Saving Christian Europe

Christianity made Europe,” Georges Bernanos writes in The Great Cemeteries Under the Moon. “Christianity is dead. Europe is going to die. What could be simpler?”

Nearly a century on, Bernanos’s bitter prophecy rings true. Christianity is once again becoming a minority religion in Europe, where empty church buildings beckon to Muslim communities whose mosques are overflowing. Pope Francis, unlike his predecessors, made disdain for Europe a hallmark of his reign. His complacency toward Muslim immigration suggests a belief that the Church’s future people will be African or Asian; Europe will no longer be Christian.

If that happens, Europe as we have known it for two thousand years will die: Europe will be Islamized. In that case, we might as well start negotiating the gentlest dhimmitude for the Christian minority that will remain in the European Caliphate.

The historic marriage between Christianity and Europe was not inevitable. It took centuries for the Roman emperors to abandon their ancient gods and worship the Son of God instead. ­Christianity was initially an Eastern religion—a daughter of Judaism. After a series of extraordinary and ­unforeseeable events, Europe became Christian, and Christianity became European.

Christianity’s relationship with Judaism will always haunt her. She is like a daughter who has never come to terms with the mother whom she can’t help at once admiring and loathing. The relationship calls to mind René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire: We learn our desires from models, whom we risk hating the more we come to resemble them. Yet the fundamental difference lies in Christianity’s unprecedented, revolutionary concept that salvation comes only from Jesus, the Son of God, as St. Paul tells us in his Epistle to the Romans. The precedence of faith over Law enabled Christianity to break free from Judaism and conquer the souls of Romans who longed for a spirituality deeper than that offered by paganism.

Judaism is a religion of the Law—a sacred Law handed down by God to Moses on Mount Sinai—which focuses on the Jewish people as a whole and governs every moment of a Jew’s existence. What makes the history of the Jews unique is the existence of prophets who endlessly scolded their own people, ridiculing their archaic sacrifices, which mistook God for a sybarite when the God of Israel himself called for his people to become more just.

Jesus of Nazareth is first and foremost in this prestigious lineage of Jewish prophets. This historical and philosophical chain is the basis of what Ernst Renan called “Judeo-Christianity.” A slow but inexorable evolution transformed what was primarily a social and political cult into an individual morality, while the God of a chosen people became the God of Humanity, and a religion whose external rites regulated the life of the city evolved into an inner personal faith. In the turbulent history of Ancient Israel, the prophets often suffered persecution and murder at the hands of the kings, priests, and people they reprimanded in the name of God. It was inevitable that Jesus would share their fate.

But if his history is identical to that of his ­glorious predecessors, his geography is very different. His message did not stop at the borders of the little kingdom of Israel, but spread across the Roman Empire. Roman legions, roads, bridges, cities, and the famous Pax Romana all proved powerful tools for the expansion of the Jewish sect that was to become Christianity.

This notion of Judeo-Christianity disturbed sincere believers of both religions. Jews could not accept being associated with a faith that advocated the “scandal” of a God who became Man. Christians, many of whom had continued to sacrifice at the Jerusalem temple until its destruction in a.d. 70, came to portray Jews as blinded by their refusal to accept the evidence of the gospel.

This tension has played out over two thousand years of Catholic history. When the Church of Rome tried to incarnate the Temple of Jerusalem in its own way, major internal resistance was mounted against the episcopal ­hierarchy, the lavish pageantry, and the rewards tallied for good deeds. Various heretical movements, now forgotten, were followed by Protestantism and Jansenism. All threatened to tear apart the seamless garment of the Church.

After Constantine, Christianity reigned over the Roman Empire, asserting itself as the true Israel, the new chosen people. (This identification was rarely manifested in sympathy for the Jews. To take but one example, at the Disputation of Paris in 1240, in the presence of King Louis IX, four rabbis defended the Talmud against charges of blasphemy laid by a convert to Christianity. In the end, a pile of ten thousand Hebrew manuscripts was set on fire in the middle of Paris. In a savage irony, Jewish books were burned while psalms—Jewish hymns—were sung.) In the sixteenth century, the jurist Jean ­Bodin based his theory of sovereignty on the Old Testament. Thomas Hobbes asserted the Israelite state to be the prototype of the sovereign state. But from the Renaissance onward, the West began to reconnect with its other great heritage: Greek and Roman antiquity. Europe’s founding conflict between Athens and Jerusalem flared up again. 

