Some worldviews have a much longer cultural memory than others.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street with the point.

Earlier this month, British Indian author Sam and Rushdie was brutally attacked at an event in upstate New York.

Back in 1989, Rushdie's novel, The Satanic Verses, enraged Iran's Ayatollah,

and he issued a global kill order, a fatwa, on the author, his editors, and publishers.

Though Khomeini died later that year, fatwas are not revoked posthumously. So, Rushdie went into hiding,

appearing later only under heavy security. Eventually, many in the West forgot about it,

but Shia extremists did not. This tells us something about how differently the secular West

and radical Islam sees the world,

and how short our cultural memory is compared to theirs.

Still, at stake here is more than just a contest of memory.

In the Western world, we're secularized to think of religion as a privatized matter of preference.

So we underestimate the power that religious convictions really wield, including the power

that our own secular religious

convictions hold over our own hearts, minds, and culture in the West, all of which is an opportunity

for Christians to show and to live a better way, one that sees God, history, people, and the world

very differently. I'm John Stone Street.