The Fate of the West

Published on FrontPage Magazine

By Enza Ferreri



Either the West Will Become Christian Again or It Will Become Muslim


It's all very simple. We can't fight Islam in the West without fighting the enablers of Islam in the West, namely the Leftists.

And, since the Left has many different and separate aspects, we have to fight against each one of them. Secularism, environmentalism, global warming alarmism, homosexualism, militant feminism, sexual relativism, multiculturalism, anti-Christianity, Islamophilia, post-nationalism, internationalism are just as important targets to attack as Marxist economics, the expropriation of the capitalist class (or, in its modern reincarnation, high taxation and welfare state, aka redistribution of wealth), and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Neglecting any of these fronts is like fighting a war leaving a battleground to the enemy, like fighting on the Western front and leaving totally undefended the Eastern one.

Secularism and atheism are certainly the first lines of important wars.

A secularist West will always lose to Islam, because it will have enough compassion, tolerance and self-restraint from violence that are the remnants of its Christian heritage, but it will have lost the ideals, the passion and certainty of fighting for a just cause that were once part of Christianity and have disappeared with its erosion.

Two quotes here serve as epigrams. Robert Spencer wrote in his great work Religion of Peace? Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn't: “People who are ashamed of their own culture will not defend it.” And Dennis Prager said during one of his radio broadcasts: “Only good religion can counter bad religion.”

Some people claim that there won't be a religious revival in Europe because we are past believing in God. That this is not true can be seen by the high - and increasing – number of Westerners who convert to Islam. Many of them give as a reason for their conversion the need for absolutes, boundaries and well-defined status.

A journalist writing for The Spectator on this subject explained why she is Catholic:

But above all, I like the moral certainties. I don’t mind the dogma one bit. I would rather dogma and impossible ideals than confusion and compromise. In that sense, I do identify with those who choose Islam over the way of no faith, or a seemingly uncertain faith, like the woolly old C of E.

William Kilpatrick, in Christianity, Islam, and Atheism: The Struggle for the Soul of the West – a book I thoroughly recommend reading -, writes:

Brian Young's friends said he was troubled by the decadence of Western society. David Courtrailler's lawyer said, “For David, Islam ordered his life.” These are the sorts of reasons ordinary converts to Islam give. A common refrain from converts is that Islam provides a complete plan for life in contrast to the ruleless and clueless life offered by secular society. As Mary Fallot, a young French convert, explains, “Islam demands a closeness to God. Islam is simpler, more rigorous, and it's easier because it is explicit. I was looking for a framework; man needs rules and behavior to follow. Christianity did not give me the same reference points.” If you look at the convert testimonials on Muslim websites, they echo this refrain: Islam brings “peace”, “order”, “discipline”, and a way of life that Christianity and other religions fail to offer.

Human beings will never be past the need for believing in something bigger than themselves, because that need is part of the human mind.

Today the Christian religion is being replaced by the worship of the Goddess earth, New Age beliefs, the cult of celebrities (not coincidentally sometimes called "idols"), a blind faith in science, in chance as the creator and motor of the universe and in the absence of God.

And, last but not least, by Islam, which is increasingly filling the vacuum left by Christianity.

It is not surprising that Western people who feel a spiritual need may embrace Islam more easily than Christianity, when the latter has been the butt of constant attacks, denigrations and ridicule for a very long time, increasing since the 1960s, while the former is continually - albeit seriously mistakenly - praised as a religion of peace, tolerance and great wisdom.

Christian clergy is often criticized, sometimes rightly and sometimes not. But we tend to forget that clergymen are human beings, with all their imperfections. They too have been subjected to many decades of Leftist indoctrination and brainwashing. Even they, by the mere fact of living in this society, have been influenced by its insanity.

This applies to admitting homosexuals to priesthood and letting them work with young boys in the misguided hope of helping them overcome their pathology, as well as to displaying an extreme naivety towards Islam and its supremacist, violent nature.

We can expect guidance from our leaders, yes, but rather than castigating them we should make the first steps.

A clear direction was given by Cardinal Giacomo Biffi, Archbishop of Bologna, Italy.

