Occasionally one comes across a bit of ancient wisdom that succinctly explains everything.
Occasionally one comes across a bit of ancient wisdom that succinctly explains everything. Consider the following words, spoken by Pope Innocent III while addressing the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215:
[F]or this is where evils have come into the Christian people: faith decays, religion grows deformed, liberty is thwarted, justice is trampled underfoot, heretics emerge, schismatics grow haughty, the faithless rage, the Muslims conquer.
This short passage embodies a perennial pattern that Christians took for granted since their first contact with Islam: the more Christians lose their way, the more does the world their forbears created begin to crumble—until, at the last, Muslims conquer.
This begins with a contemporary of Muhammad. Patriarch Sophronius of Jerusalem, who surrendered the Holy City to the Muslims after a devastating siege in 637, said the following during a sermon when the Arabs had first begun to overrun Christian regions:
Why are the troops of the Saracens attacking us? Why has there been so much destruction and plunder? Why are there incessant outpourings of human blood? Why are the birds of the sky devouring human bodies? Why have churches been pulled down? Why is the cross mocked? Why is Christ . . . blasphemed by pagan mouths? . . . The vengeful and God-hating Saracens, the abomination of desolation clearly foretold to us by the prophets, overrun the places which are not allowed to them, plunder cities, devastate fields, burn down villages, set on fire the holy churches, overturn the sacred monasteries, oppose the Roman armies arrayed against them, and in fighting raise up the trophies [of war] and add victory to victory.
Sophronius then gave the antidote:
If we constrain ourselves, as friendly and beloved of God, we would laugh at the fall of our Saracen adversaries.
A much more influential source, written around 690, spells out exactly how and why Christians had ceased being “beloved of God” to the point of “deserving” a severe chastisement at the hands of the Arabs: because of sexual immorality—specifically gender bending and cross-dressing:
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