Chestlessness

David Warren has been attacked because he points out the timidity (my word, not his) of the Fox reporters who converted to Islam to save their lives...He actually uses the word "Chestlessness" which is a referral to C.S. Lewis' famous essay on Men without Chests: "We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and then bid the geldings to be fruitful."

Warren's essay is not about reporters suffering from the Stockholm syndrome (see my previous entry about this) for Warren goes further to find parallels with the timidity of Western civilization in Canada.

Mark Steyn, another Canadian, makes a similar observation: he compares the "reasonable" sham conversion to one in a short story by Conan Doyle, where travelers 100 years ago are caught in a similar predicament:

"None of them, except perhaps Miss Adams and Mrs. Belmont, had any deep religious convictions. All of them were children of this world, and some of them disagreed with everything which (the cross)...represented... Yet in the end, even as men with no religious convictions, they cannot bring themselves to submit to Islam, for they understand it to be not just a denial of Christ but in some sense a denial of themselves, too..."

And the reporters'denial, continues Steyn, " confirms the central truth Osama and the mullahs have been peddling -- that the West is weak, that there's nothing -- no core, no bedrock -- nothing it's not willing to trade."

Ah, but I can't judge. I'd get hysterical and hyperventillate...

But perhaps the next time reporters recognize they might face that danger, could I advise them to make plans on what they would do?

When my mother died, my brother chose the hymn "How Great thou art" to close the service. When they played it, everyone cried, but I smiled...You see, she had once been a missionary in Africa when a war broke out and missionaries were being taken out and shot. So she and two nuns who worked with her as nurses decided that if they were killed, they wouldn't go to their deaths whimpering, but sing a hymn: How Great thou art.

Luckily, she never was faced with that and died at age 89 last year.
But her courage is a testimony to her children, her grand children and her great grandchildren.

Yup. She had something called integrity.
-----------------------------------------
Update: FirstThingsBlog notes that Aug 29th celebrated Blessed Anthony Neyrot...although one doubts the reporters would follow his example.