CAPITOL IDEAS: Christian Fall, Muslim Rise
Bethell, Tom
CAPITOL IDEAS Tom Bethell Christian Fall, Muslim Rise F ORA LONG TIME I TRIED TO AVOID thinking about Lebanon. It seemed too marginal, not to mention too complicated. Its government, more...
...He is often quoted as saying that when people stop believing in God "they don't believe in nothing...
...One could say that wealth makes materialists of us all...
...today it is less than half that...
...Diplomacy triumphs over conviction...
...Sustaining a population requires each woman on average to bear 2.1 children...
...A similar pattern holds across the Middle East, where the Christian downfall has been dramatic...
...The Muslims seem unable to achieve one of the most basic features of Western civilization-the rule of law...
...Increasingly, however, they are venues for music festivals...
...A likely ingredient in the Christian decline is increased material prosperity, which turns minds and hearts toward the things of this world...
...What's wrong with, say, secular humanism filling the moral vacuum...
...In The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam (1997) Bat Ye'Or wrote that 13 percent of the Middle East was Christian a century ago...
...OCTOBER 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 51...
...Why does he think the Christian doctrine is irreplaceable...
...A RECENT STUDY SHOWED that the Catholic Church in" Britain" is" facing its greatest, threat...
...A likely ingredient in the Christian decline is increased material prosperity, which turns minds and hearts toward the things of this world...
...The rest have been converted into mosques or cultural centers or have been abandoned...
...Bishops have lost all authority and few listen to their public comments, which almost always deal with material (not spiritual) concerns...
...In earlier centuries such exercises in egotism were smothered at birth...
...The strong rule by fear, force, and power replace law and consent, and property is insecure...
...SO THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 2006 TOM BETHELL How to explain this decline...
...It's an important question, deserving a full response...
...A material advance in the Middle East comparable to that of Western Europe possibly would undermine Islam...
...The faith is withering away...
...But no one has been able to find that famous remark in all his copious writings...
...The Jesuits turned to liberation theology, and many have also fallen under the homosexual spell...
...Into the void are coming Islam and Muslims," Daniel Pipes wrote in the New York Sun two years ago...
...As for those who imagine that the Christian legacy is one of imperialism, racism, and inquisition, and we are better off without it-legions on the left do believe t h a t - t h e y will have to start thinking about what will replace it...
...If faith collapses, civilization goes with it...
...But why has it not already happened...
...By one estimate, it was once over 70 percent Christian...
...His diatribes were influential not because they were cogent but because they were daring...
...But that has long been a hallmark of government in the Arab world...
...It is a country where Christianity is on the wane...
...Its membership is m terminal decline," much of it recent...
...Should current population trends continue and immigration cease, the EU population of 375 million could fall to 275 million by 2075...
...The English writer G.K...
...Writing after the suicide attacks on the London Underground last year, the British historian Niall Ferguson drew attention to Chesterton's comment (and misquotation) and added that the "moral vacuum" left by de-Christianization seemed to be creating a "soft target for the religious fanaticism of others...
...Until they are transformed into mosques, that is...
...Lebanon is a microcosm, and an object lesson...
...Somehow, it degenerated into a place where the most ruthless could prevail by force, and maybe govern after a fashion...
...Its government, more notional than real, enjoys little more than the "trappings of sovereignty," as Fouad Ajami recently wrote...
...Enfeebled bishops, selected precisely for their feebleness, preside over dwindling flocks...
...And Islam's spiritual leaders have not lost the faith, defective though it is in key areas...
...What Henry VIII persecuted the modern world simply ignores...
...Now there are about 20, and they are mostly empty...
...He foresaw a time when Europe's "grand cathedrals will appear as vestiges of a prior civilization...
...The Washington Post reported a few years ago that Lebanon has not conducted a census for about 50 years "out of concern that the evidence of Christian decline and Shi'ite Muslim advancement might fuel sectarian tension...
