It happens twice a year, in March and in December, and somehow it always catches me off-guard. I’m talking about the unofficial Catholic ritual that I call Toxic Masculinity Sunday. Surely you’ve had this experience: You join the assembly to celebrate Mass in the midst of a penitential season, whether Advent or Lent. Mass begins with an invitation to rejoice and sing. These intimations of joy are stirring, inspiring. And then the celebrant wrinkles his nose and says something like, “I bet you’re wondering why I’m wearing all this pink.”

I’ve heard many versions of this routine on many Gaudete and Laetare Sundays. The near-universal urge to make an anxious joke about wearing pink vestments makes me wonder if our priests are really that hung up on gender, or if they just believe the rest of us are. “Whoa, what’s with the girl colors? I thought the priest was a man!” Is anyone really thinking that? Is any of us so fragile or so easily thrown for a loop that we can’t handle a change in chasuble?

I know it’s a joke. I think it’s meant to be self-deprecating. But what it is actually deprecating is femininity, or at least the cultural signifiers of femininity. And even in a Church that loves its gender binaries, this biannual disavowal of girl stuff feels gratuitously insulting to those of us who happen to be girls.

To be clear, my beef is with casual misogyny, not liturgical pedantry. I love to consult the GIRM as much as the next gal. So I’ll allow a fussy “it’s not pink, it’s rose” if it comes without the “girls are gross” subtext. It’s just that it hardly ever does. And while we’re consulting the regulations, Father, it says here, “The color rose may be used, where it is the practice”—“may,” not “must.” If you really find it so uncomfortable, you can just stick with the violet vestments. That would be a shame, though, because I don’t want you to give up on liturgical variety, not even during Lent. I just want you to give up hating on pink and making a joke of the feminine qualities it is imagined to represent.

Last December, when we arrived at church on Gaudete Sunday, my six-year-old son lit up, so to speak, when he saw the lighted candles on the Advent wreath in front of us. “We get to light the pink candle today!” he crowed. He knew it meant we were one week closer to Christmas. He understood the color as a sign of joyful hope. So what did he make of it when, ten minutes later, the celebrant launched into his traditional “Don’t you dare call it ‘pink’” routine?

I hope my son tuned it all out. I hope it didn’t steal his joy. I have to admit, it puts a dent in mine, to walk into Mass needing to hear a word that will rouse me and get jokey insults instead. I don’t even like “girly” stuff all that much. But I do like liturgy, and beauty, and centering joy, however briefly, in a season of gloom. And I like aspiring to be the community St. Paul describes, with neither Greek nor Jew, neither man nor woman, but all one in Christ Jesus—even if it’s only for an hour a week.

I am ready to give up fragile masculinity as a part of my Laetare Sunday experience. My brother priests, can I convince you to give it up too? I promise, no one thinks you look silly (or, at least, no more than you normally do). Femininity poses no threat to you. Embrace the wardrobe, be a sign of joy, and maybe you can help us all to see, in the sudden irruption of pink—or rose—a glimpse of the coming dawn of Easter, instead of just another reason to be afraid.

“I struggled with this text,” is a phrase I hear a lot in doctoral studies. From undergraduates to doctoral students, to “struggle” with the text often means to disagree with its arguments or to reject its method. What it almost never means for people with a certain type of pedigree, however, is “I did not understand this text.” As I read today’s Gospel, however, I must admit that I struggled. In the past, I might have been able to focus on the idea that what these passages are really about is God’s love and reminding us in Lent, a season of penance, that we are called to remember that God loves us. This year, however, I just could not shrug off the perplexing parts of this Gospel passage. 

Perhaps it is because the world in which these Gospel passages will be proclaimed this Laetare Sunday is one requiring of moral clarity. With what many understandably believe to be an active and highly visible genocide going on, a dramatic U.S. presidential election, and increasingly divisive leadership in our Church, the Good News feels, perhaps more than ever, ephemeral. In past years, I might have been able to understand that reading these passages during Lent allows us to think about our sins through “Easter eyes.” This year, however, I found myself bitter that the readings spoil the surprise. Jesus himself announces that the Son of Man will rise (John 13). What in past years seem like a “break” this year seem like a distraction. The scandal of the Resurrection, I must admit, feels blunted in these readings. In a time when most of us should be torn apart by how drastically we have failed, these readings just seem to jump too fast to love and forgiveness. 

