"When Europe Slept"

Dear Lon,
Since I have read 4 of the essays in those two FIRST THINGS you sent me a while back, I’d be happy to read more if you care to send them. Also, a while back I mentioned Phillip Jenkins to you, the scholar from Penn State who has become the chief spokesman for the demographics of the Christian Church—where the Faith is leaving from and where it is going to and what is likely to take its place in Europe. I went on to buy two of Jenkins books, The Next Generation: the Coming of Global Christianity and The Lost History of Christianity, or how the thousand year reign of the religion in the Middle East came to an end. That is the topic in another great book that I read 2 years ago, From the Holy Mountain by William Dalrymple, which, some time or other you ought to read, for it tracks where Christianity was so strong at first, and so dominant, only to be gradually pushed out of the region by Islam, although it still hangs on here and there, but the great majority of the Christians have gone elsewhere.
Clearly, the glory days of the Faith in that region, the region of its birth, is over with, just as the same eclipsing of the Faith is likely to happen in Europe by mid-century as Muslim immigrants are reproducing at a rate that will overwhelm the ‘native’ population of white Europeans. Muslim workers went there after WW II to help build a new Europe so devastated by the war. The Natives thought they would go back home after a while, but they stayed and that phenomena is going to have unexpected consequences. R.J. Neuhaus himself mentions Muslim immigration in his essay on “Secularizations,” stating that some observers already “depict Europe as a dying continent; dying culturally, spiritually, and, perhaps most decisively, demographically.” Like many others I am familiar with, he thinks Europeans may have reached the ‘point of no return,” and that their numbers will stay well below the Muslim’s “replacement level.” Islamic demographic dominance is like a boulder rolling down hill. It is not a question of IF, but of WHEN. Ponder what that might mean for the civilization of Old Europe, the famous buildings, great Art, churches, and other unique things and places created through the Christian centuries, not to mention the Greek and Roman civilization that went before Christian Culture. But by mid-century the Vatican will have been moved from Rome to some place in Africa, where the church, both Fundamentalist Protestant and Catholic, are flourishing and growing at a fast pace. The new home base for Christianity will be in the Southern Hemisphere; because that is the direction the faith is traveling right now. Europe is a secular state but that won’t last much longer.
Another essay that I responded to was “While Europe Slept,” by some professor from the University of Chicago. It covered things I have thought about too, over the years, especially after I left the church. Two questions hang in the air considering a post-Christian world. First, I was certain I could but I wondered about others being able to live peacefully and constructively sans an institutional support system and its moral and ethical guidelines. Is multiculturalism a substitute principle for guidance? The professor doesn’t think so and neither do I. He also argues that without the Church and what it provides, anarchy and nihilism would be the results—because then all things would be permitted. . I am not persuaded by this argument, but then, I am no measure against the ordinary citizen. They may need to have all the rules and regulations spelled out very clearly. Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Camus, and others, all felt we were headed toward nihilism if God was dead, as Nietzsche had written, or if his church dissolved under secular and material pressures. Personally I think we have innate equilibrium that would serve us well if people could tap into it, but that would take a certain amount of inner work and modern man would rather take and pill and watch American Idol.
Secondly, if we are no longer rooted in Christian Culture does that mean we have no access to transcendence? Again, I can answer in the affirmative; it is possible because it is built into out make-up, our psyche. But at the same time I realize modern individualism may not be able to sustain a purely secular world with a total absence of a religious principle and a spiritual aspiration. Left to his own devices the professor says the will to power will override everything else. The universe of human interactions would tend to be self-serving, wolfish, and selfish, where might makes right, and the extreme form of that is indeed nihilism.
So what do you think Lon?
Saturday morning. I got a call from Brodek this morning, a bad connection so I probably missed if he called you too or not. But he fell out of his golf cart playing at Meadowbrook and broke his shoulder and as a consequence he’ll be out of commission probably till next year sometime. They don’t plan to operate.