Anyone preaching on the Signs of the Times or concerned about the End of the Age cannot ignore the dramatic and frightening Islamic Takeover of Europe. In today’s New York Times, there’s a review of a book by Christopher Caldwell titled Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West.
I haven’t read the book, but the NYT article was fascinating. Let me skip to the final sentence, which is a quote from Caldwell:
When an insecure, malleable, relativistic culture (Europe’s) meets a culture that is anchored, confident, and strengthened by common doctrines (Islam’s), it is generally the former that changes to suit the latter.
Read that again! With the loss of its Christian mooring, Western society has become insecure, malleable (pliable, subject to being manipulated), and relativistic. When another, stronger, conviction-based culture immigrates and reproduces in large numbers, who is going to win?
Here are some other comments from the New York Times review. These are quotable and dramatic observations.
Through decades of mass immigration to Europe’s hospitable cities and because of a strong disinclination to assimilate, Muslims are changing the face of Europe, perhaps decisively. These Muslim immigrants are not so much enhancing European culture as they are supplanting it. The products of an adversarial culture, these immigrants and their religion, Islam, are “patiently conquering Europe’s cities, street by street.”
These immigrants are…swamping Europe demographically…because of their high fertility rates…. In Brussels in 2006, the seven most common given boys’ names were Mohamed, Adam, Rayan, Ayoub, Mehdi, Amine, and Hamza.
Muslims are not melting in. They are instead forming…a parallel society. Newcomers to England now listen to Al Jazeera, not the BBC.
Spain translates more foreign books a year than all the Arab-speaking countries have translated since the reign of Caliph Mamoun in the ninth century.
These immigrants are bringing anti-Semitism back to Europe.
The debate over Muslim immigration in Europe is one that the continent can’t openly have, because anyone remotely critical of Islam is branded as Islamophobic.
As I said, I’ve not read the book, just the review; but you can find more about Caldwell’s book here. For a sermon I preached on this subject a couple of years ago, click here.