Dawson saw in democracy, socialism, and nationalism secular man’s search to rediscover his lost sense of the sacred.
Democracy bases its appeal on the sacredness of the People—the consecration of Folk; socialism on the sacredness of Labour—the consecration of work; and nationalism on the sacredness of the Fatherland—the consecration of place. These concepts still arouse a genuine religious emotion, though the emotion has no basis in transcendent religious values or sanctions. It is a religious emotion divorced from religious belief.133
Neoconservatism, which shares attributes with the Trotskyism that is one of its roots, is one of the new ideologies to have seized the imagination of those seeking a cause, with its “belief in struggle, the utopian notion of a moral society at the ‘end of history’ … and, most importantly, a Romantic belief in the power of ideas and morality to change the world.”134 The conversion of George W. Bush to neoconservatism was not without consequence.
Conservative scholar Robert Nisbet identified yet another new religion.
It is entirely possible that when the history of the twentieth century is finally written, the single most important social movement of the period will be judged to be environmentalism.… Environmentalism is now well on its way to becoming the third great wave of redemptive struggle in Western history, the first being Christianity, the second modern socialism.135
By sacrificing to save our planet, Mother Earth, Gaia, millions believe, we redeem ourselves and save our souls. This effort to recover a lost sense of the sacred is truly “religious emotion divorced from religious belief.”
Other new faiths have lately appeared: New Age, Wicca, Santería, Scientology. The occult is making a comeback. Young people flock to books and films about ghosts, vampires, and creatures from other planets in a seemingly endless search for the transcendent. Others seek community and a cause to believe in by joining with those of the same sexual orientation. In the eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson called patriotism the last refuge of a scoundrel. It is also the first refuge of many without faith. This, too, must ultimately prove futile for, as Belloc said, “self-worship is not enough.”136 Yet, the self, too, has become a deity, for, more than anything else today, individualism, hedonism, and materialism move Western man.
At the Oscar ceremony in 2009, comedian and atheist Bill Maher jibed that “our silly gods cost the world too greatly.”137
“He’s absolutely right,” replied columnist Rod Dreher, “our silly gods have cost the world too greatly.”138
The God of Hedonism and Sexual Indulgence … has given us a world of broken marriages, shattered families, the destruction of the traditional family, miserable deaths from AIDS, epidemic teen pregnancy, fatherless children and the social (even criminal) dysfunction that accompanies such, and a younger generation unmoored from sexual sanity.
The God of Money, which rules Wall Street and Washington, has delivered the world to a present and future calamity that will cause suffering not seen in at least a century.139
“The truth Maher may never recognize,” wrote Dreher, “is not that God has failed us, but that we have failed Him.”140
Time’s 1966 Easter cover raised the question, “Is God Dead?” Yet, the search for God never ends, and when traditional faiths fail to satisfy the searchers, new cults arise. Nine hundred cult members perished in the mass suicide in Jonestown, Guyana, where charismatic pastor Jim Jones had moved his flock from San Francisco. In the 1990s, members of the Heaven’s Gate cult in San Diego committed collective suicide to seek God in outer space. In 1993, two dozen children and scores of adult followers of David Koresh’s Branch Davidian sect perished or were murdered in the inferno that erupted when FBI agents ended their siege and attacked the compound outside Waco, Texas. However, the greatest rival to a fading Christianity may be an ancient rival.
In the year of Munich, 1938, while the world was preoccupied with a potential world war between fascism, Bolshevism, and democracy, Belloc, with startling clarity of vision, looked to a somnolent south and saw an ancient adversary stirring again. “It has always seemed to me possible, and even probable, that there would be a resurrection of Islam and that our sons or our grandsons would see the renewal of that tremendous struggle between the Christian culture and what has been for more than a thousand years its greatest opponent.”141
But how could a quiescent Islamic world imperil Western civilization? What did that backwater world have that modern Europe did not?
The tenacity of its belief in God.
In Islam there has been no such dissolution of ancestral doctrine … nothing corresponding to the universal breakup of religion in Europe. The whole spiritual strength of Islam is still present in the masses of Syria and Anatolia, of the East Asian mountains, of Arabia, Egypt and North Africa.
The final fruit of this tenacity, the second period of Islamic power, may be delayed, but I doubt whether it can be permanently postponed.142
These prophetic words were written seventy years ago, when most of the Islamic world was under the boot of Europe. Islam, said Belloc, is “the most formidable and persistent enemy which our civilization has had, and may at any moment become as large a menace in the future as it has been in the past.”143
Half a century after Belloc wrote, Harvard’s Samuel Huntington would be credited by Fouad Ajami with “remarkable prescience” for seeing in his Clash of Civilizations what Belloc saw in 1938:
The relations between Islam and Christianity … have often been stormy. Each has been the other’s Other. The twentieth-century conflict between liberal democracy and Marxist-Leninism is only a fleeting and superficial historical phenomenon compared to the continuing and deeply conflictual relation between Islam and Christianity.144
THE ISLAMIC ALTERNATIVE
As Belloc predicted, a hegemonic challenge to the secular West has arisen from a resurgent Islam that, with 1.57 billion adherents, has displaced Catholicism as the world’s largest religion.145 Islam is the majority faith of forty-eight nations, a fourth of all the member states of the United Nations. Muslims now constitute 5 percent of the total population of the European Union and an even higher share of the population of Britain, Spain, and Holland.146
It is myth that most Muslims are Arabs. Sixty percent of Muslims live in Asia. India’s Muslims, 150 million, comprise one-seventh of the nation’s population and are double the number of Muslims in Iran. Germany has more Muslims than does Lebanon. China, with 26 million, has more Muslims than Syria. Russia has more than Jordan and Libya combined. An increasingly Islamic world is inevitable.147
What makes Islam a candidate to reshape and replace the West?