One might think that everyone around Jesus realizes what is going on and they run to the safety of salvation. He just told them what they needed to do; why would they not? However, at the end of the Gospel of John, the book these passages are taken from, the Resurrection is anything but predictable. Despite the fact that Jesus says that he has come for them, that God loves them deeply, and that the Son of Man will rise, Mary Magdalene and the male disciples are still somehow shocked. Thomas, as we know, doubts so much that he must touch Jesus’ wounds (John 20). 

Read within this larger context, I was reminded of words that have echoed through my soul since the moment I read them. St. Bonaventure at the end of his Itinerarium writes, “Ask grace, not learning; desire, not intellect; the groaning of prayer and not diligent reading; the Bridegroom, not the academic teacher….not light, but the fire that inflames one totally and carries one into God through spiritual fervor and with the most burning affections.”

St. Bonaventure’s words reminded me that I should not look to gain from the Gospel a sense of clarity or self-assuredness. Indeed, the condition of the world around us should never allow that. The Gospel should seem stark, it should engage our whole person. God is a mystery and Jesus is a miracle worker in a world that has no time for mystery and no interest in miracles. As modern human beings, we seem to be enlightened past the age of mystery. It would make sense, then, that the Gospel, an invitation into the ineffable mystery of God, sometimes makes no sense.

This Laetare Sunday, then, I do want to focus on God’s love and my sins in light of God’s love, but not to the point of apathy, and instead to the point of further struggle. We should push ourselves to struggle in community with one another. We should struggle against oppression and marginalization of all people and struggle for those whose struggle is silenced or made to be invisible by social structures. I pray that I might struggle not only through frustration, but through action. That my struggle leads me deeper into God and that that depth only creates further struggle. That I am not complacent, that I do not look for learning over grace or a calming light over a fire that will move me. I want to struggle this Lenten season, recognizing that it is only in that struggle against personal and social sin where the Resurrection becomes truly shocking.

In September 2021, I reported Dad missing. He’d been off the radar before, but this time when I asked around, we realized it had been four months since anyone had seen any sign of him. The VA didn’t know any more than we did. So I went to the police.

At that point, Dad had been homeless for three years. Mom hung on for as long as she could—she’d stayed married to him for over half a century—but eventually his mind deteriorated so much she had to flee. All his meds (for anxiety, depression, PTSD, and other mental-health issues) had rendered him unable to walk, and his subsequent reduction of them left him mobile but scary. I told Mom she needed to get out of there, and finally she did—and for once, she didn’t go back. But that left Dad at the house, winging it. Eventually he took off to live in an RV, and then he lost that, and then he had a car, and then he lost that. Out on the streets he’d connect with some people but freak others out. Shopkeepers said he couldn’t come in anymore, and when he did, they called the police. He got tossed in jail periodically for disorderly conduct and whatnot.

And that’s how I found him. It took the local police department just a day to track him down. It turned out he was in jail in his old hometown in Indiana. He’d been there sleeping in a park and was startled awake by someone walking past. Seeing the guy had a gun, Dad showed the man his knife. The guy, who had an open-carry permit, called the cops. Dad got arrested with pot and paraphernalia in his possession (illegal in Indiana) and spent two years in jail before finally facing a judge. Much of that time was spent waiting for an open spot at the state mental-health hospital so they could “restore him to competence”—to clear his head so he could stand trial for the crime he committed when it was not clear.

It did not escape my notice (my mind is sensitive to miserable irony) that the jail where Dad spent most of those two years was on the former site of the factory where his mom used to work. It’s just off the road our family used to drive between our house in the country and my grandparents’ house in Lafayette. Dad had been so intent on getting out of Indiana forty years before—the powers-that-be would never let him succeed there, he said—and now he’d walked voluntarily into the old trap. When I asked why he went there, he said he’d been curious. 

So, I found Dad. And actually, amazingly, right now, he’s doing pretty well. Granted, he lives in a motel room. But nice people from a local health-care facility bring him his meds, wash his clothes, and take him to the grocery store. They’re also helping him look for an assisted-living situation.

