The Rt. Rev. Michael Nazir-Ali, the Anglican bishop of Rochester, who is living under guard now for having spoken out against radical Islam in Britain, says:
"The real danger to Britain today is the spiritual and moral vacuum that has occurred for the last 40 or 50 years. When you have such a vacuum something will fill it."If people are not given a fresh way of understanding what it means to be a Christian and what it means to be a Christian-based society then something else may well take the place of all that we're used to and that could be Islam."
Pope Benedict has said something similar:
"The Muslims ... do not feel threatened by our Christian moral foundations, but by the cynicism of a secularized culture that denies its own foundations."
To paraphrase T.S. Eliot, if Europe will not have the Christian God, in time, it will learn to pay its respects to Allah.
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True. In 2002, when I was in the Netherlands on a story, I interviewed a criminologist about the stability of the Dutch population. Holland is almost entirely secular and liberal, yet prosperous and stable and bourgeois. Doesn't that suggest that religion is not required for a stable social order?
He said that it's too early to tell. You have to remember, he said, that there is a deep streak of Calvinist bourgeois propriety in the Dutch character. But we're beginning to see in the young, he said, a breakdown of the order that previous generations had internalized as part of their cultural inheritance. Having cut themselves off from the transcendent source of their moral order, they are starting to wither.
"I strongly suggest, GIAH, that you read some of Theodore Dalrymple's writing. Young Brits, both male and female, are drinking and fighting in an unhithero unheard of manner, because of the sheer hopelessness present in their society. I have friends who live there who attest to this most strongly."
Theodore Dalrymple's writings are exaggerated, to my mind, except with respect to Muslims. However, there does seem to be more violence and simple disrespect in the air than there was when I was young, although this doesn't show up on the statistics all that clearly.
Is this due to lack of religion? It certainly could be, if only because religion gives people something to keep them occupied, and something other than aimless wandering. My hunch is that there are all sorts of factors involved-
Cheap drink - some beer is now cheaper than water
Collapse of heavy indutry - people have nothing to tire them out, and no obvious way of expressing masculinity other than by fighting
Finance-sector-based economy - the richest members of scoiety share in a "chancer" attitude to life, and there is more obvious great wealth, encouraging envy, than in more manufacturing-based economies like Germany
Gun laws - people can beat each other up without anyone getting shot dead. I suspect that the availability of guns in the USA reduces low-level violence, bt that has to be weighed against the higher murder rate.
Did the Christians persecuted by the Soviets, or those under the Moslem yoke decry the systems of their persecutors because their careers were invested in the prosperity of their faith? Even you can't be ignorant enough to believe that. Then again...
First of all, the people I refer to are in no way persecuted by those by comprehensive, e.g. state, power. They might have to fear a few extremists. They aren't victims.
As for your query, I think you brush too lightly over the historical record of Christian passivity, rationalizations of waiting out the oppressor, cooption, outright collaboration, and submission in the name of some greater good. Have a close look at the record of the Polish bishops under Communism, the Russian Church, etc.
The heroic minority is always a small minority, and it isn't as identical with the alarmists and pessimists as you seem to believe.
However, there does seem to be more violence and simple disrespect in the air than there was when I was young, although this doesn't show up on the statistics all that clearly.
That sounds like the traditional class codes of conduct becoming more ambiguous, less stringently enforced by social pressure. And people motivated to exploit that.
"First of all, the people I refer to are in no way persecuted by those by comprehensive, e.g. state, power. They might have to fear a few extremists. They aren't victims."
Ah, but they are. It may not be persecution, and it may not even be "direct" action against them (yet), but when an elderly woman can't walk to the corner store without fear of being mugged or worse, or when you can't safely advise your children to go outside and play after dinner and "come home when the streetlights go on," then we are all victims of a collapsing culture. The more acute attacks of persecution and totalitarianism do not generally occur overnight. I think that what we are probably more likely heading for is a species of "soft totalitarianism."
"The heroic minority is always a small minority, and it isn't as identical with the alarmists and pessimists as you seem to believe."
I don't believe that. I do believe, however, that there always tends to be a certain amount of overlap between the groups.
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