Augustine Was Right. The Question Is Whether We Understand Why.
A Response to “Pacifism Is Christian Suicide in the Age of Jihad” by: Brother Rachid
Brother Rachid is right about the conclusion. Just war theory is not a concession to moral weakness. It is the product of serious theological reasoning by people who understood, as Augustine understood while the Vandals laid siege to his city, that love of neighbor sometimes demands the willingness to use force. The pacifist who refuses to defend the innocent is not practicing a higher morality. He is outsourcing the moral burden to someone else and calling it virtue.
But arriving at the right conclusion for incomplete reasons is a different problem than arriving at the wrong conclusion. And Brother Rachid’s argument, for all its energy, leaves the most important question unanswered. Why does jihad keep producing these outcomes, across centuries, across cultures, across every conceivable variation in political circumstance? If we cannot answer that question structurally, we will keep winning individual arguments and losing the longer war.
My book The Two Muhammads is an attempt to answer exactly that question. What follows draws on that analysis.
The Asymmetry Is Theological, Not Accidental
Brother Rachid identifies the historical pattern with precision. North Africa, Egypt, Syria, Anatolia, the cradle of the ancient church, swallowed by conquest and slow strangulation. Western Christianity surviving precisely because it built sovereign states willing to fight back. The map speaks plainly. Where Christians fought, civilization endured. Where they submitted, it died.
But the pattern requires an explanation deeper than “Islam is aggressive and pacifism is naive.” The aggression is not incidental to the system. It is structural. In The Two Muhammads I trace the divergence to the founding narratives of the two civilizations themselves: “Christianity’s founding act is God’s self-sacrifice for the unworthy. Islam’s founding narrative centers on human sacrifice for God, obedience proven through conquest, submission confirmed through struggle, and ultimate assurance of salvation promised most clearly through martyrdom. These are not merely theological differences. They shape moral psychology. They determine whether the highest virtue is self-giving love or loyal obedience, whether power is redeemed through suffering or sanctified through dominance.”
This matters enormously for how we understand just war. Augustine’s framework was not developed as a response to Islamic jihad. It was developed as a response to the universal problem of evil in a fallen world. But when it is brought into contact with a system whose founding texts explicitly authorize offensive expansion until the whole of the earth submits, the just war framework is not debating a rival ethical theory about when force is permissible. It is confronting a system for which force in the service of God’s sovereignty is not a regrettable necessity but a spiritual virtue.
What the Texts Actually Say
Brother Rachid gestures at the doctrine of jihad but does not dwell in the texts. The texts deserve attention, because they are what makes this different from ordinary geopolitical conflict between rival powers.
The Quran’s late Medinan verses, which classical Islamic jurisprudence treats as the definitive final word on relations with non-Muslims, are unambiguous about the mandate. Quran 9:29 commands: “Fight those who do not believe in Allah or in the Last Day... from those who were given the Scripture, until they pay the jizya with willing submission and feel themselves subdued.” Quran 9:5 extends this to polytheists: “Kill them wherever you find them, capture them, besiege them, and sit in wait for them at every place of ambush.” Quran 8:39 frames the horizon: “Fight them until there is no more fitnah and the religion, all of it, is for Allah.”
In The Two Muhammads I note that classical jurists widely treat these later verses as abrogating the earlier, more restrained passages. The doctrine of abrogation, naskh, exists precisely to resolve the tension between the Quran’s peaceful Meccan period and its militant Medinan period. And the resolution consistently favors the later, harder texts. The instruction to fight until the religion is entirely for Allah is not a fringe reading. It is the mainstream jurisprudential inheritance.
This is not a portrait of a tradition that happened to produce some violent actors. It is a tradition whose most authoritative texts explicitly mandate expansion until submission is universal, and whose legal tradition has consistently treated those texts as operative rather than symbolic. The just war framework is responding to something categorically different from a state pursuing national interest through military means.