As early as 30 September 2000, before 9/11, when very few in the West even thought of worrying about Islam, he delivered a very forward-looking speech, which included this premonition:

In an interview ten years ago, I was asked with great candor and with enviable optimism: “Are You among those who believe that Europe will either be Christian or cease to exist?”. I think my answer then may well serve to conclude my speech today.

I think – I said – that either Europe will become Christian again or it will become Muslim. What I see without future is the “culture of nothing”, of freedom without limits and without content, of skepticism boasted as intellectual achievement, which seems to be the attitude largely dominant among European peoples, all more or less rich of means and poor of truths. This “culture of nothingness” (sustained by hedonism and libertarian insatiability) will not be able to withstand the ideological onslaught of Islam, which will not be missing: only the rediscovery of the Christian event as the only salvation for man – and therefore only a strong resurrection of the ancient soul of Europe – will offer a different outcome to this inevitable confrontation.

Unfortunately, neither “secularists” nor “Catholics” seem to have so far realized the tragedy that is looming. “Secularists”, opposing the Church in every way, do not realize that they are fighting against the strongest inspiration and the most effective defense of Western civilization and its values of rationality and freedom: they might realize it too late.

An effect of the decline of Christian faith in Europe has been the strong decrease in birth rates, that are now below the population replacement level (for the indigenous, as the replacing – and then some - is done by Muslims). Why have babies when you feel that you don’t have anything valuable to pass on to them?

I remember a time when my friends and contemporaries of child-bearing age - but childless - were saying to me things to the effect that there was no point – indeed it was a crime to engage - in bringing people into this terrible world. This is the talk of faithless despair, no hope in this or another world, lack of belief.

Militant atheists à la Richard Dawkins have not really given enough thought to the long-term consequences of their ideas, which we are beginning to see.

And of which we are reminded whenever, for example, we read in the news of doctors and missionaries who die of Ebola while assisting affected patients for Christian charities. Not many atheist charities are involved in that work.

Right to Bear Arms and Secular State

Europeans don't generally understand that many things that Americans do have the purpose of protecting the individual from the state, whereas the inhabitants of the Old Continent think that they are done for different reasons.

Two of the most illustrative and important cases of this misunderstanding are the right to bear arms and the secular state.

Europeans usually think that the US Constitution's right to bear arms has to do with individual protection from criminality and violence from other individuals. In reality, its main goal is to protect the citizen from the power of the state.

Without this constitutionally-enshrined right only the state, through the armed forces and the police, would be be authorized to have the use of arms, and this is a huge source of power and control.

It's reminiscent of the origin of the expression 'crossing the Rubicon'. The Rubicon is a river in Northern Italy which is sufficiently distant from Rome to have been elected by the ancient Roman Republic as the safe boundary, the defining line which nobody could cross with an army. The Romans knew only too well that weapons are a great source of power.

You must have an enormous trust in a government to allow it to be the only entity to be permitted to carry arms.

In my second example, Europeans in their majority believe that the secular state serves the purpose to protect the state from the power of the Church, whereas the opposite is true: the separation between Church and state has the role of protecting the Church from the power of the state.

Intolerant Secularists

People like Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion (Amazon USA) , (Amazon UK) , and Christopher Hitchens, who wrote God Is Not Great (Amazon USA) , (Amazon UK) , et al, when attacking “religion”, play on various ambiguities. They create ambiguities in their choice of terms and then these ambiguities are convenient for them.

The first instance of ambiguity is the use of the term “religion”. It puts together all sorts of people and doctrines which may have very little in common.

To give an analogy, the flat earth theory is undoubtedly a theory of physics. It says something about the earth and, by extension, is a cosmology theory because the universe in which a flat earth exists would be a different universe from ours. It is scientific because it can be tested and disproved, as indeed it has.

Now, if I wanted to criticize scientific physics, I could bundle together the flat earth theory with Newton’s classical mechanics and Einstein’s relativity theory, and say about the former things which are obviously not true about the two latter.

When Dawkins and company attack “religion”, they bundle together Muslim suicide bombers (who are among the most hated figures of our times) with Catholic and other Christian missionaries who risk disease to help the poor in African and other Third World countries.