...In some ways Muslims are actually more respectful of Christianity than the Church's internal foes...
...Those old cathedrals are still maintained-even admired as works of art...
...Augustine was born and died...
...Just at the most basic level of demography, however, the secular-humanist option is not working...
...Whoever seizes power can never relax the use or threat of force, lest he be overthrown by superior force...
...Nothing less than a book-length response would suffice...
...He was thought profound merely because he had disturbed the peace...
...As Christianity falters, Islam is robust, assertive and ambitious...
...Meanwhile, the Church of England has devolved into a museum...
...Tom Bethell is a senior editor of The American Spectator and author of the new book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science (Regnery Publishing...
...T HE MOST COMMON SECULAR RESPONSE t o all this is to say: What was so great about Christianity...
...All the work was being done for them by critics, reformers, apostates, defectors...
...He did write something similar-that your "hard-shelled materialists [are] all balanced on the very edge of bel i e f - o f belief in almost anything...
...And the attempt to live without any faith at all is, I believe, impossible...
...since the _9 lk Reformation...
...Whittaker Chambers is worth reading on these issues, even though Islam was still dormant when he wrote Witness...
...In droves, Western intellectuals wanted to believe that they could safely defy the parson--ignore a creator perceived as more tyrannical than loving...
...But why hasn't there been an equivalent decline in the United States...
...A succession of popes has failed to mount any effective response...
...Friedrich Nietzsche, the son of a Lutheran pastor, composed his nonsensical but influential work The Antichrist (better translated as "The Anti-Christian," as Walter Kaufmann noted), and proclaimed the death of God in a country still nominally Christian...
...Chesterton feared that if Christianity ever began to disappear, "superstition would drown out all your old rationalism and skepticism...
...The attempt to reconstruct faith without God produced Communism, he wrote...
...Rome slumbers on, imagining that English Catholics must above all repair the breach with Canterbury, and that the way to do so is to stand for as little as possible...
...As for the Church of England's Episcopalian equivalent in the U.S., it suggests nothing so much as a wounded animal beset by carnivores...
...The Muslims of the Arab world, in contrast, have been unable to achieve anything beyond rudimentary levels of development...
...A territory more than a nation, it is a land of private militias, checkpoints, autonomous regions, and assassinations...
...The decline may be greater than that...
...Some are already doing so...
...The archbishop says Mass for a remnant of 20 people...
...Plainly, the rise of Islam in Europe is directly related to the fall of Christianity...
...But here are a few thoughts...
...Christianity has been under constant attack since the time of the Enlightenment and the attacks have come from within...
...In 1958, there were more than 700 churches in the country where St...
...In recent decades, mullahs and imams have hardly needed to say a word against Christianity...
...Furthermore, birth rates are not lower than they already are (in France and Britain, for example, they are noticeably above the EU average) because Muslim immigrants to those countries are having more children than fallen-away Christians...
...Something similar is happening, although more slowly, in Europe...
...Shi'ite Muslims alone probably outnumber Lebanese Christians (mostly Maronite...
...In the European Union, Daniel Pipes wrote, "the overall rate is one-third short, at 1.5 and falling...
...The Catholic Archbishop of Algeria, interviewed recently by the New York Times, described "the ebbing of Christianity from North Africa's shores as Islam spreads across Europe...
...One blogger responded to Niall Ferguson: "I don't get it...
...So they disparaged the "wishful thinking" of believers, and in so doing imputed their own mindset to the faithful remnant...
...There is no sign that the old pope, John Paul II, paid attention to the problem...
...And they have remained largely frozen in a premedieval past...
...but in anything...
...Today that figure may be as low as 2 percent...
...Benedict XVI understands that Catholicism is in trouble in Europe, but has not yet shown that he has the courage to do anything about it...
...CAPITOL IDEAS Tom Bethell Christian Fall, Muslim Rise F ORA LONG TIME I TRIED TO AVOID thinking about Lebanon...
Vol. 39 • October 2006 • No. 8
