Clay Higgins / Photo by Gage Skidmore, Creative Commons

By Matthew A. McIntosh / 06.05.2017
Brewminate Editor-in-Chief

Clay Higgins, a Republican recently elected in Louisiana to the U.S. House of Representatives, posted on Facebook yesterday what can only be seen as a clear desire to use the taxpayer-funded resources of the United States military to engage in a holy war, a 21st century version of the Crusades.

Higgins was a captain with the St. Landry Parish Sheriff’s Office in Louisiana before winning his House seat and had developed a reputation of being outspoken online there as well.

The words “all of Christendom” make the representative’s intent clear. This is for him not just a battle against terror. In fact, the GOP has a history of looking the other way when it comes to domestic terror committed by those more aligned to their own sensitivities.

For Higgins, this is a battle against Islam itself, seeing terror committed by radical Islamists as an excuse to justify condemnation of the entire religion and a new war against it if possible. Evangelicals everywhere applaud.

He doesn’t simply call them monsters or “animals” alone. Terrorists absolute are appropriately described as both, but again makes his motivation overt by using “heathen” in the description. Our government should not care what is “Christian” or “Islamic” nor what either would consider “heathen”, and such rhetoric from a government official is disturbing to say the least.

He doesn’t simply want to combat terror in toto for the safety of people or for national security alone. He is concerned with what is “good and righteous”.

If you think for one second that the desire to stop terror on the part of those like Higgins doesn’t extend to wanting to eradicate an entire religion if possible and not just those using it for terror, you are sorely mistaken.

For radical Christianists like Higgins, this is more than a battle against terror. This is a battle of religious ideology, and terror gives them an excuse to once again spread by the sword that which hasn’t taken the hearts and minds of everyone in the world – their own belief system.

Thank you, Congressman Higgins, for making it clear that your motivation for military engagement is not national security in and of itself. You simply use that as a cover for your heart’s true desire.

We do indeed need to combat terrorism on all fronts, including that committed by radical Islamists. But we need to do so as the secular nation we were intended to be, not with the Holy Bible as a driving motivation.

We do not need and should not have that for which your rhetoric calls – a reincarnation of medieval Christianity and Crusades version 2.0.