In the nineteenth century, a triumphant Europe parceled itself into discrete nationalities, each aspiring to be a sovereign, free nation. While the great states—England, France, and Germany—fought relentlessly to dominate the continent, the smaller nations of Europe rediscovered pasts for themselves that were all the more glorious for being so often invented. All saw themselves as chosen peoples.

The Jewish origin of Christianity once again became a sore point in Europe, and mimetic desire went back into action. Marxism and romantic nationalism added their stones to the fatal edifice, and the Jews became identified with capitalism, money, individualism, cities—everything that constituted the modernity that had destroyed associations refined over the centuries by the genius of ­Christianity—and, paradoxically, with Marxism itself.

We know how it all ended, in the Holocaust and the death of six million European Jews. Christianity’s reaction was equal to the event. From the 1950s onwards, not least during Vatican II, the Church sought to purge its teaching of the slightest trace of anti-Judaism. At the same time, the Churches of Europe were at the forefront of the great struggle to welcome immigrants from faraway lands without condition. This great migration of the peoples of the south toward the rich lands of the north, which was then beginning, was falsely equated with the flight of the Jews from the Nazis. Christian peoples were called upon to welcome them, to atone for their failure to protect the Jews.

Catholic prelates united with Protestant pastors and Jewish rabbis in this great project of expiation and redemption. They were useful idiots, first of the Marxists, then of the woke left, which had designated the white, capitalist West as its enemy.

These reactions to the Holocaust by Christian Europe were to transform Europe and Christianity beyond all imagining. The destabilizing movement came from within and without. With Vatican II, the revolt originated in Rome. Vatican II revived the age-old quarrel between those who wanted to sacrifice everything to the love of Christ and those who wanted to perpetuate the Church’s authority in the world. Many of the faithful no longer recognized their religion; they believed their Catholicism had been Protestantized.

It was as though a malevolent spirit had revived conflicts settled long ago. At the Council of Nicaea in 325, Catholicism severed the umbilical cord linking it to its Jewish mother by ratifying the doctrine of the Incarnation championed by Athanasius against the Arians. A few centuries later, ­Muhammad rubbed shoulders in the deserts of Arabia with the heirs of Arius and became one of them. Islam represented a return to a Semitic monotheism purified of the mythological and polytheistic complications the Greek genius had purportedly introduced into the Christian story. It went so far as to excise the doctrine that man is made in God’s image. Since then, each religion has grown up in its own geographical area, taking on the characteristics of the peoples living there.

Judaism allowed free discussion of dogma but strictly defined the practices of daily life: You could debate dogma, but you couldn’t eat pork. Christianity, by contrast, freed up daily life, while establishing dogmatic truths that were not up for discussion: You were allowed to eat pork, but not to deny the Holy Trinity. Islam slammed the doors shut on both sides: You could neither eat pork nor question ­Allah’s commands. Islam means submission, whereas Judaism has thrived on theological disputation. Islam is the most absolute monotheism, as well as the most demanding orthopraxis. Sharia is binding on all Muslims, regulating every aspect of their lives; there is no room for discussion (the Jews’ specialty) or for secular law (a Christian custom). This is what made Renan say in an 1883 lecture: “Islam is the indistinguishable union of the spiritual and the temporal; it is the reign of a dogma, it is the heaviest chain that humanity has ever worn.”

This explains the persistent failure of the Catholic hierarchy’s efforts to promote a “­dialogue of religions”: How can you dialogue with someone who doesn’t recognize your legitimacy? But the bishops are stubborn. In his last book before his death, the philosopher Alain ­Besançon accused the post-conciliar Roman Church of making the same mistake with Islam as it had with communism.

It’s no coincidence that Besançon, one of the most brilliant critics of communist ­totalitarianism, ended his career with a study of Islamic totalitarianism, concurring with the orientalist Maxime Rodinson that “Islam is communism with God.” And it is no coincidence that our philosopher repeatedly berated the Catholic Church for its ­naivety and inept defense of its precious heritage in the face of ideologies that seek to destroy and enslave the individual. But the individual is surely the product of Christianity, whose evangelical message focuses on the salvation of the individual soul. Judaism teaches that man is made in God’s image, but the priority granted by St. Paul to faith over Law fostered the emergence of individuals who could develop that image in intimate union with the Divinity.

