ISIS has a Plan: Some Comments

Just a few clarifications of my piece on ISIS and having a plan, brought on by some fruitful discussion on the Irish Catholic Boards.

When I ask if the Church has ‘a plan,’ that probably sounds like I want the Church to have some grand master plan in which one person or one small clique is giving the orders, either on a local or global level, and the rest of us just follow along meekly and unquestioningly.

My language probably didn’t help, and as one person pointed out ISIS is a much more centralised, rigidly structured organisation than the Church, for all of its diffusiveness.

So no, I don’t think that such a situation is desirable, even if possible. But to quote one of my own replies on those boards, I think that there are three things which can be done regards ‘having a plan’ if I may use that expression in a broader sense than just the literal:

I think that rather than one big plan, there is a place for some or all of the following:

1) A clearer broad diocesan/countrywide/global vision of where we need to be at, which individual bishops or congregations could try to implement and work towards without necessarily shutting down other means, apostolates, initiatives etc… this carries the risk of those in charge trying to impose their vision on others, but I think I’m thinking in a looser sense of the diocese actually having a strategy to re-evangelise, catechise etc. that is professional, coherent, consonant with the Church’s teachings etc. rather than just lots of haphazard top-down events that don’t build on each other or towards anything (for instance, was there follow-up to the Eucharistic Congress?)

2) A greater degree of coordination between Catholic groups in a region and between regions, so that resources can be shared and people won’t double up work so much by starting a ‘new’ apostolate that is actually already going on in every other parish and need not be started from scratch; this would also make it easier to see where there IS a gap to be filled

3) A greater degree of planning, foresight and thought going into each local initiative that can more easily plug into the resources that are there. I think that the thing is to balance connectivity and coordination with creativity and individuality

Another point that comes out of this is how the Church is rather diffuse itself in many ways and everybody is free to go and follow their own projects, apostolates and initiatives. Despite having a centralised teaching authority and bureaucracy in Rome, the Church is very decentralised in general.

This is a feature, not a bug. If an organisation the size of the Church was to be monolithic, well, as one person on the Boards pointed out, it would go the way of the Soviet Union. We need different ideas, we need debate, we need diversity.

But we also need unity in that which is essential. We need an idea of where we have to get to and we need to each plan how we’re going to get there. Renewal won’t happen if we don’t look to the years ahead and plan.

Yes, the guidance of the Holy Spirit comes into this. But that same Spirit Who made us gave us the brains to think things through for ourselves.

Hopefully what I meant by ‘having a plan’ is a little clearer now…

ISIS has a Plan. Do We?

From time to time I hear people say that the problem with the Church, whether here in Ireland or globally, is that there is a lack of vision.

I’ve heard some others attack that as clichéd and nebulous. But I think that there’s something to it and I’d like to draw a comparison that might show what ‘vision’ might be.

I hope it’s not considered bad form to learn some lessons from such a horrifically violent and evil organisation, but there are certain things that ISIS seems to be doing quite well, and I think it’s because they have a vision of what they want and they know how to sell that vision quite well to the right target audience. In short, they have a plan and they’re determined to put it into action.

Let me draw your attention to two pieces by Rod Dreher from about two months back. In this first one he quotes extensively from Scott Atran, an anthropologist who has been studying ISIS, its appeal and its methodology in an in-depth way, apparently because nobody else has bothered to.

I’d like to single out a few pieces from this article for the Guardian:

This is about the organisation’s key strategy: finding, creating and managing chaos. There is a playbook, a manifesto: ‘The Management of Savagery/Chaos,’ a tract written more than a decade ago under the name Abu Bakr Naji, for the Mesopotamian wing of al-Qaida that would become Isis.

Think of the horror of Paris and then consider these, its principal axioms: Hit soft targets… Strike when potential victims have their guard down. Sow fear in general populations, damage economies… Consider reports suggesting a 15-year-old was involved in Friday’s atrocity. “Capture the rebelliousness of youth, their energy and idealism, and their readiness for self-sacrifice, while fools preach ‘moderation’ (wasatiyyah), security and avoidance of risk.”