But, from their viewpoint, it’s a good ploy. If you are not interested in truth and intellectual honesty but only in scoring points (political and non), you can use generic terms which are obviously ambiguous and create confusion by mixing “il sacro e il profano” (“chalk and cheese”). Then, by attacking the obviously bad, you have achieved the effect of also attacking the obvioulsy good in the process. And if you’re good at it, it can be as in a magic trick: nobody noticed where the card, or in this case the truth, disappeared or indeed if it did disapper at all.

Men of science like Dawkins should know that, as in science different theories redefine the concepts they use (Newtonian time and space are not the same as Einsteinian time and space), so in religion the same is true: different doctrines have different concepts of God, and they may have very little in common.

In short, you cannot criticize “religion” meaningfully, especially by extending bad aspects of terrible religions to other religions which are fundamentally good.

Another ambiguity that they employ is when they say “religion is declining in the West” or something to that effect. In that case, what they mean is clearly “Christianity” and not “religion”, given that other religions professed by ethnic minorities who live in the West do not show sign of decline.

Here they got it wrong again. Christianity still permeates Western life and way of thinking profoundly. We are all Christian, as Oriana Fallaci says. I am an atheist Christian as she is, and I’m borrowing her expression because I think it explains well the condition of our “secular” societies too.

These, and we ourselves, have been shaped by two millennia of Christian thinking, luckily. An article by John Gray on secular fundamentalists in The Guardian seems to agree with this when he says that Dawkins & co. are really expressions of the Christian background from which they derive (and he does not even defend Christianity, he just attacks Dawkins and his gang). He believes that the very idea of history as progress is Christian.

I don’t know where we would be without this profound Christian influence. Britain, which is perhaps the least Christian country in Western Europe (perhaps in the West) has also some of the greatest drugs and alcohol problems, highest level of teenager pregnancy, highest rate of illegitimate births, biggest problem of an underclass, highest crime rate, highest level of debt among the population, highest spread of obesity.

This is where abandoning our Christian roots would lead: forgetting self-discipline and only thinking of immediate self-gratification have these effects. Which is also part of the reason why, whereas it may be possible for an individual to be atheist, I don’t think that it is apossible for a society to be atheist.

When Dawkins and people of his ilk say something like “hey, look, we are a secular society now and we are fine” or something similar, they systematically forget, overlook or disregard the many, profound, pervasive ways in which many centuries of Christianity have influenced our society and still do. I can see it in myself, how my Christian upbringing still has a (mostly beneficial) effect on me.

Where the intolerant secularists also got it wrong is in putting science and religion against each other. They think that they are incompatible, whereas in fact they occupy different domains, and there is no conflict or contradiction. In fact, you may say that the problems arise when one of them tries to occupy the other’s territory, and attributes to itself a role and capability which it does not possess.

Dawkins is a good case in point. When he writes as a modern evolutionary and genetic theorist and as a zoologist, he is fine and indeed very interesting. When he writes as a self-proclaimed philosopher and a “religion basher”, he writes nonsense.

Something similar happens to science when it usurps a role which is not its own. Dawkins is a good metaphor for this arrogance and its consequences: when he tries to attributes to both himself and science a role which they do not have and a power which they do not possess, they get it all wrong. Basically, biology is his profession, and philosophy of religion is his fun activity, his hobby. I would call him a religion basher by hobby. He definitely should stick to his profession, because he is rubbish at his hobby.

We have to be careful that science does not overstep its domain and role, because many bad things may easily follow from this.

Positivism was a 19th century philosophy which overstressed the power and importance of science. The French positivist sociologist August Comte thought that humanity goes through three stages: "the Theological, or fictitious; the Metaphysical, or abstract; and the Scientific, or positive."

Gray's article does not mention him but mentions the anthropologist James George Frazer instead, who slightly altered and popularized Comte’s theories His three stages are: primitive magic; religion; and science.

All this leads to scientism, the belief that the scientific method can be applied to everything and that science is the most authoritative and valuable learning activity to the exclusion of other viewpoints.

We can easily give too much power to science, as the case of animal experimentation clearly and tragically shows. Most people in the West probably are morally, instinctively opposed to vivisection, but they just accept it because “scientists say that it’s necessary” without even trying to question whether that statement by scientists is true or not.

Technocracy, government by scientists and technical experts, is just as bad as any other form of control by an elite.