Happy Meals cannot overcome holy war.
"Happy Meals cannot overcome holy war. Commerce may produce prosperity, democracy may establish elections, and military power may remove a regime, but none can expose false theology, conquer spiritual darkness, or transform the human heart. The West attempted to answer a theological and civilizational enemy with ballots, markets, and consumer goods—and then wondered why the enemy remained."
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) is a Somali-born American author, former member of the Dutch Parliament, and research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. After identifying as an atheist for nearly two decades, she publicly announced her conversion to Christianity in November 2023.[1] Her husband, historian Niall Ferguson, has said that he, Hirsi Ali, and their two sons were baptized together that September.[2]
Last week, in an essay titled “What Mohamed Atta Was Trying to Tell Us,” Hirsi Ali forcefully confronted the question the West has evaded for twenty-five years: What did we fundamentally misunderstand about 9/11?[3]
Her larger warning is that Islamism cannot be understood merely as a terrorist movement measured by bombs, hijackings, and body counts. Rather, she argues, it is a theological, political, and long-term civilizational project seeking to reorder Western law, government, education, culture, and institutions according to Islamic norms.
Stated plainly, terrorism is merely one tactic employed by militant Islamists; their ultimate objective, Hirsi Ali argues, is far more expansive—the ideological transformation and political subjugation of Western civilization.
Western leaders, she contends, have persisted in interpreting Islamic theology through the categories of secular humanism, reducing a theological and civilizational struggle to the presumed consequences of poverty, political grievance, humiliation, social alienation, or mental illness.
George W. Bush’s presidency (2001–2009) provides a revealing example of that approach. The administration presented freedom, democracy, economic opportunity, and the rule of law as the foundation for peace and stability throughout the Middle East.
Afghanistan, Americans were assured, could become a stronghold of representative government, economic opportunity, religious tolerance, and women’s rights. The Bush administration explicitly connected the nation’s future to democracy, commerce, liberty, the rule of law, and equality for women.[4] The governing assumption appeared to be that democratic institutions and capitalist prosperity could accomplish what military victory alone could not: diminish religious fanaticism and turn enemies into allies.
Theologian Peter Leithart exposed what he saw as the deeper assumption beneath that optimism. Modern liberalism, he argued, has undertaken a “grand project” to abolish the very category of enmity—reimagining an enemy as merely an outsider, stranger, or member of an out-group who has not yet been persuaded, prospered, or properly assimilated.
With characteristic bite, Leithart wrote: “Put a McDonald’s and a Gap in every major Middle Eastern city, and terrorism will drown in a wave of Happy Meals.”[5]
Even after September 11, the Madrid and London bombings, October 7, 2023, and continuing terrorism throughout the Middle East, Western leaders still wrestle with the question Leithart raised: Can consumer culture, rising living standards, and access to markets dissolve theological hatred and civilizational conflict?
Happy Meals cannot overcome holy war. Commerce may produce prosperity, democracy may establish elections, and military power may remove a regime, but none can expose false theology, conquer spiritual darkness, or transform the human heart. The West attempted to answer a theological and civilizational enemy with ballots, markets, and consumer goods—and then wondered why the enemy remained.
Consequently, Hirsi Ali argues, the West has become proficient at finding and killing terrorists while remaining dangerously inattentive to the theology, institutions, funding networks, and civilizational ambitions that produce, sustain, and continually replace them.
“Twenty-five years later, ignorance is no longer a tenable excuse,” Hirsi Ali writes. Jihadists must be judged not by their ethnicity or merely by the Muslim name, but by what they believe, preach, finance, and do.
Any movement that sanctifies the murder of innocent people, glorifies suicide attacks as martyrdom, spreads antisemitism, persecutes converts, subordinates women, and seeks to replace constitutional liberty with coercive religious rule is not merely mistaken or misunderstood. It is morally evil in its theology, murderous in its methods, and totalitarian in its ambition. Terrorism is one of its weapons, but the subjugation of society is its larger objective.
Whatever may be said of peaceful Muslims, militant Islamism must not be placed beyond scrutiny simply because it presents itself in religious terms. The determining question is what its leaders teach, who finances its institutions, which organizations it supports, whether it condemns terrorism and antisemitism without qualification, and whether it accepts the supremacy of America’s constitutional order.
Throughout much of early American history and into the early 20th century, American missionaries carried the Gospel of Jesus Christ throughout the world. In the Christian understanding presented here, America’s greatest export was not democratic capitalism, consumer culture, or military power, but the Gospel, carried worldwide by missionaries armed with the Word of God.
America’s military can disarm a roadside improvised explosive device and destroy the terrorist who planted it, but neither bombs nor bullets can defeat the militant theology that inspired him. Government may restrain evil, armies may defeat terrorist organizations, and the law may punish the guilty—but only the Gospel can expose the lie, redeem the sinner, and transform the human soul.
Militant Islamism must therefore be confronted on three fronts: militarily, where it employs violence; constitutionally, where it seeks political domination; and spiritually, where it advances a theology incompatible with the Gospel. Military power may restrain violence, and constitutional vigilance may preserve liberty—but only Jesus Christ, the Son of God and Lord of Life, can redeem the sinner, transform the human heart, and make all things new.
Will a Gideon or Rahab please stand.
David Lane
American Renewal Project
[2] Ferguson described the family’s baptism in an interview reported by The Australian.
[3] Ayaan Hirsi Ali, “What Mohamed Atta Was Trying to Tell Us,” Tablet Magazine, September 9, 2026.
[4] George W. Bush White House Archives: Rights and Aspirations of the People of Afghanistan.
[5] Peter Leithart, “Enmity”.
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