Donald Sensing has an interesting post (with interesting comments) on what the religious status of Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig is today:

…were the forced confessions of Islam by Centanni and Wiig valid?

I would not count them as valid because there is no reason to believe from the men’s reports that they experienced a religious change of heart. That is, the men’s confession did not spring from faith in Allah, it was a deed done from fear of their lives.

But, let us remember that the basis of Islam, indeed the very meaning of the word, is “submission,” not faith. There is no concept of original sin in Islam as there is in Christianity; indeed, while original sin is the conceptual glue that holds Christian doctrine together, it is entirely rejected in Islam. Christianity teaches that original sin cannot be remitted by any human works, only by the works of God, namely, Christ dying and resurrected. Hence, no deeds human beings can do can bring them to salvation. Thus, wrote St. Paul, “If you believe in your heart that Jesus was raised from the dead and confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, you will be saved.” Note the order: confession follows a change of heart, an affirmation of belief. Without the change of heart the confession’s utterance is of no value.

But in Islam, the confession’s utterance is unconnected to a change of heart. In fact, a change of heart is wholly irrelevant. The confession stands alone and its only point is that it is done, not that it is believed. The entire edifice of salvation theory in Islam is built on one thing alone: human submission to perform deeds ordered by Allah. Islam does not teach that Allah desires human beings to love him; they are commanded to obey.

There are a lot of interesting issues here, one of which is that some Christians would consider them insufficiently faithful, in that they valued their life over their faith (this assumes, of course, that both men were/are Christians–it certainly wouldn’t apply to me, since I have no faith other than provisional materialism). They might point out the relatively recent example of the young Christian woman at Columbine who refused to renounce her lord at gunpoint, and died.

As one WoC commenter points out, in the mentality of the enemy, we have once again showed ourselves to be weak and insufficiently devoted to our own beliefs (a microcosm of the larger societal problem of a soft multi-cultural post-modern Europe and much of America, unwilling to defend our own values). It was another demonstration of being, in Osama’s formulation, the “weak horse.” I’m not, of course, saying that the men had some sort of patriotic duty to take a bullet for the team–I certainly wouldn’t have, but it’s a symptom of just how difficult it will be to win this war, and persuade the enemy that they’ve lost.

More practically, in many places in the world, including Gaza and the West Bank, these two men are now apostates and liable to be killed under sharia law (remember the Christian convert in Afghanistan?), because they have since renounced their “conversions.” I wouldn’t go back to the Middle East if I were them. Their statements of encouragement for other reporters to continue to cover Gaza and “tell the story of the Palestinian people” (is that really the job of a so-called objective news reporter?) may sound nice to PC western ears, but it will have little effect in making the region safer for them, or others. Such words will also be interpreted as a sign of weakness by the enemy.

And I should say that I find tedious the argument that, because there were forced Christian conversions in history (e.g., during the Crusades and the Inquisition), Christians are hypocritical in criticizing this. One is history. The other is happening today. The point is that Christianity has largely evolved from a Middle Ages mentality. In the twenty-first century, Islam (or much, too much of Islam) remains firmly within it.