The Sexual Clash of Civilizations
Monday, November 14, 2005
Albert Mohler

In the aftermath of the fall of the Iron Curtain, prominent writer V. S. Naipaul declared the dawn of a "universal civilization." According to Naipaul's vision, the end of the Cold War was a signal that the entire planet was moving toward a single civilizational form that would transcend ethnic differences, ideological cleavages, and the fault lines that have separated cultures in the past.

As events were soon to demonstrate, this "universal civilization" did not come to pass. To the contrary, the fissures of our contemporary conflicts tend to fall precisely along civilizational lines. The great prophet of civilizational conflict is Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington, whose seminal 1996 book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, set the terms for a debate that, in our post 9/11 world, is still very much on the front burner.

Rejecting the idea of any comprehensive global civilization, Huntington argued that a clash between civilizations is the primary cause of conflict on the global scene today. While acknowledging that virtually all civilizations hold certain shared beliefs, Huntington argues that these beliefs are minimal and clearly insufficient to avoid deadly conflict. the rest