Compassion Without Courage: How the Church Drifted into Dhimmitude

The Church is called not only to comfort the world but to clarify it. Christian compassion is not mere feeling; it is a moral virtue properly ordered toward truth, justice, and rightly directed love. Detaching compassion from truth results in dhimmitude disguised as humility. Dhimmitude, of course, is the legally enforced condition of second-class citizenship that shari‘a imposes on non-Muslims under Islamic rule, a condition meticulously chronicled and documented by Bat Ye’or. What is novel is not the condition itself, but the voluntary assumption of it by Church leaders in the West. In doing so, the Church abandons its vocation to provide moral clarity in its own time.

Any responsible discussion must distinguish between Islam as a system of theological and moral (shari‘a) law, and Muslims as free moral agents. Dhimmitude is the product not of individual caprice or bigotry, but of shari‘a, thus codifying legal and social discrimination against non-Muslims as part of its structure. The discrimination is not incidental, but purposeful. Such rules maintain the asserted dignity of Islam over competing religions while allowing only qualified toleration. It’s true that within liberal democracies shari’a has no official power, but a number of Islamist movements adhere to its logic, because Islam is seen as a system of public order and not as a path to individual salvation only. This makes it possible to be critical without being accusatory!

Here again, the Biblical tradition has no lack of condemnation for false peace, beginning with the prophets’ denunciation of those who are leaders by remaining silent, and Jesus’s rebukes of religious leaders who blanket lucidity with confusion in order to be well-though-of. Augustine affirms that there is no peace apart from verity (The City of God, Book XIX, Chapter 13), and Thomas Aquinas declares it a vice to exercise prudence at the expense of justice (Summa Theologiae II–II, q. 49, a. 4). Repentance restores lucidity; it does not abolish it. According to this criterium, voluntary dhimmitude is a sin.

This failure of clarity is increasingly the norm among Christian institutions in the United States. Many are in effect observing Western “blasphemy laws” by declining to criticize Islam at all, and their staffs, congregants, and students know exactly which sermons, lessons, and discussions can be expected to trigger the loss of a job or reputation. Christian colleges respond to accusations by changing their policies, preferred speakers, and course offerings rather than by arguing the merits of the case. Business executives and politicians discover that criticisms of Islamist antisemitism or Islamic supremacism are punished in ways that criticisms of Christianity are not. Though these punishments are not codified by law, their effect is intimidation. The net result is that the Church becomes not a truth-teller but a risk-managing enterprise.

These strategies arise from Islamic obligations to work toward righteous government even while living as a minority. Importantly, Islamic theology does not require symmetric self-control regarding non-Islamic truth claims. Christianity is asked to silence itself for the sake of “tolerance”; Islam is not. In Europe, this process is much further advanced because misunderstanding at the theological level paved the way for political appeasement. Many churches bought into the idea that religion is an identity but not a moral system and thus failed to anticipate the possibility of theological conflict, a failure Mark Durie has documented in detail.

Dhimmitude among churches has increased alongside the expansion of anti-speech laws, while protecting Jews has become a full-time task for security agencies, and the causes of Islamic antisemitism remain unnamed. Criticism of Islam is policed much more vigorously than violent antisemitism in the name of civil peace. These conclusions, however, are reached only after a long process of moral disarmament; the outcome is not preordained. Especially when it comes to antisemitism, the Church’s dhimmitude is particularly shameful.

The Christian Church’s history of antisemitism demands Repentance, but Repentance does not require the disabling of judgment. Silence is not Repentance. To love your neighbor is to defend him, and to defend him, you must be able to articulate truth and identify transgressions. To refuse to name Islamist antisemitism as such is to disable oneself from criticizing Islamist movements. It means refusing to submit to Islamic supremacism, political Islam, and enforced confusion. The Church must regain its ability to confidently defend clarity of speech in the face of conflicting truth claims and moral systems. Compassion properly ordered to truth is compassion indeed. Clarity is not enmity, and truth is not hate. When truth-telling fails, the Church abandons the very vocation that defines it.