Muslim Minarets Replacing Christian Steeples
Christianity is vanishing from the European landscape like a giant iceberg in a tropical sea. Like a colossus falling to the ground, you wonder if it will ever rise again. Once the cornerstone of European civilization, the whole edifice is now teetering. Like a drunken man uncertain of its next step, Europe’s secularist philosophers know a lot about politics but nothing about the spirituality that made it great.
As the Bible says, “Ever learning, but never coming to a knowledge of the truth.” With birth rates declining and the Muslim birthrate increasing, the writing on the wall is clear and undeniable. This is especially true in France, Germany, Britain, and the Netherlands, where there is a very active Muslim population. By 2050, the U.N. estimates that more than 40% of Italy’s population will be 60 or older. Also, by 2050, population decline in 25 European countries will exceed their current level. Russia is projected to lose over 30 million people; Italy, 7.2 million; Poland, 6.6 million; and Germany, 3.9 million. Europe is heading toward a collision course of its own making.
“God is not mocked,” for you reap what you sow and usually more than you sow.
Churches have become mausoleums for tourists to visit; sermons have become socialistic lullabies telling congregants that they can pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. The Bible is considered to be spiritually disconnected from the intellectually free modern European man. A Christophobic pestilence is sweeping through the land, aligning with its dissolution of moral standards.
It’s basically the same kind of intellectual nonsense that led 19th-century France and 20th-century Germany to ruin and disgrace.
Meanwhile, many imams in their mosques give fiery sermons about holy war, emphasizing being a Muslim first and foremost, and asserting that tolerance is a weakness. Their increasing influence is not driven by their message of submission to 6th-century sharia law, which appeals little to those who value freedom. Instead, it grows because Europe’s Christianity is cold and lifeless, like a painted fire. It’s a religion of self-improvement as fragile as a flickering candle in the wind, about to be blown out by secular winds blowing through its seminaries and universities.
While Europe’s spiritual foundation is literally collapsing around them, the European Union in 2004 notoriously rejected appeals from religious leaders to include some acknowledgment of the continent’s Christian heritage in its 70,000-word constitution. They just don’t know what to do with God.
On average, only 41 percent of Europeans claim to believe in a personal God. In Catholic France, less than 5% attend weekly services — and the figure is just 3% in the Czech Republic. In Ireland—Ireland!—only half the population reportedly goes to Mass now, compared with 84 percent in the early 1990s. Germany, the land of Luther and Bach, and the Netherlands, one of the cradles of the Protestant Reformation, are now neglecting the very gospel that made them great. In Sweden, 85 percent of the population are church members, yet only 11 percent of women and 7 percent of men attend church services. In Norway, more than half of the children are born to unmarried mothers.
I believe that if Europe doesn’t return to its Christian faith, it will perish just like the once-strong Christian civilizations in Asia Minor and North Africa.
Perhaps you have read about the armies of Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours (732), the great naval battle at Lepanto (1571), and the Battle of Vienna (1683), where Muslim forces were soundly defeated by Christian forces. These three battles, in particular, saved Europe from becoming a Muslim peninsula. Mohammed over Christ must not happen again.
A spiritual revival of Pentecostal proportions is what is needed. Only such a force can replace the evils of Marxism, Freudianism, and Darwinism, which nearly destroyed Christianity in the 20th century, and now confront violent Islam in the 21st century.
While this realistic commentary may be somewhat discouraging, as a Christian, don’t become discouraged; let me remind you that while the Church may be dying in Europe, it is flourishing in other parts of the world. Especially in China!
Like trees planted beside rivers of living waters, it has a million branches reaching upward toward the Sun of Righteousness, and it’s becoming a vast forest with new branches waving in the wind. Like an invisible coral reef, it develops from beneath in numerous ways that are unseen from the surface.
“I will build My church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”
Be Blessed, the best is Yet to Be!
Dr. Robert Bryant