First, with a more robust birth rate, its population is growing, while that of the West is declining. Second, immigration is bringing Islam back to Europe, five hundred years after its expulsion from Spain and three centuries after the retreat from the Balkans began. Millions have come to fill spaces left empty by aging, dying, and aborted Europeans. Third, as there was once a church militant, there is today a mosque militant.
Fourth, Islam gives its believers clear, cogent, and coherent answers to the great questions: Who created me? Why am I here? How do I live righteously? Has my God prepared a place for me? Islam’s “insistence on personal immortality, on the Unity and Infinite Majesty of God, on His Justice and Mercy, its insistence on the equality of human souls in the sight of their Creator—these are its strength,” wrote Belloc.148 Islam gives men a reason to live and a cause to die for. It is a fighting faith. What will secular, hedonistic Western man, who believes this is the only life he has, give his life up for? Where are the martyrs of materialism?
The Muslim world, like what is left of the Christian, is repelled by and recoils from a sybaritic West. Writes columnist Jeffrey Kuhner, “the greatest source of global anti-American hatred is our decadent popular culture.”149 Many Western writers and thinkers have shared Islam’s savage judgment of Western secular culture. Anglo-American culture, wrote English journali
st Malcolm Muggeridge, is “nihilistic in purpose, ethically and spiritually vacuous, and Gadarene in destination.”150
Lastly, Islam is a universal religion which claims it alone has the path to salvation and is destined to become the religion of all mankind. Islam divides the world into the lost and the elect, the Dar al-Harb and the Dar al-Islam. Missionaries who preach the Gospel in the Dar al-Islam and Muslims who convert to Christianity face a death sentence imposed by the state, clerical command, or the mob. To Muslims, all religions are not equal and it is blasphemy and apostasy to treat them equally. In the secular West, intolerance is a grievous sin—but it is also the mark of a rising faith.
When Abdul Rahman, 41, an Afghan who converted to Catholicism, tried to reclaim his daughters from the grandparents raising them, he was arrested and charged with apostasy. Rahman refused to recant. The prosecutor then demanded his death and the Afghan people supported that demand. Only by fleeing to Italy did Rahman survive.151 This was in the sixth year after the United States had liberated Afghanistan from the Taliban.
While the Islamic presence is growing in Europe, populist parties are mushrooming to halt immigration from the Islamic world and demand that Western values remain dominant. In November 2009, the Swiss voted a ban on the building of minarets and prayer towers in mosques.152 In 2010, surveys found that French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s proposed ban on the burka, the full body garment that some Muslim women wear, was supported by 70 percent of the French and majorities in Germany, Britain, Holland, and Italy.153
Yet among Europe’s elites there is a disposition to appease. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, says it “seems unavoidable” that Britain will have to “face up to the fact” that millions of Muslims do not relate to the British legal system. An approach that says, “there’s one law for everybody and that’s all there is to be said, that’s a bit of a danger.”154
British law should accommodate Sharia, Islamic religious law, beginning with the laws on marriage and finance, Archbishop Williams is saying, or Britain will face an endless culture war with its Muslims. “What we don’t want … is … a stand-off, where the law squares up to people’s consciences,” said Williams, “There’s a place for finding what would be a constructive accommodation with some aspects of Muslim law.”155 Muslims must not be forced to choose between “the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty or state loyalty.”156
Considering the ferocious resistance of secularists to accommodating Christians, the archbishop’s receptivity to accepting aspects of Islamic law into Britain tells us whom it is that the West truly fears, and understandably so. The fatwa issued by the Ayatollah Khomeini against novelist Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses and the riots around the world and bomb plots that followed publication of the Danish cartoons mocking Muhammad have concentrated the mind of Europe, as did the ritual murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a Muslim. The enraged murderer shot van Gogh twice, sat on him, cut his throat, then plunged a knife into his chest attached to a page of Koranic verses. In the new world we have entered, insulting Muslims is a more serious matter than insulting Christians.
Van Gogh, writes Flemish historian Paul Belien, “was a foul-mouthed, ugly man,” who “particularly liked to upset religious people. He began with insulting Christians, but as this was not considered particularly shocking in the tolerant Holland of the late 20th century he soon moved on to insulting Jews.”157
By the end of the century, having shocked enough Jews, van Gogh went after the new “sacred cow”of the multicultural elite: the Muslims.
