The exponential growth of Islam here in America comes as a tremendous shock to the average middle class Christian. This, to be sure, has always been a tolerant country. But above all it has been a Christian country. How is it, they ask, that this alien creed has so rapidly taken root?
The answer would seem to lie largely in the crime statistics. Violent crime is still something quite outside the average American’s normal realm of experience. Few of us, for example, live our daily lives in constant fear of robbery or assault. We go about our business confident in the fact that we will return unscathed, with our pocket books and persons intact. In the unhappy event that we become victims of crime, our friends will commiserate with us in our misfortune, but they are unlikely to imagine that it is inevitable that they, too, will ultimately share our fate.
Given a modest degree of luck, the average Joe and Jill can still anticipate going through life without becoming crime statistics—even in an age as lawless and violent as our own.
Our comparative security, however, is not shared by the folks who dwell in our inner cities. For far too many, daily life is a constant cycle of terror.
We who live in safer neighborhoods are familiar with the drug–inspired violence that has claimed the lives of so many young people in the inner cities. It is the standard fodder of our daily papers and the television news programs. But the power struggles of teenage druglords are by no means the primary cause of the terror that stalks our inner cities.
Lawlessness and amorality are so general that it could be reasonably argued that there are neighborhoods inhabited not so much by residents as hunters and the hunted. Robbery is a way of life; rape merely an option for an afternoon’s entertainment.
The brutal young men responsible for the mayhem constitute only a tiny fraction of the population of our inner cities. Yet society seems powerless either to bring them to heel by force of law or to provide the moral education necessary to deter new generations of youths from swelling their ranks.
A criminal justice system that lacks both the will and the capacity to re–impose the rule of law leaves, by default, the thugs in command of the streets and those they prey upon in a state of hopelessness and despair. These are the circumstances in which Islam flourishes in our inner cities. And very small wonder …
Islam requires its adherents to live according to a strict moral code. It is imposing social discipline where before none existed, and, thus, restoring the community’s self–respect. Its philosophy of self–reliance fosters self–supporting two–parent families in what was formerly the domain of impoverished single–parent families, headed by women.
It affords inner city dwellers an opportunity to nurture their children in love and economic security, and to raise them up with a strict sense of traditional morality. Islamic communities, moreover, have demonstrated the will, and the ruthlessness, to do what government has proved unwilling or unable to do: drive the drug lords and pushers out of their neighborhoods.
However, there is a downside to this. For all their claims of moral rectitude, many Islamic leaders preach an ugly creed of crude religious hatred: anti–American, anti–democratic and, above all, anti–Semitic.
It would be easier to discredit Moslem religious triumphalism if their efforts to repair and restore the social fabric of the inner cities were simply a small part of a larger, more comprehensive effort by the mainstream Christian churches, the public schools, and the government. But this is not so.
The public schools are one of the main sources of the moral relativism that is wrecking the inner cities. Government has proved itself incapable of either inculcating morality or upholding the law. But, in truth, genuine moral leadership has to come from the churches—and, in this, we have been sadly remiss.
With the exception of the occasional individual parish, modern mainline Christianity is far from muscular. It is too timid, too lacking in zeal, and often too politicized, to proclaim the Gospel as it needs to be proclaimed.
Frequently, it is more concerned with excusing the self–destructive and immoral behavior that is destroying the inner city communities.
It has rightly been said that all that is necessary for evil to triumph is that men of good will do nothing.
In failing to preach, teach, and practice the faith as delivered of Jesus Christ and the Apostles, we in the mainline churches have abdicated our God–given duty and, by default, ceded the initiative to the Moslems. GPH✠
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