The West’s Theological Evasion: Why It Cannot Name the God of Its Enemies

Modern Western governments speak endlessly of terrorism. They build ministries and budgets around it, convene summits, and invent new technologies of surveillance to contain it. But they refuse to name the thing they fear in its own vocabulary. When militants invoke scripture and call their struggle jihad, Western leaders translate the word away. They call it “extremism,” “radicalization,” or “terror.” They strip it of theology and treat it as a pathology. In doing so they reveal not neutrality but guilt. The West does not examine the metaphysics of holy war because it was once the chief author of it.

From the Crusades to colonialism, revelation was Europe’s passport to empire. The conquistadors who crossed the Atlantic and the missionaries who followed them believed they were armed with divine license. “Go and make disciples of all nations,” said the Gospel of Matthew. They obeyed with ships and swords. Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Oceania were carved into provinces of salvation. Lands were claimed in the name of the Cross; cultures were broken in the name of the soul. The entire modern world order—the borders, the languages, the very categories of “civilized” and “savage”—was born from revelation wielded as law.

That memory cannot be exorcised. It sits at the root of every Western nation that now calls itself secular. Their institutions grew from churches; their ethics from theology. The Enlightenment weakened revelation’s authority but never erased it. The moral language of the West still echoes its religious past: mission, conversion, salvation, destiny. To analyze jihad as a theology would be to reopen the question of Christian conquest. It would mean acknowledging that Western civilization itself was built upon a revelation that claimed absolute truth and universal rightness. The very premise that Europe could civilize the world was a metaphysical claim—the same form of claim now condemned when heard from others.

So the West prefers amnesia. It calls every act of faith-based violence an anomaly, never an idea. The rhetoric of “terror” allows condemnation without reflection. “Terror” has no scripture; it needs no mirror. It is a psychological disease, a problem of recruitment, of poverty, of ideology—but never of theology. This deliberate secularization of the problem protects the West’s conscience. If jihad is purely political, then Christendom’s past was merely pre-modern, an error of history, not of metaphysics. But if jihad is understood as a logical expression of revelation itself—the belief that God commands human history—then the entire edifice of Western moral superiority trembles.

The silence is therefore strategic. The United States, born from Puritan eschatology, still carries its theology under a different name: manifest destiny, American exceptionalism, the belief that history bends toward its leadership. Its wars are wrapped not in scripture but in universal values, yet the grammar is the same—freedom as redemption, intervention as moral duty. Europe, too, exports salvation in secular form: democracy, development, modernization. When Western leaders denounce jihadist violence, they speak as if divine mission ended in 1648. But every time they invoke a “global mission” or a “coalition of the righteous,” the ghost of revelation returns.

The intellectual class is no braver. Universities that once produced theology now produce policy, but the avoidance remains. Philosophers of liberalism praise tolerance yet dare not apply critical reason to revelation itself. They fear the accusation of blasphemy or bigotry. The media repeats the official euphemism—terror, not theology—because it shares the same heritage. The secular West pretends to have buried faith, but faith still defines what may or may not be said. To question revelation is to question the moral foundations of Western identity, and that is forbidden territory.

This evasion has consequences. By refusing to name the metaphysical core of religious violence, the West traps itself in endless cycles of reaction. It treats symptoms as causes. It sends armies against effects it dares not explain. Every new conflict becomes another “war on terror,” as if terror were an independent actor rather than a manifestation of belief. Each campaign ends with the same paradox: trillions spent, thousands dead, and the ideology untouched. The enemy’s theology remains intact because the West refuses to confront its own. To win such a war would require not only arms but philosophy.

The deeper reason for this paralysis lies in the Western idea of guilt. Europe once believed it was chosen by God to bring light to the nations. When that illusion collapsed, the guilt of conquest remained. Modern secular humanism inherited both impulses: the will to save and the shame of having saved by force. To criticize another faith’s holy war would be to reopen that wound. Better, then, to call it “terror,” to treat it as madness. But guilt disguised as tolerance is still servitude. It enslaves thought to the fear of moral comparison. The West’s self-absolution depends on silence.