This is why Western Europe became the home of the individual very early on. Constitutions of modern states did not enable individuals to emerge, endowed with and protected by rights; rather, the society of individuals constructed for itself a state to protect its rights. In Europe, social development preceded political development. But this nascent society of individuals, emerging from the tribalism of its ancestors, had to be organized and ordered, or else risk lawlessness. This was the awesome duty of the Church.

In The Origins of Political Order, Francis Fukuyama explains that “it was not Christianity per se, but the specific institutional form that Western Christianity took, that determined its impact on subsequent political development.” Essentially, the Catholic Church unified Europe as a whole. She shaped the peoples and cultures of Europe in her own image, just as God had created man in his.

This society of individuals, unified by a common culture and social order, could then, after centuries of slumber under the protection of castles and the Church, begin its great march toward modernity.

Each side of the Atlantic has its own original sin (as it were). While in Europe, since 1945, the memory of the Shoah has haunted people’s minds, the whole of postwar American political life has fixated on the memory of slavery, from the massive demonstrations of the Civil Rights era, the Watts riots, and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., to the riots and looting that followed the death of George Floyd in 2020. The “Negro Question” made the white majority feel guilty and prompted political leaders in the United States to pass two major pieces of legislation in the 1960s that altered the foundations of American identity. The first was the Civil Rights Act, which led to affirmative action in universities, reserving places for young blacks in the most prestigious American institutions. The second was the abolition in 1965 of the immigration quotas set in 1924, which had cleverly guaranteed that the demographic composition of the American people would not be upset by new waves of immigrants, obliging the latest arrivals to assimilate to the model bequeathed by the country’s Anglo-Saxon masters in the eighteenth century. These two revolutions, led by the Democratic Party, destroyed two major pillars of America: meritocracy and the dominance of the WASP majority.

Like Europe, the United States is ­experiencing what is fundamentally a religious crisis: The Christian river that irrigated the nation since its origins has been dammed up. Catholic and Jewish immigrants had found their place in American society, but Protestantism had retained its status as the undisputed cultural reference point. Then its throne was overturned by the revolutionary movement of the 1960s.

In his masterpiece, The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom grasped the scale of the catastrophe initiated by the programmed destruction of the forms inherited from Greco-Roman and Christian humanism. Fifty years later, with the rise of the woke movement, we can survey the damage. This is what Joseph Bottum claims in An Anxious Rage: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America. In an interview with Le Figaro, he ­explains: “We now have a Church of Christ without Christ. That is, there is no forgiveness possible. . . . Christ pays the debts of original sin, freeing us from it. If you take Christ away, you get white guilt and systemic racism.” The aim of this movement is quite simply to “undo the United States in its foundations: the nation-state, capitalism and the Protestant religion.”

That movement is now transatlantic. The American Founding Fathers read Montesquieu and ­Rousseau. Similarly, in the 1960s, the intellectual fathers of deconstruction were celebrities on American campuses. “French theory” took root, and returned to France in the form of “wokeism,” which exalts sexual and racial minorities and promotes hatred of heterosexual white men. In Europe, and especially in France, wokeism has allied with Islam, emphasizing its “subaltern” status and, for the sake of expedience, ignoring its brutal treatment of women and sexual minorities. Taking Western civilization as its adversary, the iron ­alliance between Islam and wokeism is the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of our time.

October 7, 2023, will be remembered as the day that alliance came of age. On that day, more than a thousand Israelis were massacred: Men were disemboweled or emasculated, women were raped and murdered, by bloodthirsty jihadist commandos from Gaza. But this pogrom, unprecedented since the Second World War, was immediately followed by huge demonstrations in every European capital in support of Hamas. At American universities—including Harvard and Yale, just as at Sciences Po in Paris—young students wearing keffiyehs rallied behind the flag of Islamo-leftism, chanting anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic slogans. The leaders of these institutions were shamefully slow to condemn them. The most lucid intellects on both sides of the Atlantic understood what the leaders’ silence meant: the definitive end of the postwar era. The Shoah would no longer serve as an absolute reference point for humanity’s misfortune or Western guilt. The Jew had become a “white man.” Israel was guilty of being, not merely a nation-state, but an “imperialist and colonialist” power. Decolonization studies had achieved its goal.