That’s how it always seems to go. It almost pisses me off. My dad did not deserve that war or his PTSD, and our family didn’t deserve their consequences. Sometimes I think I should be filing a missing-person report on our Father in heaven, who stands by while wars happen and families are broken, while we humans perfect ways of killing one another. I have two children myself. I wouldn’t just stand there while they tore each other apart; I’d intervene. But God lets so much happen. He looks like a worse father than I am, but surely that can’t be the case. And then, just when I’m totally fed up with God, I encounter some sign of his grace and mercy—like the recent improvement in my dad’s situation—that restores my faith.

Faith is something I have in common with my dad. I don’t know anyone who loves Jesus more than he does. He told me he wouldn’t have survived the war or jail without the Lord. Once, when Dad was still on the streets, I heard from someone that he showed up at the Easter Vigil. How did he even know when it was? It brings to mind the time, way back when I was kid, when I was playing with Grandma’s chalkboard. After I drew a peace sign, Dad took the chalk from my hand. He drew a Chi-Rho (☧). “This too,” he said, “is a peace sign.” 

Watching La forza del destino, Giuseppe Verdi’s sprawling 1869 opera about fate’s relentless pursuit of a single family line in eighteenth-century Spain, you can’t help but wonder: Whose side is the composer on?

Does he sympathize with the characters on stage, many of whom cling to their private faith and seek refuge in the might of the institutional Church? Or is Verdi instead aligned with fate itself, stalking his protagonists from the orchestra pit (the score’s “fate” motif, introduced in the overture, is one of the composer’s most memorable) and transforming moments of religious calm into preludes for bloodshed?

A new staging in New York—the first in eighteen years—by Polish director Mariusz Treliński suggests that the answer lies somewhere in the middle. The landmark production, featuring a star-studded cast conducted by the Met’s musical director Yannick Nézet-Séguin, offers audiences the rare chance to ponder the paradoxes at the heart of what is often considered the most outwardly “Catholic” of Verdi’s operas. 

If Verdi is universally acknowledged as an icon of Italian nationalism and emblem of Romanticism, his relationship with Catholicism is much more complicated. He had a profound (and very public) admiration for the liberal religious vision of Italian novelist Alessandro Manzoni, to whom he dedicated the Requiem, his most significant sacred (if non-liturgical) work, and his later operas show a marked turn toward prayer and interiority. But in his personal faith, Verdi was more elusive. As his wife Giuseppina Strepponi wrote to a friend in 1872, “he’s the soul of honesty, he understands and feels every noble and delicate sentiment; yet for all that, he allows himself to be, I won’t say an atheist, but certainly not much of a believer.” Verdi’s friend, librettist Arrigo Boito, concurred: “​​one should take care not to present him as Catholic in the political and strictly theological sense of the word: nothing could be further from the truth.”

Verdi had his reasons: as a temporal power, the institutional Church was irreconcilable with the Risorgimento politics of Italian unification. Yet Verdi, for all his anticlericalism and abhorrence of ecclesial bureaucracy, remained fixated on the Church’s message of grace and salvation. What makes La forza del destino such a powerful work is the way it seems to show Verdi grappling with this conflict in real time, dwelling alongside his characters in a kind of in-betweenness as they engage with various forms of prayer, religious vocation, and ritual. He never pronounces on any “correct” version of faith: for Verdi it’s always the drama that matters.

La forza del destino bears that out repeatedly. Librettist Francesco Maria Piave’s tragic plot, adapted from a work by the Spanish playwright Ángel de Saavedra, is just as complicated as the opera’s characters. The first act begins with the forbidden romance between the noblewoman Leonora di Vargas (soprano Lise Davidsen)—who most fully channels Verdi’s nuanced dialogue with Catholicism—and Don Alvaro (tenor Brian Jagde), a half-Spanish, half-Incan prince. The pair plan to escape Leonora’s domineering father, the Marquis of Calatrava, but are foiled when he catches them together. Alvaro throws down his gun in surrender; but it fires accidentally and shoots the Marquis, who dies cursing the pair. This activates the inescapable churn of fate that dogs the characters through to the end. The brunt of its machinations are borne by Leonora’s brother Carlo (baritone Igor Golovatenko), who quests (in and out of disguise) through Spain and Italy to avenge the death of his father and sister. 

