WHAT IS CATHOLIC SOCIOBIOLOGY?

[first published February 16, 2016]



by Dr. David Pence


On Tuesdays at AOA, we will devote our discussions to a Christocentric interpretation of the natural world. The physical world manifests the glory and purposes of God. It is utterly inadequate to contend that  science is about facts, and religion is about meaning. A God who reveals Himself has left all sorts of factual interactions which help orient us toward the truth. The different sciences seek causes which give meaning to events that no longer need be approached as random occurrences but are made intelligible by explanatory paradigms. The sciences cannot be reduced to repeatable lab experiments and religion cannot be dematerialized into beliefs independent of observed facts and events that have occurred in history.  The isolating dissipation of most matter throughout the universe, countered by the communal integration of the human species in Christ on earth, are central facts which have great meaning. Religion and the subordinated physical sciences help us understand these physical and spiritual phenomena. The new field in biology called sociobiology pioneered by EO Wilson is a purely secular but brilliantly synthetic source for our work.
                       

Chardin

Two thinkers who have inspired our reflections are Jesuits of the last century. Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) was silenced and criticized for his inadequate treatment of Evil and original sin. Those areas showed a certain deficiency in his thinking exacerbated by his tendency in later life to minimize the interventions of God in natural history.  Chardin’s quest, however, was a great-souled attempt to synthesize the reality of life’s organic development with man’s final Eucharistic end to be united in the Body of Christ. His work and insights cannot be left to heretics or the godless who will never be able to develop his deepest currents. Nor should his reputation be sullied by those who have no idea what mighty pillars of truth he was trying to align upon a Christian foundation. He had a deep appreciation for the Eucharist and the communal destiny of man as did his fellow Jesuit Henri de Lubac (1896-1991). Father de Lubac, too, was disciplined for some of his writings but was rehabilitated and honored before he died. He was made a 'peritus' (theological adviser) at the Second Vatican Council, and a cardinal by Pope John Paul II. Cardinal de Lubac maintained a lifetime admiration for Chardin; and spent a good deal of time defending his work. This continues to confuse the more tight-fisted of the doctrinal Catholics who embrace de Lubac, but shun Chardin. Both Pope Francis and Pope Benedict understand the limitations of Chardin, but quote his insights approvingly. De Lubac understood that the purpose of the Church was integrally tied to the destiny of man as a species, not just as individual souls. Chardin considered the mystery of the Eucharist as the culminating event of evolution. Chardin saw not just human history but the very structure of nature as moving toward a complexification and unity -- an interpersonal communion. De Lubac understood that the sacramental order of Mother Church was drawing man into this perfection.
                           

Henri de Lubac

What we call Catholic Sociobiology is an attempt to show how the culmination of the natural world is a sacramental incorporation of the human race as a species in the interpersonal life of the Trinity. The human species functioning as a single organism has a key similarity to all eusocial species--sexual differentiation and parthenogenesis are deeply significant. This  drama of love is played out  amidst the ruins of an entropic expanding  universe.  There was a missing element in both Chardin and de Lubac, who focused their thinking on the final culminating unity of redemption in Christ. That union must be contrasted with the expulsion of Satan, his angels, and the damned. The moral fate of the damned is parallel to the physical fact that most of the universe is violent, disintegrating into space, and hostile to life. This was not widely appreciated in the time of Chardin. There was a theory of the universe that it was oscillating and its expansion would soon cease and a reconvergence would draw all of matter back into "a great crunch". It turns out that most of the matter in the universe is expanding outwards and it is not coming back! There is however a selected place of complex convergence. That is one way to describe that "thin strip of life"-- a 10 mile shell of the earth's surface and inner atmosphere known as the biosphere. This set aside or "elect" spatial sanctuary is where the ultimate Eucharistic convergence will occur.  The liturgy does not make all things sacred but performs a separating function before communion.  So too the universe. There is a radical distinction between the hierarchical ecology of life and the deadly cold and vacuum filling the galaxies. A tiny amount of matter  is being drawn into the Body of Christ. The rest of the material Universe ( 99% of which are the two simplest elements- hydrogen and helium) is being separated out.  The Eucharist is not "performed on the world" but on the set aside elements which reconstitute the human species for our special vocation. This distinction of the Household of Life from the inanimate convulsions of matter in space does not refute the Chardin-de Lubac project. This refinement rescues them from Origen and the Greek cosmic return  of apocatastasis.  The convergence toward the Omega point of Christ in the context of a contrasting entropic dissolution makes the cosmic, anthropological, and Eucharistic insights of these two great churchmen even more remarkable.
(Added Note August 2017) There is much in the work of Protestant theologian NT Wright that helps explain our overall Corporate Body Kingdom emphasis. Here is an interview. Here is a pithy summary: "We have platonized our eschatology, as a result of which we have moralized our anthropology, and have therefore been in danger of paganizing our soteriology.":

