Bruce S. Thornton, City Journal 

On November 18, the New York Times ran a full-page ad entitled “A Christian Response to A Common Word Between Us and You.” A Common Word is an October letter from 138 Muslim scholars and clerics “to leaders of Christian churches, everywhere.”

It reads like an invitation to ecumenical tolerance and “peace and understanding” based on “the very foundational principles of both faiths”: “The Unity of God, the necessity of love for Him, and the necessity of love of the neighbour is thus the common ground between Islam and Christianity.” Over 300 Christian theologians and church leaders signed the “Christian Response,” including the heads of some of the nation’s most prestigious seminaries and theological schools. But if it accurately represents the thinking of mainstream Christian leadership, then Christianity in America is in deep trouble.

The response opens on a familiar self-loathing note, in the therapeutic style that has convinced jihadists that Christianity in the West is an empty shell, a mere lifestyle choice. Noting that Muslim and Christian “relations have sometimes been tense, even characterized by outright hostility,” the letter professes “that in the past (e.g. in the Crusades) and in the present (e.g. in excesses of the ‘war on terror’) many Christians have been guilty of sinning against our Muslim neighbors,” and so “we ask forgiveness of the All-Merciful One and of the Muslim community around the world.”

The groveling self-abasement of this language, particularly its begging forgiveness of Allah, is matched only by its remarkable historical ignorance. “Outright hostility” has indeed existed between Muslims and Christians, for the simple reason that for 13 centuries Islam grew and spread by war, plunder, rapine, and enslavement throughout the Christian Middle East.