For Christmas, our kids gave us tickets to a Sting concert in Dallas. They know how much I like his music and how unlikely I am to spend the money to see him perform live. The whole experience was priceless, and Sting was in top form. He ended the evening by singing “Fragile,” which has become something of an anthem in times of sudden outbreaks of extraordinary violence.
On the evening of September 11, 2001, Sting was scheduled to perform in Tuscany, Italy, and record his first live album in 15 years. We all remember what happened earlier in the day, which left the band wrestling with whether or not to go on in spite of the devastating images of madness. They all agreed to take the stage and play one song only, “Fragile.”
I thought about that as we left the concert with the news of the same images of madness in Paris:
If blood will flow when flesh and steel are one
Drying in the colour of the evening sun
Tomorrow’s rain will wash the stains away
But something in our minds will always stay
Perhaps this final act was meant
To clinch a lifetime’s argument
That nothing comes from violence and nothing ever could
For all those born beneath an angry star
Lest we forget how fragile we are
We are fragile as human beings. But we are discovering with frightening alarm how fragile we are as cultures.
This week I read “A War Between Two Worlds,” the latest column by George Friedman, the founder of Stratfor. The column is on the horrendous slaughters in France and how they are an unavoidable part of a historic pattern of conflict between Islam and Christianity – especially in Europe. Each had a history of the long-standing desire to conquer the other.
However, with the loss of Christianity’s “hegemonic control” over European culture and the rise of a secular mindset that relegates all religion to the private sphere, it is no longer a battle between Christianity and Islam. The battle has become a radical Islamic religion and worldview practiced by millions of imported and angry adherents pitted against a secularism that cannot mount a sustained opposition based on common beliefs.
Friedman writes, “Europe solved the problem with the weakening of Christianity that made the ancient battles between Christian factions meaningless. But they had invited in people who not only did not share the core doctrines of secularism, they rejected them. What Christianity had come to see as progress away from sectarian conflict, Muslims (and some Christians) may see as simply decadence, a weakening of faith and the loss of conviction.”
Secularism is not a fighting religion. It believes too many different and often contradictory things. It can be shocked, angry and stunned, but it has lost the ability to be fervent. It can be oppressive, but it cannot call people to lose their lives in its defense.
I don’t like Friedman’s conclusion but we need to heed him: “We are entering a place that has no solutions. Such a place does have decisions, and all of the choices will be bad. What has to be done will be done, and those who refused to make choices will see themselves as more moral than those who did. There is a war, and like all wars, this one is very different from the last in the way it is prosecuted. But it is war nonetheless, and denying that is denying the obvious.”
Christendom is a fragile world weakened by what Pope Francis describes as “finding ourselves professing our faith in the context of societies and cultures every day more lacking in reference to God and all that recalls the transcendent dimensions of life.”
Just at the moment a new generation is weary of the religious wars in our country, they may find the next war will not be between liberals and conservatives or the left and the right but a fight between an elite and educated (but unbelieving) culture and a genuine religion in which flesh and steel are one.