Leonora is still alive, of course, though Carlo doesn’t know it. After the accident she seeks shelter at the Madonna degli Angeli monastery, where, on bended knee, she prays to the Blessed Virgin, asking for forgiveness for her father’s death and for the strength to forget Alvaro. She’s soon received by two of Verdi’s most vivid clerical characters: the reactionary, finger-wagging Fra Melitone, and his more gracious superior, Padre Guardiano. After initially suggesting she profess religious vows, Guardiano grants Leonora’s request to live out the rest of her days as a solitary ascetic in a nearby cave. Her prayer, which floats gently over two harps and a male chorus of monks, is the first and only moment of stillness Verdi gives us in the opera’s tumultuous first act. There’s a mystical, inspired selflessness in it, as Leonora’s earlier imperatives to the Virgin—forgive me, don’t abandon me—give way to serene trust.

We don’t hear from Leonora again until the end of the fourth act, when she emerges from her cave exhausted and dejected to sing her famous aria, “Pace, pace, mio dio” (“Peace, peace, my God”). Her voice materializes almost miraculously out of churning repetitions of the fate motif. But by now Leonara’s solitude has proven ruinous. Her world-weary lament culminates in a fanatical, paranoiac b-flat “Maledizione!” (“Curse!”) as Leonora thinks she hears someone approaching. 

In fact, it’s two people: Carlo and Alvaro, dueling again after their first encounter on the battlefield at the historical Battle of Velletri in the previous act. Alvaro, unbeknownst to Leonora, has also sought refuge as a monk at the same convent. He mortally wounds Carlo in the fight, who, in turn, stabs Leonora. An earlier version of La forza del destino had resolved this situation dramatically, with Alvaro cursing God and leaping off a cliff in devastation with a distant chorus of monks chanting an ominous Miserere. But this final version, which premiered at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan in 1869, takes a quieter route. In a spellbindingly calm trio for Leonora, Alvaro, and Guardiano, Leonora dies. Alvaro believes that her death has redeemed him for the death of her father; the curtain slowly falls as Guardiano commends her soul to heaven.

The intermittent thrust of excitement and intrigue in Verdi’s score is partly what makes its moments of stillness so affecting. Treliński’s new production admittedly leans more into the opera’s expansive, intermittently coherent depictions of war and violence—here adapted to conjure a contemporary totalitarian state—rather than its rarer moments of contemplation. When the latter do occur, the emphasis is on the spectacle of asceticism and corporal punishment over clemency and grace. In Act II’s Madonna degli Angeli scene, for example, Leonora has her hair shorn and her hands whipped as she kneels beneath a spooky, floating CGI Madonna projected above. (It elicited more than a few laughs on opening night.) But even if Treliński’s pared-down Forza is bleaker and lonelier than usual, it shows a persistent smartness and subtlety. Its melodrama spills out over the stage, melding orchestral music and diegetic noise to a satisfying, unifying effect.

It’s largely the phenomenal voices of the two leads that make this possible. Jagde’s beefy sound remains cohesive and forceful across his range, while you can practically feel Davidsen’s—rounded but piercing, dramatically expressive—in your solar plexus. Her “Pace, pace, mio Dio” (which Treliński, originally a film director, relocates from a mountain cave to a bombed-out subway station conveniently indicating “Trinity Ave”) overflows with plaintiveness and frenzy. The applause was so overwhelming that Davidsen briefly broke character and acknowledged the crowd with a smile. 

But competent performances abound in the Met’s new Forza. Carlo, bent on revenge as he is, usually ends up being portrayed as a mustache-twirling villain. Instead, Golovatenko, singing with steadiness and style, gives us a more wounded, human version. Bass Soloman Howard performs double duty, singing generously as both the Marquis of Calatrava (firm and forceful) and Padre Guardiano (magisterial and forthright). And while it’s hard to look at the stingy, sanctimonious priest Fra Melitone without thinking of Pope Francis’s condemnation of the “scourge” of clericalism—when distributing alms, Melitone refers to the needy as “lowlifes”—bass-baritone Patrick Carfizzi balances Melitone’s unkindness with a dash of comedy, making this crotchety character both more palatable and more real.

