When we are talking about the conflict between the West and radical Islam, do we have a clash of civilizations? Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton apparently does not think so. At the last Democratic presidential debate, she said she worried “that the rhetoric coming from Republicans, particularly Donald Trump, is sending a message to Muslims here . . . and around the world, that there is a clash of civilizations.”

The phrase “clash of civilizations” is important because it comes from the title of the book written by Harvard professor Samuel Huntington. Back in 1996, he wrote The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order and predicted the current conflict between Islam and the West.

In my book, A Biblical Point of View on Islam, I show how this clash of civilizations has had a profound impact not only on the war on terrorism but even on missions. In the past, countries that were closed to the gospel tended to be communist countries. Even so, there was still a significant amount of Christian growth in countries behind the Iron Curtain and Bamboo Curtain. Today many of the closed countries are Muslim countries where the gospel is prohibited and Christians are persecuted.

Samuel Huntington also predicted a growing conflict between western universalism and Muslim militancy. In other words, there is a political and ideological conflict between liberal western democracies and Muslim countries. He didn’t mean that all Muslims are militant or that all Muslim countries are militant. But there is certainly a clash between western values and Muslim values.

Does Hillary Clinton reject the ideas put forward by Samuel Huntington, or did she use the phrase and not even understand its significance? I doubt any moderator or interviewer would ask her this question, even though it is very important. We are in the midst of a major clash of civilizations, and the next president needs to understand this.