How American Christians Should Respond to Islamic Extremism
Emmanuel Lemelson
Politics, Americas
It is not un-Christian to preserve the American way of life.
Americans are appropriately responding to last Sunday’s terrorist attack in Orlando, which took dozens of innocent lives, with unfathomable grief and a sense of stabbing darkness. As is said in Orthodox Christian memorial services, may their memory be eternal.
But it would be a disservice to these forty-nine innocent Americans if grief alone comprised the totality of the nation’s reaction. The time has also come to start asking and answering some specific, difficult questions about Islamic extremism and American policies to address it. This starts with acknowledging the threat and evil of Islamic extremism specifically by its name—and understanding that Islamic terrorism, much like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, seeks the very destruction of America. In this war on terror, it’s difficult to envision anything beyond two outcomes: either the nation will confront and defeat the threat of Islamic extremism, or it will continue to inflict vast death and suffering on Americans and Christians globally.
It is important to define the enemy with specificity in this conflict. Like the Islamic violence in San Bernardino last year and the Boston Marathon massacre in 2013, Orlando’s shooting was not an incident of “workplace violence,” as the 2009 Fort Hood massacre had been wrongly categorized. It was not merely “domestic terrorism” or an “act of hate”—vague phrases used to obfuscate the larger motivations behind it. Rather, it was an act of terrorism conducted in the name of a very specific ideology—Islamic extremism, an ideology with which the United States has been at war since at least September 11, 2001.
Yet Obama and his administration continue to demonstrate a curious inability to label this and similar acts as “Islamic extremism.” In a White House statement, Obama avoided using of the phrase, directing instead the public’s attention to the nation’s gun laws along with a vague reference to an environment of intolerance, neither of which are central to the Islamic terror threat that manifested in Orlando.
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