A Prime Opportunity for Conversion

Recently, young Iraqis expressed their feelings about clerics of Islam in their country this way:

“I hate Islam and all the clerics because they limit our freedom every day and their instruction became heavy over us,” said Sara, a high school student in Basra. “Most of the girls in my high school hate that Islamic people control the authority because they don’t deserve to be rulers.”

Atheer, a 19-year-old from a poor, heavily Shiite neighborhood in southern Baghdad, said: “The religion men are liars. Young people don’t believe them. Guys my age are not interested in religion anymore.”

As students of René Girard’s mimetic theory can attest, nothing in nature “abhors a vacuum” so much as religion, so these words must be heard as either an opportunity to conversion to authentic transcendence, or as a prelude to more of the same old same old: falling for yet another expression of the primitive Sacred with its concomitant false transcendence posited on scapegoating, religious dread, sacrificial violence, and so forth.

The expected gradient will be (a) the disaffected will throw themselves into secular Western neo-paganism; (b) they will become slowly horrified at its decadence and polytheism; (c) they will return penitently to Islam. It is an old story these past 50 years.

I can only attest to the reality of authentic conversion and the hope, promise, and fulfillment held in the Catholic Church’s adoration of the Blessed Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And I pray for these disenchanted young Iraqis to find what I have found after a similar aridity and disillusionment.