The Melancholy, Long, Withdrawing Roar

They’re turning chapels to mosques in England. The most recent issue of Newsweek contains a little vignette that illustrates far more about the Old Continent than its author realizes: In the little town of Clitheroe, only 300 strong, there’s been quite a row on the question of what to do with the town’s abandoned Methodist chapel. After months of discussion, the town council finally voted in December to convert the beautiful, if somewhat forlorn chapel into a Muslim mosque, pleasing the small but growing Muslim proportion of the tiny town. According to Sheraz Arshad, a community leader, “Just because it looks like a church, there’s no reason why it can’t be used as a mosque.

No reason indeed. But if you ever wanted to see Europe, to walk the streets of Paris, or breathe the foggy air of Britain, I’d suggest you start making plans soon. The Europe we know will not linger; indeed, in many places it is already gone. Mohammed has overtaken George and Joseph in the annual popularity ranking of U.K. baby boy names, but England is actually doing well in comparison to Brussels. Mohammed almost doubles the second most popular name, Adam, in “the capital of Europe,” and just in case you were wondering, Ayoub, Rayan and Mehdi round out the top five.

According to that same Newsweek article, only 5% of Catholics attend church on Sunday, and in the Czech Republic it’s an even more dismal 3%. According to the British Christian Research group, practicing Muslims will outnumber practicing Christians in as little as two decades. Maybe the Europeans are taking a holiday from faith, you say, only to return when the time is right. Not likely. According to the Rand Corporation Across Europe’s latest report, the birthrate in every European Union member nation has plummeted to below two children per women. The birthrate required to maintain population levels? 2.1 children per woman. Europeans aren’t likely to return to faith, because Europeans are going the way of the dodo.

The Europe of the future will be older, more secular, and more Muslim. This is a fact. So how did this happen, and should we worry?

The late British historian Arnold Joseph Toynbee famously said that “civilizations die from suicide, not by murder,” and it’s no different in Europe’s case. There are three main reasons why Europe is killing itself: secularism, decline in birthrate, and a commitment to squeamish multiculturalism that saps any strength to face a challenge.

The secularization of Europe is abundantly clear. There are thousands of stories like the one about the little chapel in Clitheroe, and the statistics are brutal. Just 21% of Europeans say that religion is very important to them, says a 2005 European Values study. Contrast this with America’s 59%, according to a Pew Research study, and it’s pretty clear Europe has a problem. The Enlightenment, and the age of modernity has taken its toll on Europe. Indeed, Europe (France specifically) practically invented secularism, and is practicing it with devastating results. Not surprisingly, with the last vestiges of faith being scrubbed from European memory (witness the latest controversy over the British Airlines employee who was asked not to wear a cross necklace at work) Europeans are confused, despondent, and pessimistic. A Eurobarometer poll found that only 31% of Europeans believe that “life in general” will get better, only 17% thought that the economy would get better, and 48% thought that their employment situation would get better. A continent sapped of spiritualism is a continent sapped of vitality, and Europeans are deep in the slough of despond.

The decline in the European birthrate is similarly stark. In 2002, fifteen countries had birth rates below 1.3 children per woman, wrote the New York Times. The only European nation where zero population growth is even statistically possible was France. The large, loud Italian families of lore? Ciao. The Italian birth rate is 1.28 children per woman. The “Big Fat Greek family?” Gone. The birth rate is 1.34. Poland? 1.25. Lithuania? 1.20. Post-Christian Europe is committing suicide by condom, self-destruction by abortion. If you take immigration out of the picture, Europe will lose 88 million people by 2100 at current birth rate. And this birth dearth is hard to recover from, because the current lack of children will soon translate to a lack of adults. It’s a chilling cycle. Europe is older now than it’s ever been, and it’s just getting older.

Squeamish multi-culturalism makes this downward spiral difficult to arrest. Europe has lost the will to fight. Churchill’s “We will fight on the beaches,” has turned into “Kick us around, we won’t fight.” The civilizations that gave us William Wilberforce, John Paul II, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Churchill now give us spinelessness and relativism. This summer we watched as Islamic radicals, indignant at the disrespectful portrayals of the prophet Mohammed in a Danish newspaper, threw a weeks-long temper tantrum that left hundreds dead. The newspaper apologized, we were warned not to insult Muslims, and there the matter was left. Multi-culturalism has killed any sense of right and wrong, as the “Cartoon Intifada” proved. One side printed cartoons, the other side blew things up. Guess who had to apologize?

Demography is destiny, writes Mark Steyn in his wake-up call to the West; America Alone (appropriately subtitled The End of the World as We Know It), and the demography is ugly. The threat of an aging, welfare-dependent European population bumping heads with a young, vital and constantly aggrieved Muslim population ought to ring warning bells across the West. There’s no space here to detail all of what Islam believes about Christians and Jews, but suffice it to say, it’s not pretty. Koran quote: “And the tree and the rock will say ‘O Muslim, O servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’” Now obviously, not every Muslim believes in this kind of radicalized jihad, but think for a moment. If only 10% of Western Europe’s 12 million Muslims are radical (a conservative estimate), that means that 1.2 million European Muslims would rather live under sharia law than in a liberal democracy (sharia= head scarves, honor killings, subjugation of women, oppression of the foreign dhimmi, etc.) Imams in European mosques are preaching jihad against their own nations, and the young, angry Muslims are responding. In the words of Osama bin Laden “…when people see a strong horse, and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse…” European civilization is no longer the strong horse.

Europe is fading, and America must take note. The very same things that have ushered Europe into its long, slow slumber-death will face us someday soon. We will have to avoid Europe’s mistakes or say, with Matthew Arnold, “The Sea of Faith/ was once, too, at the full…” “But now I only hear/ its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.”