Map on Monday: THE HORN OF AFRICA

An Introduction to the Religious, Ethnic, and Geopolitical Makeup of the Horn of Africa

By A. Joseph Lynch

The "Horn of Africa" refers to the far eastern region of Africa which juts out into the Indian Ocean. Although Somalia comprises much of the horn itself - aptly called the Somalian peninsula - the region also includes Eritrea, Djibouti, and Ethiopia.

Christian Ethiopia is by far the region's dominant nation. Not only does it control 60% of the region's land area, Ethiopia is home to roughly 85% of the region's  people (2018 update pop Ethiopia=107mill). Ethiopia's Lake Tana provides the source of the Blue Nile flowing out of Ethiopia's highland core where the capital city of Addis Ababa sits at the foothills of Mt. Entoto. Ethiopia is, however, landlocked and dependent on its neighbors (mostly Djibouti, Kenya, and Somalia) for transportation of its exports. Ethiopia is the continent's greatest supplier of coffee, and also exports agricultural goods and gold. Militarily speaking, Ethiopia has an army of roughly 135,000 men with another 3,000 in air forces. The landlocked nation has no navy. Ethiopia is also the third largest Christian nation in Africa (behind only Nigeria at #1 and the Democratic Republic of Congo) and the ninth largest in the world. Christian roots in Ethiopia run deep as the evangelist St. Matthew brought the faith to Ethiopia in the first century, and Scripture records St. Philip's conversion of the Ethiopian court official (see Acts 8:26-38). Christianity was made the state religion of Ethiopia around the year AD 330, but with the rise of Islam across north Africa in the seventh century, Ethiopia was cut off from its brethren in the north. The three least ethnic groups are the Oromo (35%) Amhara(27%) and Tigray(7%). The more populous Oromo have been lower in the social scale and less dominant politically than the Amhara. That ethnic divide is a frequent cause of violence. In 2007 Orthodox were 43% Protestants 16% and Muslim 33% of population. Much of the Protestant growth has come from replacing animists.

At around fifteen million people (2018) and about one third of the region's land area, Somalia is the second largest country in the Horn of Africa and the region's largest Sunni Muslim country. Where Ethiopia has no coastline, Somalia has the longest coastline in Africa and is situated near the geostrategic choke point of the Bab El-Mandeb strait (which links the Mediterranean-Suez-Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden and Arabian Sea). Despite its access to the sea and its strategic location, Somalia has been wracked by civil war for decades. While some stability is growing from its southern coastal region around the capital of Mogadishu, Islamic terrorists networks (like Al-Shabab) remain strong in the southern hinterlands while the northern-most region of Somaliland (the former British colony of 4.5 million ) has declared independence and is considered an autonomous region within the country. Dangers from Islamist forces have led to interventions by Christian Ethiopia (2006-2009) and Christian Kenya (2011's Operation Linda Nchi - "Protect the Country.") An excellent historical review by J.Peter Pham.

Eritrea (5mill-2018) is the region's other country with a substantial coastline. Unlike Somalia, however, Eritrea's coast is contained within the Red Sea, oriented toward Saudi Arabia and Yemen; and its southern-most point is located at the northern boundaries of the strategic Strait of Bab El-Mandeb. Eritrea is also torn between Islam and Christianity -- with Christianity holding a slight majority in the nation. Having been incorporated into Ethiopia in the years after World War II, Eritrea fought a 30-year war of independence from Ethiopia ending in 1993. From 1998-2000, Eritrea sparked (and lost) a border war with Ethiopia. With Ethiopia still holding lands in Eritrea, the region's two most populous Christian nations have relatively poor relations with one another. Eritrea also began a short border war with the Islamic nation of Djibouti, and yet holds an observer status in the Arab League. Eritrea, it seems, is thus neither integrated into the Islamic nor Christian worlds. Eritrea's strategic location and large copper, gold, granite, marble, and potash reserves, however, make it a potentially important regional ally to whoever can forge a lasting relationship.

