Broadening salvation’s scope weakened Western civilizational unity

Evidence

The contrary tendency appeals to every human instinct, but it also marks, for better or worse, a loosening of the cohesion of the Western world, an obscuring of its sense of separateness, and a blurring of the clear-cut line between the West and its neighbors. — R. W. Southern, Western Views of Islam in the Middle…, 440

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the shared theme of how defining an outside enemy maintains in-group cohesion, familiar from studies of moral panic and boundary maintenance.

Related

• The West’s apparent unity masks deep internal divisions (similarity 0.80)
• The medieval Christian canon about Islam survived even the breakup of European ideological unity (similarity 0.80)
• Western discourse reduces all Muslim societies to a single malevolent essence (similarity 0.79)
• The West is framed as having surpassed religion while Islam remains mired in it (similarity 0.79)
• Civilizational confidence asymmetry drives Muslim-Western conflict (similarity 0.79)
• A coherent internal image of Islam survived because it was internally consistent (similarity 0.79)
• Islam’s challenge helped forge western Europe’s collective identity as the West. (similarity 0.79)
• The Western canon on Islam outlived religious unity and the Reformation itself. (similarity 0.78)
• A self-serving religious canon outlived the power shifts that gave rise to it (similarity 0.78)
• Western ideological camps all reduce Islam to a scapegoat (similarity 0.78)
• Communism’s collapse left West and Islam as mutual perceived threats (similarity 0.78)