There is also convenience in the evasion. A theological critique would require the West to abandon its alliances with states whose power rests on revelation. It would mean confronting partners in oil, trade, and geopolitics who rule by divine law. It would expose contradictions between secular rhetoric and sacred diplomacy. So realpolitik joins metaphysics in the conspiracy of silence. The West needs both its markets and its myths. It keeps faith out of analysis because faith is still part of its foreign policy.

Yet the cost of this cowardice is truth itself. To understand any act of violence, one must understand its ideas. When those ideas are theological, only theology can expose them. A secular vocabulary cannot touch the root. Calling jihad “terror” is like calling the Crusades “unrest.” It misses the point. The act is inseparable from the belief that sanctifies it. The belief is inseparable from revelation—the conviction that morality can be decreed from beyond reason. As long as that premise is left intact, any revelation can justify any atrocity. The West’s silence leaves the premise untouched.

The alternative is not another theology but the courage of reason. Only a civilization that has fully examined its own revelations can speak honestly about the revelations of others. That examination need not deny the spiritual; it need only deny infallibility. The mind must be sovereign over the text, evidence over faith, logic over decree. Until the West achieves that intellectual emancipation, it will remain trapped between guilt and fear—condemning holy war abroad while practicing moral evasion at home.

The world does not need another crusade or another jihad. It needs a final enlightenment—a recognition that revelation, however clothed, is an epistemology of power. The same premise that justified the sword of faith once justifies the drones of freedom. The same voice that commanded “convert or die” now commands “liberate or perish.” History changes its weapons, not its gods. To end the cycle, one must confront revelation itself, strip it of its sanctity, and expose it as a human invention. Then, and only then, can morality be rebuilt on reason rather than obedience.

If the West wishes to lead the world morally, it must begin with confession, not conquest. It must admit that its own empires were founded on revelation’s logic: that the will of God could overrule the rights of man. Having once practiced that creed, it has no authority to condemn it elsewhere until it renounces it completely. To do so would not be self-hatred but self-knowledge—the first virtue of reason. Only a civilization that has faced its own theology can confront another’s without hypocrisy.

The tragedy is that the West, which gave birth to science and secularism, still trembles before its own reflection. It fears that if revelation dies, morality will die with it. But the opposite is true: morality begins where revelation ends. To ground ethics in reason is not to destroy faith in humanity; it is to affirm it. The mind is not a blasphemy. Inquiry is not arrogance. To think is the highest act of reverence toward reality. The West must remember that it once believed this—that its greatness was born from doubt, not dogma. When it dares again to examine all creeds, including its own, it will have nothing to fear from naming another’s.

Until then, the silence will continue. Every time a bomb explodes in the name of God, leaders will promise to fight terror, not theology. They will mourn the dead but not the idea that killed them. They will call for unity while refusing understanding. They will condemn the act while protecting the cause—because the cause, stripped of its scripture, still resembles their own. The world will go on burning, not for lack of weapons but for lack of honesty.

History offers only two choices: to live by revelation or by reason. The West pretends to have chosen the latter but behaves as if both were true. That contradiction is its crisis. It cannot confront the theology of its enemies because it has not yet confronted the theology of itself. When it finally does, it will discover that the war on terror was never against an external foe but against its own metaphysical shadow. And only then will the word “civilization” regain its meaning.

Citations

[1] Karen Armstrong, The Battle for God (New York: Knopf, 2000).
[2] Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978).
[3] John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration (London: 1689).
[4] Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary (Paris: 1764).
[5] Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Twelve, 2007).
[6] Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Tavistock, 1972).
[7] Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (New York: Random House, 1995).
[8] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (Riga: 1781).
[9] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, 1951).