(This article is taken from the October 2006 issue of
The American Spectator. To subscribe, click here.)
FOR A LONG TIME I TRIED TO AVOID thinking about Lebanon. It seemed
too marginal, not to mention too complicated. Its government, more
notional than real, enjoys little more than the “trappings of
sovereignty,” as Fouad Ajami recently wrote. A territory more than
a nation, it is a land of private militias, checkpoints, autonomous
regions, and assassinations. Somehow, it degenerated into a place
where the most ruthless could prevail by force, and maybe govern
after a fashion. But that has long been a hallmark of government in
the Arab world. Whoever seizes power can never relax the use or
threat of force, lest he be overthrown by superior force.
Lebanon is a microcosm, and an object lesson. It is a country
where Christianity is on the wane. By one estimate, it was once
over 70 percent Christian; today it is less than half that. Shi’ite
Muslims alone probably outnumber Lebanese Christians (mostly
Maronite). The decline may be greater than that. The Washington
Post reported a few years ago that Lebanon has not conducted a
census for about 50 years “out of concern that the evidence of
Christian decline and Shi’ite Muslim advancement might fuel
sectarian tension.”
A similar pattern holds across the Middle East, where the
Christian downfall has been dramatic. The Catholic Archbishop of
Algeria, interviewed recently by the New York Times,
described “the ebbing of Christianity from North Africa’s shores as
Islam spreads across Europe.” In 1958, there were more than 700
churches in the country where St. Augustine was born and died. Now
there are about 20, and they are mostly empty. “The rest have been
converted into mosques or cultural centers or have been abandoned.”
The archbishop says Mass for a remnant of 20 people.
In The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam
(1997) Bat Ye’Or wrote that 13 percent of the Middle East was
Christian a century ago. Today that figure may be as low as 2
percent.
Something similar is happening, although more slowly, in
Europe.
The English writer G.K. Chesterton feared that if Christianity
ever began to disappear, “superstition would drown out all your old
rationalism and skepticism.” He is often quoted as saying that when
people stop believing in God “they don’t believe in nothing, but in
anything.” But no one has been able to find that famous remark in
all his copious writings. He did write something similar-that your
“hard-shelled materialists [are] all balanced on the very edge of
belief-of belief in almost anything.”
Writing after the suicide attacks on the London Underground last
year, the British historian Niall Ferguson drew attention to
Chesterton’s comment (and misquotation) and added that the “moral
vacuum” left by de-Christianization seemed to be creating a “soft
target for the religious fanaticism of others.” Plainly, the rise
of Islam in Europe is directly related to the fall of
Christianity.
“Into the void are coming Islam and Muslims,” Daniel Pipes wrote
in the New York Sun two years ago. “As Christianity
falters, Islam is robust, assertive and ambitious.” He foresaw a
time when Europe’s “grand cathedrals will appear as vestiges of a
prior civilization.” Until they are transformed into mosques, that
is.
A RECENT STUDY SHOWED that the Catholic Church in Britain is facing
its greatest threat since the Reformation. Its membership is in
“terminal decline,” much of it recent. What Henry VIII persecuted
the modern world simply ignores. The faith is withering away.
Meanwhile, the Church of England has devolved into a museum. Those
old cathedrals are still maintained-even admired as works of art.
Increasingly, however, they are venues for music festivals. As for
the Church of England’s Episcopalian equivalent in the U.S., it
suggests nothing so much as a wounded animal beset by
carnivores.
How to explain this decline? Nothing less than a book-length
response would suffice. But here are a few thoughts. Enfeebled
bishops, selected precisely for their feebleness, preside over
dwindling flocks. Bishops have lost all authority and few listen to
their public comments, which almost always deal with material (not
spiritual) concerns. Rome slumbers on, imagining that English
Catholics must above all repair the breach with Canterbury, and
that the way to do so is to stand for as little as possible.
Diplomacy triumphs over conviction. There is no sign that the old
pope, John Paul II, paid attention to the problem. Benedict XVI
understands that Catholicism is in trouble in Europe, but has not
yet shown that he has the courage to do anything about it.
Christianity has been under constant attack since the time of
the Enlightenment and the attacks have come from within. In recent
decades, mullahs and imams have hardly needed to say a word against
Christianity. All the work was being done for them by critics,
reformers, apostates, defectors. In some ways Muslims are actually
more respectful of Christianity than the Church’s internal foes.
And Islam’s spiritual leaders have not lost the faith, defective
though it is in key areas.
Friedrich Nietzsche, the son of a Lutheran pastor, composed his
nonsensical but influential work The Antichrist (better
translated as “The Anti-Christian,” as Walter Kaufmann noted), and
proclaimed the death of God in a country still nominally Christian.
His diatribes were influential not because they were cogent but
because they were daring. He was thought profound merely because he
had disturbed the peace. (In earlier centuries such exercises in
egotism were smothered at birth.) In droves, Western intellectuals
wanted to believe that they could safely defy the parson-ignore a
creator perceived as more tyrannical than loving. So they
disparaged the “wishful thinking” of believers, and in so doing
imputed their own mindset to the faithful remnant.
The Jesuits turned to liberation theology, and many have also
fallen under the homosexual spell. A succession of popes has failed
to mount any effective response.
A likely ingredient in the Christian decline is increased
material prosperity, which turns minds and hearts toward the things
of this world. One could say that wealth makes materialists of us
all. (But why hasn’t there been an equivalent decline in the United
States?) The Muslims of the Arab world, in contrast, have been
unable to achieve anything beyond rudimentary levels of
development. A material advance in the Middle East comparable to
that of Western Europe possibly would undermine Islam. But why has
it not already happened? The Muslims seem unable to achieve one of
the most basic features of Western civilization-the rule of law.
And they have remained largely frozen in a pre-medieval past. The
strong rule by fear, force, and power replace law and consent, and
property is insecure.
THE MOST COMMON SECULAR RESPONSE to all this is to say: What was so
great about Christianity? One blogger responded to Niall Ferguson:
“I don’t get it. What’s wrong with, say, secular humanism filling
the moral vacuum? Why does he think the Christian doctrine is
irreplaceable?”
It’s an important question, deserving a full response. Just at
the most basic level of demography, however, the secular-humanist
option is not working. Sustaining a population requires each woman
on average to bear 2.1 children. In the European Union, Daniel
Pipes wrote, “the overall rate is one-third short, at 1.5 and
falling.” Should current population trends continue and immigration
cease, the EU population of 375 million could fall to 275 million
by 2075. Furthermore, birth rates are not lower than they already
are (in France and Britain, for example, they are noticeably above
the EU average) because Muslim immigrants to those countries are
having more children than fallen-away Christians.
As for those who imagine that the Christian legacy is one of
imperialism, racism, and inquisition, and we are better off without
it-legions on the left do believe that-they will have to start
thinking about what will replace it. Some are already doing so.
Whittaker Chambers is worth reading on these issues, even though
Islam was still dormant when he wrote Witness. The attempt
to reconstruct faith without God produced Communism, he wrote. And
the attempt to live without any faith at all is, I believe,
impossible. If faith collapses, civilization goes with it.
