Losing Our Religion

We won't know what we had until it is gone.

I was sort of talking smack about the UK this morning, but the more I thought about it, that same argument applies not only to the UK but to all of Europe as well – and it is about two suit sizes from fitting the US like a bespoke Saville Row suit.

When I think about Europe and Great Britain, I see city-states, kingdoms, and countries that changed the shape of the entire globe and essentially created the modern world. Global domination by an island country smaller in land area than Louisiana (England is only 50,337 square miles, Louisiana is 51,840) is something almost inconceivable today, yet it happened. European countries colonized not only North America, but most of the world.

I have been doing a lot of research on crime, especially crimes that are directly related to attacks on Christians and Jews, either directly on people or on churches and synagogues, looking for something that differentiates these attacks from other forms of violence.

To paraphrase R.E.M, it appears to be that we are losing our religion.

Critical thinkers in America could well draw comparisons and parallels between stories in the Hebrew Scriptures and Europe’s reduced religiosity during the late 19th early century leading up to the catastrophe of World War I – and subsiding for a time during WWII. The decline was forestalled somewhat by WWII and the absolute inhumanity of the Nazis, but somewhat surprisingly, it did not take very long for the abandonment of religion and Jew-hate to return, even after the horrific atrocities of the Holocaust became common knowledge.

Noted economist F. A. Hayek chronicled in real time how Europeans went from worshipping God to worshipping the collectivism of the nation-state prior to WWI and when that failed, they did not return to God, they turned to even darker forms of idolatry (statolatry as Ludwig Von Mises called it) communism and fascism.

If you pay attention to who the American Democrats revere among their members, and what those members are saying, you can see the same pattern as Hayek did.

A decade or so ago, historian Walter Russell Mead noted that the declines in religion in Europe, primarily Christianity, are threefold and are being brought about by:

• The increasing influences over time of the migrating populations from the former communist bloc counties.

• The increasing impact of social liberalism/libertine beliefs (a libertine is a person who is unrestrained by convention or morality).

• The fact that agnosticism is truly a temporary condition.

With respect to the increased influences of the migrating populations of the former communist counties, this demographic infiltration of members of former socialist/Marxist/communist societies cannot be discounted as a driving factor. One of the major features of these authoritarian governments was the forced secularization of their societies and the replacement of God by government – and by extension, by man. As they spread into Western Europe, those secularist beliefs are also spreading.

Increasing social liberalism – bordering on libertine behavior – is causing disrespect for rules and the institutions that are built on them. Social liberalism preaches the same sort of “man is God” irreligious perspective as communism but rejects that there is any governance other than what man’s desires are at any given point in time.

Societal agnosticism is in fact, a temporary condition. There is an old saying that if you believe in nothing, you will believe anything. Such is true for “agnostics”. How many times do we see the non-religious flock to churches and pray to God in times of great distress? This lack of commitment to a belief system does however make Europe fertile ground for the supplanting of Christianity by Islam, something we are witnessing across the UK and the Continent due to extremely liberal migration controls. Weak beliefs will be replaced by stronger ones.

The ideals of communism and fascism are not as popular in Europe today as one might suppose; rather the people participate in the worship of a consumer utopia of sorts. Searching for a better term, all I can think of is something like economic nihilism and with a couple of notable exceptions, what we see across Europe is the loss the biological will to live. Going to the point that agnosticism never is permanent, American conservatives might say that Europeans are failing to reproduce themselves and are being visibly supplanted by Muslims who at least believe in God, even though Islamic radicalism is served as a side dish.

One would also not be wrong to say that their destruction is coming at their own invitation.

What seems clear is that the same growing differences in culture and religion we see in the UK and across Europe will play a significant part in the future of America.

Far from being just my opinion, there are mounds of statistical and social evidence that the very foundations of Western civilization and those of America are eroding and those undeniably parallel the decline of Christian beliefs.

If we allow what is washing up on the shores of England to infiltrate America, for the first time in our history, our grandchildren will be faced with a world where, in the same way the UK and Europe are in the process of reducing themselves to a historical footnote, America will surely follow, becoming just another an asterisk in the recorded history of free nations.