With a population just under one million(2108) and amassing just one percent of the region's land area, Djibouti is the Horn of Africa's smallest country. The former French Somaliland has French and Arabic as official languages but Somali as the most spoken. The port city and capital of Djibouti City provides an important commercial hub at the entrance of the Bab El-Mandeb strait. Although Djibouti is 94% Sunni Muslim and only 6% Christian, it practices religious freedom and acts as a key partner of Christian Ethiopia as 70% of all port activities involve shipments for the landlocked nation. As a member of the Arab League, Djibouti also maintains strategic ties to the wider Sunni-Arab world.

Religion and Geopolitics Review: Saturday, March 4

by Dr. David Pence and A. Joseph Lynch

I. THE WEEKLY BRIEF

President Trump's masterful State of the Union found its emotional center in honoring Navy Seal Ryan Owens who died in a Jan 29 'boots on the ground' raid of Al Qaeda in Yemen. There is debate in the media how successful the raid was. There are two wars in Yemen -- the disgraceful Saudi bombing war against the Shiite Houthis, and the American war against AQAP and ISIS in Yemen. AQAP is considered one of the most likely sources of future attacks against the US. Strategists agreed that operations involving soldiers who could retrieve information would have to supplement  drone attacks. The Obama administration planned the operation, but left the final decision to the new President understanding the significance of this more aggressive strategy. It appears the enemy knew we were coming, which highlights the necessity of tightening the internal leaks which have jeopardized the transition of military command from President Obama's administration to President Trump's. These breaches that endanger the lives of our soldiers can no longer be winked at as the work of civic whistle blowers.

This week we also discovered that Senators cross paths with Ambassadors as Attorney General Jeff Sessions is now proposed as the newest Russian spy in the White House. If it is really foreign influences in campaigns we are looking for, then we might check contributions of the Saudis to Mrs. Clinton's campaign. The enduring influence of the Saudis with the Bushes, Clintons, foreign policy think tanks and universities is going to become a major battlefront in devising an America First foreign policy. Their role remains clouded because of their de-facto alliance with Israel against Iran. The war hawks from McCain to Clinton have accepted the Saudi-Israel formulation of US strategy which led to the decimation of the Syrian population in the ill fated attempt to overthrow President Assad. The ability of the Trump administration to break from the Saudi playbook in understanding "what the hell is going on" and "all that hate" in the Mideast is the most critical question before us in foreign policy.

Russia and Syria see the Saudis much more clearly than Lindsey Graham and John McCain do. So did President Obama in his second term. When he was asked at the end of his presidency if the Saudis were our allies, he said, "It's complicated." That is also why a reflective President Obama judged his refusal to escalate against Assad in Syria as "the most important thing he didn't do" in the Mideast. In this poisoned era of public discourse it is difficult to explain that it was the restraint of President Obama in dealing with Iran and Syria that will allow President Trump to pivot in building a new Shiite inclusive alliance to destroy ISIS.

II. ISLAM AND THE MIDDLE EAST

RUSSIA RETURNS TO AFGHANISTAN: The Taliban as a local force against ISIS internationalism.

NORTHERN AFRICA: WAR AND FAMINE RIDE: The breakdown of civic authority; the breakdown of food production.

LEBANON - ISRAEL AND LEBANESE CHRISTIANS DO NOT SEE THIS THE SAME WAY: An Israeli take on the next war against Lebanon -- it must be fast and furious. Needless to say this is  more than troubling to those of us who support Lebanese Christians allying with Lebanese Hezbollah to protect themselves from the Salafist Sunnis ravaging Syria and threatening Lebanon.  From Daily Alert Newsletter:

                 Israel's Strategy in the Third Lebanon War - by  Giora Eiland

We should pay attention to Lebanese President Michel Aoun, who reiterated that Hizbullah was part of the power protecting Lebanon from Israel. This statement only strengthens what should have been clear for years - that Hizbullah and the government of Lebanon are one and the same.

In the Second Lebanon War, Israel fought only against Hizbullah, without getting the Lebanese government, the Lebanese army and the country infrastructures involved in the battle. If we run the third Lebanon war the same way, the cost to the Israeli home front would be unbearable. The conclusion, therefore, should be clear. If fire is opened at Israel from Lebanese territory, Israel should declare war on the State of Lebanon.