There is a recruitment framework. The Grey Zone, a 10-page editorial in Isis’s online magazine Dabiq in early 2015, describes the twilight area occupied by most Muslims between good and evil, the caliphate and the infidel… It conscientiously exploits the disheartening dynamic between the rise of radical Islamism and the revival of the xenophobic ethno-nationalist movements that are beginning to seriously undermine the middle class – the mainstay of stability and democracy…

…what inspires the most uncompromisingly lethal actors in the world today is not so much the Qur’an or religious teachings. It’s a thrilling cause that promises glory and esteem. Jihad is an egalitarian, equal-opportunity employer: fraternal, fast-breaking, glorious, cool – and persuasive. A July 2014 ICM poll suggested that more than one in four French youth between the ages of 18 and 24 have a favourable or very favourable opinion of Isis, although only 7-8% of France is Muslim…

We have “counter-narratives”, unappealing and unsuccessful. Mostly negative, they rely on mass messaging at youth rather than intimate dialogue. As one former Isis imam told us: “The young who came to us were not to be lectured at like witless children; they are for the most part understanding and compassionate, but misguided.” Again, there is discernible method in the Isis approach.

Eager to recruit, the group may spend hundreds of hours trying to enlist a single individual, to learn how their personal problems and grievances fit into a universal theme of persecution against all Muslims.

Current counter-radicalisation approaches lack the mainly positive, empowering appeal and sweep of Isis’s story of the world; and the personalised and intimate approach to individuals across the world.

There is a lot in this article, but I’d like to just take a few points from the excerpts I’ve taken out:

• ISIS has a ‘playbook’ or manual for creating and exploiting chaos, which it follows with big results. In other words, it has a plan for what it wants to achieve.
• It has a very effective recruitment methodology backed up by professional propaganda (take a look at Dabiq if you want to see it; I took out the hyperlink because I don’t really want unwanted attention but you can search for it) which targets disaffected youth with an attractive narrative that promises brotherhood, victory, glory and so on.
• This recruitment includes spending hundreds of hours getting to know young men and women who are searching for meaning and love in their lives.
• It is very clued into the situation in the West and elsewhere and is effective at exploiting tensions for its own ends.
• The West is clueless as to how to respond.

• ISIS has a very powerful, compelling narrative which the West can’t compete with.

 

This interview with Atran from Russia Today expands on some of these points in a revealing way, particularly in relation to attracting youth to their cause:

…the counter-narratives I hear, at least in the Western Europe and in the U.S. are pathetic. They basically say: “look, ISIS beheads people, they’re bad people” – God, didn’t we know about that before already? The way ISIS attracts people is that they actually are both very intimate and very expansive. So, they’ve brought in people from nearly 90 countries in the world, and they spend hundreds, sometimes even thousands of hours on a single person, talking about their family, saying to young women, for example, in the U.S.:”Look, we know you love your parents and your brothers and your sisters, and we know how hard it’s going to be to leave them, but there are more things to do in life. Grander things. More important things. Let us try to help you explain it to yourselves when you get here, and explain it to them.” And they go through the personal history and grievances and frustrated aspirations of each of these individuals, and they wed it to a global cause, so that personal frustration becomes universalized into moral outrage, and this is especially appealing to young people in transitional stages in their lives: immigrants, students, between jobs, between mates, having just left their genetic family, their natural family and looking for a new family of friends and fellow travellers. This is the age that ISIS concentrates on, and in response, most of the countries of the world, and the Muslim establishments, who call for “wasatiyyah”, moderation. Well, everybody who has ever had teenage children, they know how worthless that is. So, the counter-narratives we’re proposing are pretty pathetic.

…it appeals to young people and their rebelliousness, and again, that’s the specific target population of the Islamic State – and they provide a very positive message.  I mean, what’s reported in our press and in our media, are of course the bad things, the horrific things, but if you pay much closer attention to what ISIS is actually producing in its narratives – it is offering a utopian society. I mean, they show warriors playing with children in fountains, and at the same time they’re training them to kill. I mean, it’s not all one-sided and they’re perfectly aware of trying to balance the two. That is, showing the future of peace and harmony, at least, under their interpretation, with the brutality that is needed to get there.

