Column of the Day

Academic . . . long-winded . . . but spot-on: Is Europe Dying?

The demographics are unmistakable: Europe is dying. The wasting disease that has beset this once greatest of civilizations is not physical, however. It is a disease in the realm of the human spirit. David Hart, another theological analyst of contemporary history, calls it the disease of "metaphysical boredom"-boredom with the mystery, passion, and adventure of life itself. Europe, in Hart's image, is boring itself to death.

And in the process, it is allowing radicalized twenty-first century Muslims -- who think of their forebears' military defeats at Poitiers in 732, Lepanto in 1571, and Vienna in 1683 (as well as their expulsion from Spain in 1492), as temporary reversals en route to Islam's final triumph in Europe -- to imagine that the day of victory is not far off. Not because Europe will be conquered by an invading army marching under the Prophet's banners, but because Europe, having depopulated itself out of boredom and culturally disarmed itself in the process, will have handed the future over to those Islamic immigrants who will create what some scholars call "Eurabia" -- the European continent as a cultural and political extension of the Arab-Islamic world.

Should that happen, the irony would be unmistakable: the drama of atheistic humanism, emptying Europe of its soul, would have played itself out in the triumph of a thoroughly nonhumanistic theism.

. . . why should Americans care about the European future? I can think of three very good reasons.

The first involves pietas, an ancient Roman virtue that teaches us reverence and gratitude for those on whose shoulders we stand. . . . We have seen what historical amnesia about civilizational roots has done to Europe. Americans ought not want that to happen in the United States.

The second reason we can and must care has to do with the threat to American security posed by Europe's demographic meltdown. . . . Since 1970, which is not all that long ago, some 20 million (legal) Islamic immigrants -- the equivalent of three E.U. countries, Ireland, Belgium, and Denmark -- have settled in Europe. [This could well produce a] Europe increasingly influenced by, and perhaps even dominated by, militant Islamic populations, convinced that their long-delayed triumph in the European heartland is at hand.

The third reason why the "Europe problem" is ours as well as theirs has to do with the future of the democratic project, in the United States and indeed throughout the world. . . . To deny that Christianity had anything to do with the evolution of free, law-governed, and prosperous European societies is more than a question of falsifying the past; it is also a matter of creating a future in which moral truth has no role in governance, in the determination of public policy, in understandings of justice, and in the definition of that freedom which democracy is intended to embody.