Such layered ambiguity is entirely appropriate to Verdi’s vision, in which inescapable grace always follows ineluctable chaos. That Verdi asks his audiences to sit with the discomfort of those two poles in La forza del destino is not unique to his operas, though making prayer and penance the overt vehicles for that meditation certainly is. The Met’s slick new staging may not help us settle the question of Verdi’s faith. But that’s for the best: in his operas Verdi was more interested in the complexities and contradictions of being human.

Like many left-leaning teenagers during the 2000s, my introduction to hard-line unbelief came from YouTube clips of the so-called “Four Horsemen of New Atheism.” In these videos, commentators Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris would dismantle fundamentalist Christian beliefs with facts and logic. At a time when the Bush administration was using the language of crusade to justify the Iraq War, it was easy to see this uncompromising, combative strain of atheism as progressive. 

But in hindsight, the movement offered more defenses than critiques of Bush’s most violent and ignorant policies—particularly toward Muslims. Hitchens infamously turned hawkish, while Harris wrote apologias for airport profiling and torture. Such views followed naturally from the New Atheist conception of Islam as an essentially evil, irrational ideology from which Muslims must be liberated.

Sometimes referred to as the movement’s “Fifth Horseman,” Somali-Dutch writer, activist, and politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali lent credibility to this view of Islam with her personal story. After escaping her native Somalia, where she’d been indoctrinated and mutilated by the Muslim Brotherhood, Ali found political asylum in the Netherlands, as well as a career in center-right politics. Her decision to renounce Islam seemed validated when her creative collaborator, Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, was murdered by a terrorist over their anti-Islamic short film, Submission.

Unlike most of her fellow New Atheists, Ali rarely aimed her criticisms at religions other than Islam. Her public conversion to Christianity, announced in an essay in UnHerd titled “Why I Am Now a Christian,” is therefore not entirely shocking, especially since the bulk of her essay focuses on the political instrumentality of Christianity over its truth claims. 

In Ali’s view, Western civilization is under attack by existential threats at home and abroad: global Islamic terrorism, the geopolitical power of China and Russia, and the spread of “woke ideology.” Secular tools are insufficient to combat these threats. The only credible defense is “our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition,” a tradition which consists of “an elaborate set of ideas and institutions designed to safeguard human life, freedom, and dignity.” These ideas and institutions are, for Ali, unprecedented in human history—a defining achievement and bequest of Western civilization. 

Predictably, the essay was criticized by many atheist and skeptic publications, and celebrated by many high-profile conservative Christian commentators, who took for granted her claims about Western civilization and its enemies without and within. “The fire of the faith upon which we built a civilization has grown dim in our hearts,” wrote Rod Dreher at the European Conservative, “but to one like her, who ran to be with us out of the darkness of Islamic fundamentalism, even our embers shine like lighthouses.” Meanwhile, Carl R. Trueman at First Things dismisses misgivings over the fact that Ali only mentions Jesus once in the essay while lauding her concern “with how the West is dismantling its traditional cultural norms and with what it intends to replace them.” 

But Ali’s reasoning calls for a more critical Christian response. For one thing, the implications of a multipolar world are far more ambiguous than Ali allows. Global Islamic terrorism has declined since the mid-2010s, and this decline seems likely to continue if the West avoids the military interventions that create conditions under which religious extremism becomes attractive. As for “woke ideology,” the censorious and simplistic strains of social-justice discourse that predominate in some online spaces are certainly regrettable, but it is foolish to view such tendencies as a coherent, destructive ideology. In large part, they are symptomatic of polarization fueled by the incentive structure of both legacy media and social media. Those concerned with free speech should be far more alarmed by the censorious response to “wokeness” on the Right. Ron DeSantis’s Stop WOKE Act, for example, threatens to ban the discussion in public schools of any facts inconvenient conservative ideology. 

Ali inflates these threats to the West while ignoring more genuine threats that are global in nature: climate change, global pandemics, and war, including nuclear war. These are also existential and spiritual threats as much as physical ones, but they cannot be solved through “civilizational war.” They require international collaboration and multilateral action—the kind of cooperation that is hindered by corporate interests, on the one hand, and, on the other, ascendant right-wing nationalist movements, which traffic in the same paranoid fears of cultural contamination that Ali advances.