Western Christianity is proving more impotent than ever. Blinded by guilt, it fails to see that wokeism transforms the defense of individual freedom into the freedom to Islamize Europe. All the antiracist laws adopted after the war in reaction against the bloody tyranny of the Nazis are being used in a judicial jihad against those who alert Western peoples to the dangers of Islamization. I have suffered from this offensive for years. All my public statements are dissected and reported to the judicial system; I have lost count of the times I’ve been prosecuted for “incitement to racial discrimination.” The Muslim Brotherhood has convinced Westerners that any obstacle to the expansion of Islam in Europe is an intolerable hindrance to civil liberties, in particular religious freedom. The irony is rich: There is no individual freedom in a religion that knows neither freedom nor the individual.

History is a never-ending story of revenge. With the advent of Islam in the seventh century, Eastern Christianity bore the brunt of the military hordes mobilized by Muhammad’s message. For centuries, the fierce lords of the West mocked the “decadent and feminine” Christianity of the East.

Today, the situation is reversed. Having lived under Ottoman rule for centuries, the peoples of Eastern Europe developed antibodies against Islamic invasion. These countries refuse to entertain Muslim immigration, even if it means making themselves look bad in the eyes of European institutions. They understand that safeguarding their nationhood means defending the ethnic coherence of their people and preserving inherited cultural forms.

Because they have never lived under the Islamic yoke, Western elites take at face value those syrupy speeches about “the religions of the Book.” They have swallowed the mendacious discourse on “Europe, land of immigration.” In Feudal Society, the medievalist Marc Bloch notes that Western Europe was exceptionally lucky to avoid outside immigration between the ninth century—the end of the great Norman and Saracen invasions—and the nineteenth century, when the Industrial Revolution began. Either Western Christianity will learn from the countries that endured Ottoman domination, or it will suffer the yoke itself.

The Church refuses to understand what’s happening. With each concession, the Church surrenders more of the European imagination to Islam. The visibility of mosques, madrassas, halal grocers and street vendors, veiled women, and men wearing the kameez is ever increasing. Islamic forms permeate our European space, while Christian forms fade away. The future of Christianity in Europe is written in blazing letters amidst the dangers of the twenty-first century: Europeans are becoming less and less Christian and dwindling in number, amidst an influx of Muslims who grow ever more numerous and ever more Muslim.

In the face of all this, over the course of my 2022 presidential campaign, I observed a phenomenon that gave me a slender but real hope. During my rallies, I saw young (and not so young) Jews and Catholics standing side by side.

This friendship should not be taken for granted. From the 1970s and 1980s, an entire generation of young Jews, who had never experienced the Second World War, harbored resentment against the French and European populations as a whole, who they believed had been at least passively complicit in the Shoah. At the time, young left-wing Jews were at the forefront of antiracist movements, vigorously defending immigrants against the “racism” that seemed to them consubstantial with France and the West. Those days are gone. I’m rather proud to have been one of the main forces in my country behind changing this attitude, at a time when Jewish institutions hurled endless abuse at me.

It’s obvious today that the antiracist spectacle no longer attracts crowds, at least not Jewish and Catholic ones. More and more Jews and Catholics have realized that they must ally to save France and Europe from Islamization. I of course speak of a fight against Islamization, not against Muslims; this is not merely a rhetorical precaution. Prominent Muslims from Algeria, including the writers Kamel Daoud and Boualem Sansal, will join this fight for French identity, as will ­Algerians who escaped the GIA militias during the civil war of the nineties. So will Iranian refugees who fled the Islamic regime in Tehran. They are joined by countless private citizens—North African and sub-Saharan Muslims who appreciate the French secular way of life and respect individual freedom. All of these, especially the women among them, know that only a French France—that is, a France that is at once Christian and secular—can protect them from the family and community pressure to be “good Muslims” rather than “dirty French.”

A divide also exists among French and ­European Catholics. Some are resolutely committed to the struggle for the identity of France and Europe, connecting Christian faith with Christian civilization. Others refuse to claim their faith as “an identity,” whether French or European, clinging instead to the skirts of a universal Church and its humanist message.

Again we see the tension that has challenged Christianity from the beginning: Identity or universalism? Law or faith? Judeo-Christian or friend of the Gentiles? We might recall that Paul’s humanist universalism enabled a small sect of Jesus-­worshippers to conquer the Roman world unarmed. But this time, the aim is not conquest, but preservation. To survive, European Christianity must undergo a cultural revolution. Everyone from our bishops to the faithful must understand that a humanism degenerated into humanitarianism and a universalism degraded into globalism are, together, killing us. If they refuse to change, the Christian peoples of Europe will become a minority on their own soil.