[Interviewer]: But, you know, we’re used to think that young people, teen in transition, like you say, they want freedom. They want to have fun, they want to have sex and drugs and drink. What we see with ISIS is forbidding this, for young people and for everyone – yet, there is this flock towards ISIS. I still don’t understand why, because whatever they’re trying to convince young people of, it’s pretty obvious there is no freedom where they are going. And young people usually strive for freedom…

DR.SA: Yeah, but I believe they do think they’re getting freedom. Instead of freedom-to-do-things, it’s freedom-from-having-to-do-things, where a life well-ordered and promising. I mean, again, they appeal to people from all over the world. I got a call from head of Medical School telling me that her best students have just left to set up field hospital for ISIS in Syria, and she was asking me why would they do this; and I said, “because it’s a glorious and adventurous mission, where they are creating a Brand New World, and they do it under constraints.” I mean, people want to be creative under constraints. A lot of young people just don’t want the kind of absolute freedom you’re talking about. The choices are too great, there’s too much ambiguity and ambivalence.

…

[Interviewer]: So, there’s no way to win this social media war against the Islamic State?

DR.SA: Yes, there is; and that is coming up with some kind of equally adventurous and glorious message that can give significance to these young people, and this – I’m not hearing. At least in the Western democracies, things have become sort of “tired” as young people become alienated from their leaders and no longer believe in them very much. …young people are finding this call to glory and adventure quite enticing. Again, it’s understandable… decisions are made at the levels of governments and bureaucrats, which are about as appealing to youth as, you know, those cigarette commercials showing diseased mouths and lungs, which have really no effect. It’s young people who get other young people away from cigarettes – that works.

Dreher has more in a second piece here about how ISIS ‘evangelises’ which is well worth looking through.

 

 

There are a few pertinent points to tease out from all of this, building on the ones I mentioned previously.

• ISIS has a plan, in other words a utopian vision for society and a concrete series of steps to follow to get there
• ISIS is incredibly calculating, professional and effective in striving towards that goal
• ISIS is very effective at recruiting young people by spending hundreds of hours getting to know them and bringing them into the brotherhood (this is referred to as ‘ministry’ by one person Dreher quotes in his second piece; I would almost call this a form of Jihadist spiritual direction); they focus on disaffected teens and young adults who feel a sense of emptiness in spite of the freedoms of the modern West
• ISIS has a very compelling narrative which it sells to these people and which Western 21^st century liberal narrative can’t seem to counter

Which is at once impressive and horrifying. Impressive in that this is a social movement that knows how to achieve its goals. Horrifying in that those goals involve mass beheadings, rape, forced conversions, terrorist attacks, with the ultimate aim of establishing a global caliphate…

I said that this would be a comparison. So let me turn these four points above on their head and ask four questions about how the Church is doing in its mission here in the West. I’ll try to answer with my own two cents.

1) Does the Church have a plan?

Do we? There are two sides to this: the spiritual and the practical. One the spiritual side, God has a plan. The Holy Spirit is our guide, and given that He is omnipotent, omniscient and loving it’s going to be a pretty good plan.

However, God in His generosity allowed us humans to take part in His plan of salvation, so there is a practical side to this.

I could be wrong, but I think we’re doing a terrible job of our end of things. I’ve already spoken about how things are in the Church in Ireland (they are not good). We’re divided, we disagree on exactly what our mission is and even more bitterly disagree about how to go about that mission. We’ve lost the culture of the West and seem to walk into scandal after scandal.

There are many good leaders within the Church, and I don’t wish to be overly harsh on them given the difficulty of the job they have, but I never seem to get the impression that there is any coordination or cooperation, that anybody’s in charge, that there’s a plan to revive Catholicism in the West. This isn’t just down to bishops either; the laity also need to get stuck in. We’re in this together.

Don’t get me wrong. I believe that many good things are happening within the Church. They’re just haphazard. For example, I had a bit of a debate with somebody a few weeks back about Youth 2000, a movement I have a lot of time for. This person was complaining that they were failing to do X, Y and Z. To which I could only reply: their job is A, B and C, and they’re doing well at those. Somebody else in the Church should be doing X, Y and Z because this is a team effort, but nobody’s plugging the gaps or solving the problems that are there.

This confusion seems to stretch right up to the top of the Church. I don’t know what Pope Francis is up to, I see many positives but also some not-so-positives in his leadership. I see even more division in the Curia and I think that this is why Pope Emeritus Benedict had so many problems getting real reforms through; I don’t think politics was his strong point.

So yes, the Holy Spirit has a plan. But we need to cooperate with Him, and figure out the practical side of that plan (i.e., the bits that we humans need to work on). And I don’t know if anybody is really doing this.

2) Are we being professional and effective in the things we are doing?