Faced with such divisiveness, the question Ali aims at Westerners alone—“What unites us?”—must be expanded. What unites us in the West to those cultures with whom we experience real differences, but with whom we must cooperate in order to survive?

One credible answer lies in the classical theist definition of God, explored in Eastern Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart’s book The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss. Written in 2013, Hart’s book debunks an idea of God typically shared by religious fundamentalists and evangelical atheists alike, that of one exceptionally powerful, wise, and moral being among many. Hart draws instead upon a venerable Sanskrit formulation of God, satchitanada, which translates roughly to being (sat), consciousness (chit), and bliss (ananda). In this definition, God is not a being, but Being as such—the absolute, unconditioned reality on which all contingent things depend, and in which all things find their ultimate fulfillment.

Hart uses this definition not only because it recurs through various faiths, from Hinduism to Christianity to Islam, but because being, consciousness, and bliss “are ideal descriptions not only of how various traditions understand the nature of God, but also of how the reality of God can, according to those traditions, be experienced and known by us.” Hart shows how theistic arguments have, for millennia, deduced these attributes of God from the same mysteries of existence experienced by all people, in all times, in every conceivable cultural context. 

If everything in the material world is contingent upon something else for its existence, how could anything have come to exist at all? What accounts for the miraculous intelligibility of the material world, the mysterious coherence between the laws of nature and the abstractive faculties of the human mind? And how can we make sense of an apparently fundamental human desire for the fulfillment of absolute values? Of course, reasonable people may disagree with the conclusions classical theistic thinkers have drawn from reflection upon these mysteries. But as Hart points out, they are mysteries universal to the human experience, arising from a primordial awe at the unlikeliness of being. (They also happen to be conspicuously absent from Ali’s conversion narrative.)

Yet it is not only the commonality and immediacy of such experience that makes classical theism a fruitful ground for human unity. Wherever the definition of God as being, consciousness, and bliss has been articulated, ideas and practices honoring human life, freedom, and dignity have been instituted. The most cursory glance at history gives the lie to Ali’s assertion that the Judeo-Christian tradition alone “advanced science and reason, diminished cruelty, suppressed superstitions, and built institutions to order and protect life, while guaranteeing freedom to as many people as possible.” 

The contributions of non-Western religions and philosophies to the protection of human life and freedom are too vast to enumerate here. But since Ali makes the bold claim that Islam is fundamentally hostile to free speech and thought, a good starting point might be the emperor Akbar, who ruled over the Mughal empire in South Asia from 1556 to 1604. In his book The Argumentative Indian, economist Amartya Sen points out that at a time when Giordano Bruno was being burnt at the stake for heresy in Rome, Akbar “was busy arranging dialogues between Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Jains, Parsees, Jews, and even atheists” while issuing laws that protected the right of people to practice the religion of their choice without interference. A devout Muslim, Akbar nonetheless allowed proponents of the atheistic Cārvāka school into his multi-faith “House of Worship,” undermining Ali’s claim that no Muslim philosopher has ever been able to profess unbelief in an Islamic society. 

Akbar is far from an isolated case. Take the individualist spirituality of Sufi mystics, or the prefigurative secularism of the Ottoman millet system, or the fact that Jews fled from medieval Christian Europe to the far more religiously tolerant Islamic Empire. Safeguarding religious freedom is by no means unique to “Western civilization,” nor unknown to Islam. If many contemporary Islamic societies adhere to more fundamentalist and intolerant forms of the religion, we should look to the material conditions and history that led to their triumph over more liberal one—for example, CIA-funded training of Muhajideen during the Cold War. Instead, Ali and her cheerleaders rely on essentialist definitions of Islam that obscure all historical context.

Even the neat division Ali assumes between “Western” and “non-Western” civilization must itself be challenged. It may be true that modern secular humanist values of reasoned analysis over appeals to tradition and authority have roots in Christianity—particularly Scholasticism, with its emphasis on dialectical reasoning and critical engagement with biblical texts. But Scholasticism was deeply informed and influenced by Mu’tazilism, an early medieval Islamic school of theology that privileged the role of reason and intellect in apprehending God while relativizing the authority of hadith, Muhammed’s teachings and deeds. “Western” concepts of freedom of conscience and speech are therefore not only indebted to “centuries of debate within Jewish and Christian communities,” as Ali claims, but to Islamic theology. 

