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In Britain and Europe, it is customary for Liberals (and anyone under 40) to laugh at and belittle the religious*.

(*When I say the ‘religious’, I’m of course excluding Islam, which remains insulated behind a wall of ‘political correctness’.)

In the UK especially, the devout are routinely depicted as soft in the head, gullible, blindly conservative and generally stupid.

There are many reasons for this attitude. Chief among them is anti-Americanism (Americans being associated with organized religion) and particularly the age-old canard that Americans are somehow less intelligent than their European cousins. This bigotry is common enough in London and almost uniform in Paris, where the French intellectual elite can trace a lineage of imagined superiority back – through Sartre and Camus – to Voltaire.

For a while, I held fast to it myself. Prior to University, the nature of American religiosity was defined for me not by my observing the culture itself, but through a borrowed lens of self-important satire.

After a year at University however, and having moved to a city in a rapid process of Islamisation, I began to appreciate the logic of cultural protectionism – that old system of emotion traditionally badmouthed as ‘Xenophobia’.

Those religious ‘rednecks’ I had been encouraged to laugh at had a point all along. If Islamisation was the alternative to a confident Judeo-Christian identity, can we really afford to reject it?

The classical European view – that there is a comfortable ‘third choice’ available between Islamisation and Judeo-Christianity – called variously “Secularism”, “Post-Modernism”, “Multiculturalism” etc… is (to put it impolitely) bunk.

Whatever your views on the origin of life and the universe, the abandoning of cultural identity has real-world consequences.

European commentators often wonder aloud why the Muslims of the US are better integrated than the Muslims of Europe. Though the question suggests profundity, the answer is actually pitifully obvious. The Muslims arriving in the EU are walking into a cultural void. They see nothing before them but a blank sheet of paper, and, given their innate certainty and proselytizing urge, behave quite naturally by attempting to fill it in.

When a European secularist complains therefore, about the Islamisation of his native continent, a Muslim would be fully justified to reply (as they often do reply) – “What have you got instead?”.

Indeed, what has Europe got?

What tangible attribute separates the olive-skinned masses of Tunisia from the olive-skinned masses of Spain and Greece? Terms like ‘West’ and ‘East’ avail us nothing here. Geographically they are useless in explaining the divide between Tunis and Turin. ‘North’ and ‘South’ don’t work as cultural terms either. ‘Europe’ meanwhile is merely a restating of the question.

“What has ‘Europe’ got?”

I can tell you clearly what America has. American culture is solidly built on a base of confident religious identity. This element of its character has played no small part in its success relative to Europe’s decline.

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Indeed, take the word of the brilliant Jewish commentator David P. Goldman (who writes under the name ‘Spengler’):

“The United States is the last remaining Christian nation in the industrial world” he writes “…To speak of an “exceptional culture” would be a pleonasm; national cultures are unique by construction. Nonetheless some cultures may be radically exceptional. Unlike all the other nations of the world, America’s Exceptionalism rests on a political culture informed by the biblical idea of covenant – not on common language, race, borders, or history. That is why the US emerged as the survivor out of the 20th century while the ethnocentric cultures of Europe plunged into mutual destruction.”

Goldman prefixes the above observation by pointing out that “What has made the United States radically different from all other big industrial nations during the past generation is a fertility rate above replacement.” As he suggests, this is something directly attributable to American fidelity to the Judeo-Christian notion of family. I would also point to the taming effect religion has on the toxin of feminism.

Goldman elsewhere points out that, contrary to defeatist narratives arguing otherwise, the demographic prospects of the Jewish state are also bright,  a direct result of population growth among the religious population.

The only real alternative to Cultural Nationalism is Ethno-Nationalism, the transformation of a country of individuals into an ethnic farmyard.

Unfortunately – if predictably – the ghost of ethno-nationalism is rising once again in the economic ruins of Europe. The Neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party is gaining influence in Greece, while Hungary is increasingly falling under the spell of the rabidly anti-Jewish ‘Jobbik’ organisation.

In the near future, Europe may become racially awake, but fall into an even deeper cultural sleep. Fascist parties may organize to expel the Islamising forces from their lands, but then recover only to find older hatreds burning across their own borders.

Indeed, the trouble with ethno-nationalism, as opposed to the cultural nationalism of the US, is that it supplies new threats even as it gets rid of old ones. This is especially true on a crowded, multinational continent like Europe.

French nationalists, for example, still have a lingering hostility to Germans. Macedonians despise the Greeks, and vice versa. Belgium is divided into two simmering ethnic enclaves that could easily ignite into war. Italian nationalists often speak of creating a new nation (Padania) in Northern Italy based upon imagined descent from primeval Celtic tribes. Finland lies in an uneasy peace with Russia. Spanish nationalists routinely taunt Britain with threats against UK sovereignty in Gibraltar.

I won’t depress you by listing any further examples.

All that remains to say is that only a return to Judeo-Christian self-awareness can save Europe from the twin menaces of Islamisation and/or a fragmentory civil war from which it could never recover.

In the meantime, the prognosis of Europe gets grimmer by the day.

D, LDN.

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