I’ll hopefully write another post that touches on this point later in the week, but it’s one to mull over. How many of our apostolates and movements do things in a planned, considered, coherent but also proactive manner?

3) Is the Church doing a good job of ministering to disaffected youth searching for meaning?

Here there are some positives (again, I refer to Youth 2000). But I think more needs to be done. Youth 2000 provides a very good entry/re-entry point to the Church for young people, as I mentioned. This is the A, B and C it does well. The X, Y and Z of this is ongoing spiritual guidance and formation. This isn’t Youth 2000’s job, and I don’t see a huge amount of it elsewhere.

This is incredibly important.

This article by a Greek Orthodox writer identifies three factors that are key in teenagers and young adults being raised in a faith tradition making that tradition their own and continuing to practice it:

1. The young person’s parents practiced the faith in the home and in daily life, not just in public or churchly settings.
2. The young person had at least one significant adult mentor or friend, other than parents, who practiced the faith seriously.
3. The young person had at least one significant spiritual experience before the age of 17.

I can very much identify with these points; but where in the Church are young people given the opportunity to have adult mentors in the faith, or are they exposed to the wide array of spiritual experiences within the Church that might touch their hearts? And there’s more to it than just that. Catechesis. Spiritual direction. Catholic community. Just plain being-there when things are difficult. Much work must be done there.

The importance of the younger generation is that they have the energy, dynamism and freshness needed to revive and renew the Church. It’s the same in every organisation. ISIS has got this. Have we?

And it’s not ‘moderation’ that attracts youth (although moderation in the true sense is a good thing) but rather meaning, purpose, a cause, a genuine radicalism, the radicalism that will take up its cross and follow Christ.

Moderation does not inspire. Rather, it comes after inspiration in order to channel that energy in the right direction. This is the role of the older generations in the Church, but this only works if those older leaders and mentors are truly authentic, inspiring and devoted, if their moderation is a sign of the virtue of prudence rather than a fig leaf for toothlessness.

4) Does the Church have a compelling narrative that speaks to the human heart and inspires men and women to give their lives for it, even to the point of death?

There are two ways of answering this.

One is resoundingly YES. There is so much beauty, joy, passion, struggle, nobility, love, hope, humanity and divinity in what we believe as Catholics that if it truly takes root in our hearts we cannot be but transformed, inspired, ennobled.

But to slightly change that question: are we getting that narrative out there?

It seems as though we aren’t.

The cultural movements in Europe at the moment that seem to me to have vitality and passion (by which I mean are rapidly growing in overall numbers and in the number of vocal proponents) are threefold: Social Justice Warrior Liberalism, Islam and Far-Right Ideology (we can see the clash of these three in Germany at the moment).

Those that seem to have run out of steam and are dying an ignominious death are classical I-will-tolerate-my-political-enemy-for-liberty’s-sake liberalism and (to an even greater degree) Christianity.

This is a problem that truly speaks to me; as somebody who hopes to be an artist (I won’t say what form of art here) I wish I could convey more and more that Beauty, Truth and Goodness of the faith in the compelling way it deserves.

As it stands, a jihadist death-cult that seeks utopia through bloodshed and chaos is managing to make itself more compelling to the 21^st Century than Catholicism, with all of its wealth of beauty, goodness and love, heroism and sacrifice. It’s an absolute travesty. A tragedy. The Greatest Story Ever Told has been lost in the static.

 

I’m not sure how to go about solving this, other than to reiterate the first step of all attempts to renew the Church: personal sanctity, which is a fancy theological way of saying becoming more like Jesus by loving Him and our neighbour more.

But there is more, even if that is the most fundamental thing.

We need to figure out strategies and means for restoring the Church. This will require a degree of unity and learning how to plan and strategise.

We need to learn to be professional in how we do this. Amateurism only sells out the faith.

We need to provide more real youth ministry, not a series of initiatives ‘for the young people’ that will only drive them away by pandering to what the middle-aged think ‘youth culture’ is.

We need to find new ways of carrying forward our narrative, which is in the end the Good News, the Gospel, bringing it into society in a way that is both timeless and yet speaks to people here and now, with all of their prejudices, merited and unmerited, against the Church.

 

The world is starving for lack of God’s Love. And it is our mission to bring that Love to the world.

We DO need a vision. A plan for how to do that.

I hope I’ve begun to explain what that might mean.

 

 

UPDATE: Some comments on this piece here.