Already Extended

We in the West pride ourselves that our removal of faith from the public sphere has delivered us from so-called "sectarian" violence that bloodied Europe in the 17th century. The language of faith is assigned to a private, irrational (i.e. subjective) sphere....

If religion enters the public realm, so we imagine, the result will be conflict, if not violence. The outburst that followed Benedict's lecture seems a case in point. Such rage not only horrifies us, but strikes us as deeply irrational. We cannot make sense of it. And we pride ourselves that we have chosen more wisely than the Islamic world. We are free to have or not have our own religion, the reasoning goes, as long as we keep it to ourselves....

Even more, we can add, it becomes easy to condemn irrational sectarian violence while imagining our violence is rational -- and unfortunately necessary to stop their violence.

We have long since passed the time when "the West" and Christianity were in any meaningful sense synonymous. The danger for us who follow Jesus is not that some coming Islamic tide will flood the Western world and "break the Cross" as one website put it. What threatens the followers of Jesus in North America and Western Europe is that we have so accommodated ourselves to the world around us that we have no distinctive alternative by which to understand or to address the challenges facing us.

One such alternative might be the Pope's assertion that peacemaking is the most profoundly rational course of action to follow, because at its heart is the peace that God in Christ has already extended to the world.

from "What the Pope really said by Beth Newman, emphasis mine

[via abpnews.com, HT: Jesus Politics]