There is no one in the world who wants to see Lebanon destroyed. A war against Lebanon, which will inflict heavy damage on all of the country's infrastructures, will spark an international outcry for a ceasefire after three days, rather than after 33 days like in the Second Lebanon War. It is only from a really short war that Israel will be able to emerge victorious and without serious damage to its home front. 

Major-General (res.) Giora Eiland is a former head of Israel's National Security Council. (Ynet News).

THE PRESIDENT AND THE IMPERIAL JUDICIARY: In the Courts the war against the father is a series of judgments against the police power of local cities, the legislative power of states and localities to "legislate morality" and the executive power of the President to restrict non citizens for purposes of national security. The Court is the arm of the administrative state that upholds all claims of the IMPERIAL SELF against the common good. On the President's travel ban.

SOUTH SUDAN AFRICA'S NEWEST CHRISTIAN NATION - TRIBAL BLOOD BATHS AND FAMINE: There are 12 million Sudanese. From Catholic World Report.

III. RUSSIA AND EUROPE

IS NATO OBSOLETE? A crystal clear assessment from a Belgian professor.

TRUMP, PUTIN, AND THE NEW COLD WAR: A very good descriptive article in the New Yorker. The reporting is good enough that one need not share the inclinations of the authors to learn from their excellent narrative. Their best sources are people from Bill Clinton’s Presidency when the opportunity to really make peace with the Russians was not realized. It is also very good on the evolution of cyber warfare and is a reminder that the first  "Russian favorite candidate" was not Trump but Bernie Sanders. Pat Buchanan sees Russia much more clearly than most. How ironic that the left which always took the Soviet side when they were leaders of a worldwide communist movement is now hysterically anti Russian when their leader is a Christian nationalist. Maybe that isn't ironic at all.

IV. CULTURE OF LIFE, CULTURE OF PROTECTION

ON MILO AND CATHOLICS AND MILO AND CONSERVATIVES: Austin Ruse sees the Catholic priest scandal connection. Douthat of NYTimes gets a lot right on Milo and the right.

BERKLEY RIOTS AND POLICE STRATEGY-THE BREAKDOWN OF CIVIC AUTHORITY: And the criminals who benefit- who could have guessed? Heather McDonald of City Journal.

MICHAEL ANTON, AUTHOR OF 'FLIGHT 93,' ARTICLE ON AMERICA AND THE LIBERAL INTERNATIONAL ORDER: A considered critique of the overreach of LIO but he still sees American culture in terms of democracy, law and rights. Christianity and masculinity play little role in his thinking but he has a Claremont like respect for "respect, honor and thymos." His idea of national interests (peace, prestige and prosperity) are not quite the visceral religious sentiments of the patriots and Christians who powered the Trump campaign as the intellectuals were dithering.

Friday Book Review: Tales from a survivor of China's Red Guards

"To people who have not dealt with such men as the Maoists, my persistent effort to fight back against my persecutors may seem futile and pointless. But the Maoists were essentially bullies."     

Nien Cheng was an amazing woman who survived the sufferings of prison... and then emigrated to America, and settled in the Washington DC area. She died in 2009 in her mid-nineties.

Mrs. Cheng was born in 1915 in Beijing, the daughter of a naval vice minister who belonged to a wealthy family of land owners. In 1935 she went to study at the London School of Economics, where she met her future husband. He became a senior diplomat with the Kuomintang. In 1949 Chiang Kai-Shek was forced to retreat with his army to Taiwan.

At that time, Nien says she and her husband were "muddle-headed liberals" -- and decided to stay in mainland China under the Communists. She later deeply regretted not leaving, mainly because of her daughter's young life being snuffed out during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).

One of the reasons I picked up her book was because of the growing Red Guard tinge to America's own cultural revolution: "Only stupid bigots have a problem with homosexual marriage. Why are you fascists all tied up in knots about allowing boys into the girls' locker room? It's a new world, so tough luck! Racists who vote for Trump should be beaten."


In late September 1966, Nien Cheng was hauled off to prison. After being strip-searched, the female guard handed back her clothes except for the bra -- "an article of clothing the Maoists considered a sign of decadent Western influence."

Nien said: "One of the most ugly aspects of life in Communist China during the Mao Zedong era was the Party's demand that people inform on each other routinely... Husbands and wives became guarded with each other, and parents were alienated from their children."

