350 AFTERWORDentertainment, and the secularization of the rich elite along with the ever-
hardening gap between rich and poor.
One side charges, "You are decadent." The other side retorts, "We are
free." These are not opposing contentions; they're nonsequiturs. Each side
identifies the other as a character in its own narrative. In the 1980s,
Khomeini called America "the Great Satan," and other lslamist revolu-
tionaries have echoed his rhetoric. In 2008, Jeffrey Herf, a history profes-
sor at the University of Maryland, suggested that radical lslamists are the
Nazis reborn, motivated at core by anti-Semitism and hatred of women.
It's a common analysis.
Herf and others see the lslamist doctrine as boiling down to a call for
cutting off heads, cutting off hands, and clamping bags over women.
There's no denying that radical lslamists have done these things. Yet radi-
cal lslamists themselves see the main conflict dividing the world today as a
disagreement about whether there is one God, many gods, or no God at
all. All the problems of humanity would be resolved, they contend, if the
world would only recognize the singleness of God (and of Mohammed's
special role as his spokesperson).
Secular intellectuals in the West don't necessarily disagree about the
number of gods. They just don't think that's the burning question. To
them-to us-the basic human problem is finding ways to satisfy the needs
and wants of all people in a manner that gives each one full participation in
decision making about his or her own destiny. One God, two gods, three,
none, many-whatever: people will have differing views, and it's not worth
fighting about, because settling that question will not help solve hunger,
poverty, war, crime, inequality, injustice, global warming, resource deple-
tion, or any of the other ills plaguing humanity. Such is the secular position.
Yet secular and "Western are not synonymous, despite what lslamists may
declare. A 2001 survey by the City University of New York showed that 81
percent of Americans identified with an organized religion, 77 percent of
them with Christianity. Of the rest, many called themselves "spiritual."
Declared atheists were so few they didn't even register on the charts. What-
ever the conflict wracking today's world, it's not between those who are
and those who aren't religious.
In fact, the West has its own religious devotees who want to put God at
the center of politics, most notably the Christian evangelicals who have