole world!"

Did Antipas have a death wish? Did he want such a hideous fate? Of course not, any more than Quattrochhi or Centanni or Wiig or any of the other Western hostages over the past generation wanted to fall into Islamist hands. It’s insulting, both to Warren and to his own readers, for Morrissey to suggest that the Canadian columnist "wants kidnapped hostages to die," as though Christians are as eager to throw our lives away as Islamists are to take them. But as often is the case in life in general, what we want is rarely a relevant factor. We have to deal with situations as they are, and sometimes we find ourselves in circumstances where there is a cost to the principles – and, if applicable, faith – that we proclaim. If what we say we believe in actually means so little to us that we’re willing to disavow it so easily, then it is not unreasonable to question the sincerity of those beliefs.

This is why Warren is correct in doubting the spiritual status of Messrs. Centanni and Wiig. No true believer in Jesus Christ, indwelt and empowered by the Holy Spirit (as Peter was not, yet, at the time that he thrice denied Christ), would be capable of denying Him, even to save his/her life. That Cap’n Ed cannot wrap his considerable mind around this truth justifiably, to my reckoning, brings his own spiritual bona fides into reasonable doubt, just as it highlights our greatest weakness as a country, culture, and civilization and brings into like doubt our ability to defeat this enemy.

That is what makes Morrissey’s peroration so emblematic:

The thought process behind Warren's diatribe eludes me. It's presumptuous and in the end, it's ludicrous. He wants to make the abductors' point for them and turn every Westerner into a combatant. That's his argument at its base - that Centanni and Wiig should have understood themselves to be combatants and their cooperation with their captors amounted to treason, if not apostasy.

Warren’s thought process doesn’t elude Morrissey, because he quotes it in his third sentence. In this war, every Westerner is, indeed, a potential combatant, because each Westerner is a potential casualty. And if each and every Westerner is not willing, ultimately, to die for his/her country, his/her culture, and, if applicable, his/her Christian faith, then we are already beaten, because the enemy is not so bereft of zeal.

Warren’s core argument is that while Islamists place no value on human life, Westerners invest entirely too much; and that if there is, after all, nothing that we consider to be worth dying for, we leave ourselves with nothing worth living for - and, therefore, nothing worth fighting for.

The apostle Peter was eventually martyred for his faith, and demanded to be crucified upside-down because he didn’t consider himself worthy to die in the same fashion as the LORD he once denied. He counted the cost of his beliefs and was willing to pay the price for them. Hopefully no one else will be faced with that choice in the current struggle. Pipedream though that is, one can only pray that those that are will not be "without chests and without character," and that those who counsel such cul de sacs of least resistance will not need Damascus road encounters of their own to recognize the sanctimony spewing forth from their own dens of comfort.

UPDATE: Here's another classic Mark Steyn line:

Did you see that video of the two Fox journalists announcing they'd converted to Islam? The larger problem, it seems to me, is that much of the rest of the Western media have also converted to Islam, and there seems to be no way to get them to convert back to journalism.

Touche. Which is all the more gratifying given that Steyn goes on to echo my above sentiments:

[F]or the Fox journalists and the Western media who reported their release, what's the big deal? Wear robes, change your name to Khaled, go on camera and drop Allah's name hither and yon: If that's your ticket out, seize it. Everyone'll know it's just a sham.

But that's not how the al-Jazeera audience sees it. If you're a Muslim, the video is anything but meaningless. Not even the dumbest jihadist believes these infidels are suddenly true believers. Rather, it confirms the central truth Osama and the mullahs have been peddling - that the West is weak, that there's nothing - no core, no bedrock - nothing it's not willing to trade....

In the Muslim world, they watch the Centanni/Wiig video and see men so in love with the present, the now, that they will do or say anything to live in the moment. And they draw their own conclusions - that these men are easier to force into the car than that 16-year-old girl in Sydney was. It doesn't matter how "understandable" Centanni and Wiig's actions are to us, what the target audience understands is quite different: that there is nothing we're willing to die for. And, to the Islamist mind, a society with nothing to die for is already dead. [emphasis added]