[That brings back echoes of Pavlik, the Russian boy in the 1930s who ratted out his father to the government -- and was lionized in Soviet culture as the model of true sonship.]

Another subject Nien describes from personal experience is how the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution elevated ignorant peasants to assume the roles of actual doctors!

                         

From the 'New York Times' review of her book:

One night in August of 1966 the home of Mrs. Nien Cheng in Shanghai was broken into by some 40 young people wearing Red Guard armbands. Mrs. Cheng barred their way and asked for their search warrant. ''The Constitution is abolished,'' they replied. ''We recognize only the teachings of our Great Leader Chairman Mao.'' They then proceeded to vandalize the house, breaking furniture and porcelain, slashing paintings, burning books. Mrs. Cheng tried to save the more irreplaceable of her possessions by pleading that they were part of the great Chinese cultural heritage. ''Shut up!'' she was told. ''They are the useless toys of the feudal emperors and the modern capitalist class and have no significance to us, the proletarian class.'' The destruction went on. 

During the weeks of harassment that followed, Mrs. Cheng did her best to understand what lay behind the mindless destructiveness and cold lack of humanity of her Red Guard persecutors. But in the end she was left feeling that they were ''alien creatures . . . with whom I had no common language.'' This conclusion would have disturbed the Red Guards not at all. As one of her interrogators instructed her, months later, in prison: ''Men are not equal. Men are divided into conflicting classes.'' As a wealthy bourgeois, she had nothing in common with proletarians, certainly not a common humanity. And indeed, as we read the debates between her and her interrogators, the antagonists do seem to be speaking different languages. On her side, speech is full of the twists and turns of argument; on their side, it is an even flow of sophisms and cliches punctuated with quotations from Mao's Little Red Book. 

Nien Cheng spent six and a half years in detention, in a jail originally built by the Kuomintang for its Communist enemies (new regimes always find a use for the prisons their predecessors have built), in solitary confinement, on the sparsest of diets, subjected to relentless interrogation and finally to torture, all with the object of making her confess to spying for the West while employed by Shell Oil in Shanghai. The charge made no sense and was clearly trumped up. Why so much official time and energy was being invested in her case she could not understand; only years later, as the full extent of the intrigue and back-stabbing within the party and the army emerged, did it become clear that her confession was intended to be part of a power play put together by the faction supporting Defense Minister Lin Biao against Premier Zhou Enlai. 

Being innocent, Mrs. Cheng refused to confess. On a human level, the greatest interest of her memoir lies in the account of her resistance to psychological and physical pressures that would have broken most people, resistance that culminates in a magnificent moment when, her hands maimed, her gums septic, hemorrhaging continually from suspected cervical cancer, she is informed that, as a consequence of ''proletarian magnanimity,'' she is free to leave and resume her interrupted life. Trembling with anger, she rejects liberty: she will stay in prison, she says, until the regime apologizes to her and publishes its apology in the Beijing and Shanghai newspapers; and she refuses to yield till she is dragged out into the street. 

Life and Death in Shanghai is an absorbing story of resourcefulness and courage... What happened to Nien Cheng was only an extreme form of what happened to hundreds of thousands of Chinese born on the wrong side of the social and educational tracks. Indeed, Mrs. Cheng might count herself lucky to have escaped with her life (to say nothing of her Hong Kong bank account). Her daughter was not so fortunate. She was taken away in 1967 and later found dead, one of some 10,000 victims of the Cultural Revolution in Shanghai alone. Very likely she had been murdered. For years, however, the story was put out that she had committed suicide after a struggle meeting. ''According to our Great Leader Chairman Mao,'' commented one official disapprovingly to Mrs. Cheng, ''committing suicide is an attempt to resist reeducation and reform. It's a crime against socialism. Those who commit suicide are really counterrevolutionaries.'' 

The last third of Nien Cheng's book is devoted to the period between her release from detention and her departure for the United States in 1980, during which she lived no longer in comfortable bourgeois circumstances but as one of ''the masses.'' Looking around her for the legacy of the Cultural Revolution, she found only cynicism and wariness: wariness about speaking one's mind to even the closest of friends, for fear that the pendulum might swing leftward again; cynicism about the party. Having been instructed from above during the Cultural Revolution that laws are nothing but ''tools of the 'capitalist-roaders' against the people,'' people have lost all respect for the law; whatever one can get away with is right. 

