How to deal with this? A Jewish midrash has it that the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah were violent and godless, given over to every sort of sexual depravity, and even killed their own children. Abraham preached against them. They would not change, but he would not stop. One day a stranger approached him and asked, “You began preaching here so long ago. Yet no one has listened to you. Why do you continue?” Abraham replied, “At first I spoke out to change them. Now I speak out so that they do not change me.”
Robert Reilly has worked in foreign policy, the military, and the arts. His most recent book is The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis.