It is no coincidence that such schools of thought developed out of classical theist traditions. Any religion which views God as the infinite consciousness from which all things originate, and to which they are ultimately destined, must presume the intrinsic rationality of the universe, the ability of the human mind to grasp it, and the absolute value of truth as such. It is therefore unsurprising that philosophers of these traditions demonstrate an openness to truth wherever it might be found. Rather than confining themselves to their own culture, Scholastics drew from Islam just as Islamic theologians drew from Aristotle. Such openness could not be further from Ali and her allies’ understanding of a “Judeo-Christian tradition” that must remain vacuum-sealed against all contaminants. 

Why, then, does the simplistic, isolationist reading of culture, religion, and history appeal at all? Ali herself unintentionally offers an answer when she explains her disillusionment with triumphalist atheism: “[Bertrand] Russell and other activist atheists believed that with the rejection of God we would enter an age of reason and intelligent humanism. But the ‘God-hole’—the void left by the retreat of the church—has merely been filled by a jumble of irrational quasi-religious dogma.” It seems to me that, rather than being a solution, the cult of “Western civilization” is a perfect example of one such dogma.

For one thing, the spiritual and intellectual traditions of the West comprise not only Judaism and Christianity, but atheism, nihilism, paganism, and many other contradictory strands of thought—to say nothing of the chasmic differences of thought and practice that exist within Judaism and Christianity. This diverse history—coupled with abundant examples refuting the idea of freedom, secularism, and humanism as uniquely “Western” values—make clear that the notion of “Western civilization” appeals not as truth, but as narrative. It is a narrative that offers a balm for anxieties shared by fundamentalist organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood—in Ali’s words, it offers “the power of a unifying story…to attract, engage, and mobilize.” 

In The Experience of God, Hart recounts how, in the modern era, a materialist, scientific worldview eclipsed that of classical theism. The empirical methods of science congealed into a metaphysical picture of the cosmos as a purposeless, mechanistic, closed system, rather than one open to the transcendent. As empiricism became the dominant criterion of truth, Christians misapplied “the rigorous but quite limited methods of the modern empirical sciences to questions properly belonging to the realms of logic and spiritual experience.” Thus, the classical theistic definition of God as a transcendent source of being, consciousness, and bliss gave way to a literalistic, logically indefensible portrait of a benevolent, bearded superman, hiding out in some undiscovered corner of the universe—“Mr. God,” to use Hart’s term.  

Torn between nihilism and an illogical picture of God, and unable to shake the perennial longing for meaning and intuition of the absolute, it is understandable why Ali and so many others look for purpose and security in an imagined monolithic cultural inheritance of unique importance to humankind. Yet this chauvinistic view of the Judeo-Christian tradition as a raft of reason and humanity in a sea of barbarism has only made the world more dangerous.

Classical theism provides a much more powerful, comprehensive, and intellectually credible story. It offers a universal morality anchored in many different cultural contexts, not just “Western” ones. Because freedom, dignity, security, and well-being are not uniquely “Judeo-Christian” values, Westerners can join Ali in condemning the misogyny, antisemitism, and violence of sects like the Muslim Brotherhood while avoiding cultural imperialism. Islamic theologians themselves—for instance, Sufi thinker Ibn Arabi—provide their own basis for the critique of such sects. In supporting Muslim allies who adhere to these philosophies, Westerners honor the legacy of their own religious traditions at their most humane without erasing those of non-Westerners. 

In The Argumentative Indian, Sen quotes the third-century BCE Buddhist Indian Emperor Ashoka, who, centuries before Akbar, instituted a legal code of religious tolerance and pluralism: “He who does reverence to his own sect while disparaging the sects of others wholly from attachment to his own sect, in reality inflicts, by such conduct, the severest injury on his own sect.” In a time of anxiety, divisiveness, and despair, the classical theist schools of Christianity offer a bounty of resources for expressing meaning and hope, and outlining one path among many toward a transcendent reality accessible to all peoples and cultures. There is no better way to squander and dishonor that legacy than by using it as a cudgel in a self-destructive clash of civilizations.