ATTABOY, ATATURK. When I saw the title on this Crunchy Con post -- "Jape on Christians and Turkey" -- I thought, ooh, I love japes, -- japes, quips, and bagatelles! And the subject was promising.

Alas, it was just Rod Dreher quoting with approval some guy named Jape. And what he said, regarding Christians in Turkey, was less than cheering:

Moll ends with an American missionary in Turkey who comments breezily that “we are relatively free and we are tolerated now.”

If this is the sum and substance of western missionary zeal these days -- to be free and tolerated -- (and I fear that all to often it is), then Christians have good reason to question the compromises with Liberalism they are wont to make.

My nostrils twitched especially at that last part, so I went back to the source and found that, yes, Jape is indeed one of those guys who says "the structures of secular politics and economics tend to have a corrosive and colonizing effect on what passes these days for 'strong faith'" like it's a bad thing.

Also, he complains that, when Turkey tried to pass a law against adultery, the godless EU pressured them not to.

I am sympathetic to persecuted Christians -- which in my admittedly old-fashioned lexicon means Christians harrassed and assaulted for their faith -- but I notice that, like all other conservative types these days, conservative Christians have broadened their definition of persecution to include being disagreed with, and not being allowed to practice their own variants of sharia in host countries that, were they less "liberal," even in Jape's perjorative sense, would have marched them into the sea.

The whole Benedict Turkey trip, for all the feel-good man-of-peace rhetoric, is really just one powerful mobster cooking up a big takeover with another. I hope the ghost of Ataturk is knocking over their water glasses at least.