Christians aren’t the only ones in need of a Copernican revolution. The Jews must abandon their age-old reflexes as embattled minorities. Fortunately, spirits seem to be sobering, and the ­Israelite river is gradually flowing again, the one that originated in the well-known phrase of the Comte de Clermont-Tonnerre in his speech to the Constituent Assembly in December 1789: “We must deny everything to the Jews as a nation and grant them everything as individuals.”

This is the path Muslims must take if they want to assimilate into their host countries. We saw above why it is a difficult task: Due to its rejection of the Imago Dei, Islam has opposed from the outset the individualist revolution accomplished by Christianity. Islam inverts the French motto, Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité. It is the religion of Submission (to God), of Inequality (with women, infidels, slaves), and of Fraternity only with other Muslims. Islam is therefore just as incompatible with France as it is with the values of all Christian European countries. And yet Muslims, as Jews did in their time, can—and must—grow up and become individuals.

In France, we too often believe that the defense of laïcité is the alpha and omega of this integration policy. But it is not enough. In the nineteenth century, laïcité was a weapon in a war against the Church; it must now become an ally in protecting the Christian identity of European countries. For only Christianity offers the sufficient framework and resources for genuine integration.

Needless to say, the rules of laïcité are stringent, and encroach on everyone’s individual freedoms. I can imagine the American mainstream media decrying the French “Bonfire of the Liberties,” as they do every time French politicians dare to take courageous measures, or even inadequate ones, such as banning the Muslim veil or the abaya from schools. Americans are quite wrong to attack laïcité, which turns out to be a fragile and insufficient bulwark against the Islamization of our country.

Western societies have finally reached the ultimate development of the individualism they nurtured. They have become lawless assemblies of nomads who see themselves as having neither ties nor roots, neither past nor history, who claim to be the product solely of their accomplishments and imaginations. Under these conditions no society can survive, let alone integrate outsiders.

I often hear it said, even by some of my friends, that the accomplishments of European individualism will be in vain without a revival of the Christian faith in Europe.

The theme of re-Christianization has caused endless controversy throughout Europe, and France in particular, since the French Revolution. This article is not the place to rehash the history of this bitter struggle between the so-called forces of progress and the reactionaries. And yet, if we look closely at France, we note waves of fervent and popular re-Christianization after 1815, 1871, and 1940, each after France had seemed to pay for its blasphemies with military defeats. Churches filled up again, major writers made a show of their Catholic faith, and the state promoted the Church in schools and universities. Today, the old Christian lands of the West are experiencing a similar flare-up. Masses in the traditional Latin are full; evangelicals are returning to the festive, liturgical side of early Christianity; France’s most famous novelist, Michel Houellebecq, is fighting legislation authorizing euthanasia and proclaiming his quest for God; World Youth Days have become a great popular success; after decades of avoidance, young men are seeking baptism; the Catholic Church is beginning to transform itself intelligently into a “counter-society,” a counter-movement to the feminist and LGBTQ lobbies.

Will this movement be fanned to flame or snuffed out by the next strong breeze? It seems to me that to understand these stirrings of Western Christianity, we need to return to what makes Christianity unique among creeds. We have seen that the genius of Christianity lies in its unprecedented transgression of the Law in favor of faith in Jesus Christ.

This Christian revolution of the individual and his interiority enabled its dazzling glory at the time of its expansion, but now that same revolution renders it fragile when society as a whole neglects its core belief. Judaism is first and foremost a people; Islam is primarily a legal code; Christianity lacks these structuring forms. The battle for Christianity in Europe cannot simply be a battle for faith. We must defend the legacy of Christianity in Europe—those irreplaceable architectural, artistic, cultural, legal, and political forms that make the common good both “common” and “good.”

A war of civilizations is setting the tone for the twenty-first century. In this conflict, civilization must remember that it is, above all, “what coalesces around a religion,” in the words of André Malraux. Any civilization that forgets this and neglects to defend the religion that founds and sustains it, is doomed.

Neither communism nor Nazism, despite deploying colossal resources, succeeded in killing Christianity. Unless the Apocalypse is near, neither will Islam. Likewise, Europe will survive the peril of Muhammad’s shadow if she remains true to herself. Only Christianity can help her do so, for Christianity alone remembers how she was made.