In Mrs. Cheng's view, then, the Cultural Revolution, like the Great Leap Forward of the 1950's, was a disaster, a giant step backward into anarchy and obscurantism...  

What induced the Chinese Communist Party to go along with this destructive assault upon itself, and upon the Chinese intelligentsia? By and large Mrs. Cheng accepts the explanation that the Cultural Revolution began as a stratagem of the warped mind (the ''evil genius'') of Mao, that it spread by exploiting rivalries within the party and that it was used for their own ends by Mao's villainous wife, Jiang Qing, and her cronies. The virulence of the campaign against Shanghai's intellectuals is blamed squarely on Jiang Qing, in particular on her resentment against an artistic establishment that, holding her to be ''a woman of easy virtue and little talent,'' had refused her movie parts when she was younger... 

When Nien Cheng arrived in the United States from China in 1980, immigration officials told her the only way she could qualify for immediate settlement was by applying for political asylum. She refused. ''I told myself, 'Political asylum, that sounds like somebody who is helpless.' So I told them, 'I am not helpless, I am going to go and find somewhere else to live.' '' 

Mrs. Cheng, then 65 years old, headed for Canada, remaining there until she was admitted as a United States immigrant in 1983. Then she loaded her suitcases into a car, drove to Washington and set about buying the two-room condominium near American University that has become her home. 

In America, as in China, independence has been her strong suit. And just as she found a challenge in the solitary miseries of a prison in Shanghai, she has found new opportunities in the United States. ''You know, I feel so fortunate,'' she said in a telephone interview as she prepared to set off on a cross-country tour to promote Life and Death in Shanghai. ''There is so much for me to learn here in America, so much that is fascinating. It is a great honor to me in the evening of my life.''

"Looking back on those years, I believe the main reason I was able to survive the ordeal was that the Maoist Revolutionaries failed to break my fighting spirit."  

Christian Realism: Understanding the spiritual nature of ISIS

by David Pence


Part of our Christian realism project, in keeping with the Christopher Dawson argument, is that we see religious movements and loyalties as fundamental driving forces in the relations of nations. The Social Darwinist realists treat nations as black boxes whose actions are not explained by religion or ideology but by actions aiding the survival of a territorial group vis-a-vis another group. Realists thought both the Soviet Union and Maoist China were best explained with few references to Marxism.  Christian realists see the nations as principal actors in history, but we see religious movements and loyalties as even more ultimate. To understand the Mideast, ISIS must be understood on its own terms as a movement inside a religion. Whether it speaks for Islam is the great battle inside Sunni Islam, What is surely true is that this movement will not be defeated by "moderate Muslims" or secular Muslims. It will be defeated by radically committed Muslims who will fight and die rather than allow this death cult to murder in the name of God. The KKK was not opposed by moderate Christians but fervent believers who despised their actions as blasphemy.  Modern secularists have an annoying tendency to propose "solutions" to religious conflicts  in which men of religion  become more moderate in their love of God and more private in their recognition of His Sovereignty.

One analogy in Christian history to the Salafist "reformers" is that they are like the Oliver Cromwell-led Puritans of England in the 1650's who fought and killed to establish an earlier more Puritan form of Christianity against the Catholic and Anglican authorities who had corrupted the true religion of Jesus.  

A remarkable article in the 'Atlantic' by Graeme Wood on the religious goals of ISIS. This is considered the best description of the group in terms of their self-conception. This is a talk he gave on the magazine essay.

One important observation is the tradition in Islam that justifies actions in the present day if there is an accepted tradition that those actions were done by the Prophet or early ancestors. Thus, if ISIS can find an agreed-upon report that the Salafists (ancestors) burnt an enemy alive, then an action like their burning of the captured Jordanian pilot in January 2015 was in accordance with the Law.

The Salafists and Wahhabis give allegiance to the satanic movement which is infecting the religion of Islam. They truly are “spiritual but not religious”. Their enemies are the Shiites, conventional Sunni, the Jews and the Christians. This spiritual understanding of the war should make clear that Russia, Iran and Syria are not the principal enemies of the United States in our war against the forces that murdered 3000 of our people on 9-11-2001. In war the principle is to isolate your enemies and broaden your alliances. The nations of most Christians, Jews, Shia and Sunni will join us but we must be clear. who we are fighting and why.