When asked, after the murder of his friend Pim Fortuyn by an animal rights activist, whether he was afraid of being killed as well, van Gogh said, “No. Who would want to kill the village idiot?” As it turned out, his big mistake was that, unlike Christians and Jews, Muslims do not seem to be very tolerant of village idiots.158
DEAD FAITH AND DEAD PEOPLE
The last consequence of a dying Christianity is a dying people. Not one post-Christian nation has a birth rate sufficient to keep it alive. While there is a correlation between rising affluence and a falling birth rate, it is not absolute. Mormons have a robust birth rate, yet are among the most affluent Americans. But the correlation between a dying faith and a dying people seems to be absolute. Orthodox Jews have a high birth rate. Secular Jews are a vanishing tribe. Whites in California do not reproduce themselves. Whites in the Bible Belt have a healthy birth rate. Utah has the highest birth rate in the nation.
The death of European Christianity means the disappearance of the European tribe, a prospect visible in the demographic statistics of every Western nation. “A nation that kills its own children is a nation without hope,” said John Paul II.159 While all of Europe, save Ireland, Poland, and Portugal, have laws guaranteeing abortion on demand, Africa and the Islamic world protect the unborn.160 Europeans do not seem to understand what is happening to them and why, but editorialist Richard Miniter sees a causal connection between a dead faith and a dying continent.
The loss of faith in Europe is like an unseen black star that still has a tremendous gravitational pull.… They don’t understand why their culture is failing. They don’t understand why divorce rates and suicide rates are so high. They don’t understand why so few European women have more than one child, and why on most European streets, you see more dogs than children. This is the impact of the death of real Christian belief in Europe.161
German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, a secular nonbeliever, wrote in 2004: “Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization.… Everything else is idle postmodern chatter.”162
In Victory of Reason, sociologist of religion Rodney Stark concurred. Europe, he said, owes everything—culture, freedom, science, wealth—to Christianity. He sees the crisis of the dying continent resolving itself. “Europe is going to get more religious than it is either because of a revival of Christianity or because they go Muslim.… you can’t sit there with no babies forever.”163
In his review of Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Fr. John McCloskey restates the author’s closing question: “Is Western civilization a new species, in a class by itself, incomparably different from all other civilizations that have ever existed?”164 He answers “yes” with the caveat “that the civilization remains firmly rooted in a true supernatural Faith whence it originated.”165
If the West, however, has become a hedonistic de-populating civilization exporting its “values” of consumerism throughout the world, it will cave in and collapse like many civilizations before it and darkness will descend. The Faith cannot fail, but we can.166
The cycle is inescapable: when the faith dies, the culture dies, the civilization dies, and the people die. This appears less a bold prediction of what may happen than a depiction of what is happening now.
3
THE CRISIS OF CATHOLICISM
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
—SHAKESPEARE, SONNET 73
[O]n the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone.
—MATTHEW ARNOLD
“Dover Beach”
For if the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself for the battle?
—ST. PAUL, 1 CORINTHIANS 14:8
No institution has been more ravaged by the revolution that has swept over America since the 1960s than has the Catholic Church.
Under Pope Pius XII (1939–1958), the Church had made historic strides. The number of Catholics and priests doubled. Parochial schools, high schools, and churches could not be built fast enough to accommodate the faithful whose numbers were growing from the Catholic baby boom and conversions in the aftermath of World War II.
The 1950s were America’s Catholic moment. The moral authority of the Pope and America’s bishops was never higher. Long lines formed outside confessionals on Saturdays. It was standing room only a
t Sunday Mass. Fr. Patrick Peyton’s Rosary Crusade (“The family that prays together stays together”) drew huge crowds. The most visible prelate was Msgr. Fulton J. Sheen, whose television ratings bested those of Milton Berle. “He’s got better writers than I do,” quipped Berle. Notre Dame’s legendary gridiron teams had millions of “subway alumni.” Four out of five Catholics cast their votes in 1960 for John F. Kennedy, who became our first Catholic president. We were a people then.
Pope John XXIII, successor to Pius XII, thus startled faithful when he began his papacy by calling Vatican II, the first Church council since 1870, when Vatican I defined papal infallibility. With Catholic unity and vitality never greater, the Church’s prestige and moral authority never higher, many felt that calling a council to modernize was unnecessary and unwise. Why call a convention if your party’s in good shape, JFK mused to fellow Catholic Eugene McCarthy.
In his opening address to the council, Pope John chided the skeptics. “We feel we must disagree with those prophets of gloom, who are always forecasting disaster, as though the end of the world were at hand.”1
May good Pope John rest in peace. But the end of the Catholic world was at hand.
AN INDEX OF CATHOLIC DECLINE
Half a century on, the disaster is manifest. The robust and confident Church of 1958 no longer exists. Catholic colleges and universities remain Catholic in name only. Parochial schools are closing as rapidly as they opened in the 1950s. The numbers of nuns, priests, and seminarians have fallen dramatically. Mass attendance is a third of what it was. From the former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to vice president Joe Biden, Catholic politicians openly support abortion on demand.
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