Where Secularism Triumphs Populations Begin to Shrink and Die

At the beginning of the seventh century, the Mediterranean world was Christian. But, within fifty years of Muhammad’s flight to Medina in 622, the armies of Islam had swept over the southern coast of the Inland Sea. Early in the eighth century, Arabs and Berbers brushed aside weak Visigoth resistance, overran Spain, and crossed the Pyrenees into France, where one of the decisive battles of history was fought. At Tours, the “Hammer of the Franks,” Charles Martel defeated the Muslims, who withdrew back over the mountains. Except for the tiny kingdom of the Asturias, which would be the base camp of the Spanish Reconquista, Islam dominated the Iberian Peninsula for centuries. Not until 1492 did Ferdinand and Isabella finally drive the Moors out of Spain.

Indicators suggest Islam is rising again. An Islamic secessionist movement is active in the Philippines. Muslim troops battle Christian secessionists in Indonesia. From Palestine to Pakistan, street mobs cheered the slaughter at the Pentagon and World Trade Center. For years, the Afghani Taliban gave sanctuary to Osama bin Laden and his terrorist cells and dispatched holy warriors into the old Soviet republics of Central Asia and assisted Chechen rebels fighting in Russia.

In Turkey and Algeria, elections in the 1990s brought to power Islamic regimes, which were removed by methods other than democratic. In Egypt, Muslim militants have renewed the persecution of Christian Copts. Islamic law has now been imposed on ten northern states in Nigeria.

In Europe, Christian congregations are dying, churches are emptying out, and mosques are filling up. There are five million Muslims in France, and between twelve and fifteen million in the European Union. There are fifteen hundred mosques in Germany. Islam has replaced Judaism as the second religion of Europe. As the Christian tide goes out in Europe the Islamic tide comes in. In 2000, for the first time there were more Muslims in the world than Catholics.

While the ideology of “Islamism” has failed in Afghanistan, Iran, and Sudan to create a modern state that can command the loyalty of its people and serve as a model for other Islamic nations, the religion of Islam has not failed. In science, technology, economics, industry, agriculture, armaments, and democratic rule, America, Europe, and Japan are generations ahead. But the Islamic world retains something the West has lost: a desire to have children and the will to carry on their civilization, cultures, families, and faith. Today, it is difficult to find a Western nation where the native population is not dying as it is to find an Islamic nation where the native population is not exploding. The West may have learned what Islam knows not, but Islam remembers what the West has forgotten: “There is no vision but by faith.”

How does one sever a people’s roots? Answer: Destroy its memory. Deny a people the knowledge of who they are and where they came from.

In the Middle Ages, Ottoman Turks imposed on Balkan Christians a blood tax—one boy out of every five. Taken from their parents, the boys were raised as strict Muslims to become the fanatic elite soldiers of the Sultan, the Janissaries, who were then sent back to occupy and oppress the peoples who had borne them. George Orwell in the party slogan of Big Brother gave the formula for erasing memory, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

As Christianity began to die in the West, something else occurred: Western peoples began to stop having children. There appears to be a correlation between religious faith and large families. The more devout a people, whether Christian, Muslim, or Jewish, the higher its birth rate. In New Square, New York, in the first wholly Orthodox Jewish community in the United States, the average family has ten children. In Kostroma, Russia, Vladimir Alexseyev, father of a poster family of sixteen children, and his pregnant wife have a home full of icons. In the Baptist state of Texas, the birthrate among whites is higher than among white folks in sybarite California. Wherever secularism triumphs, populations begin to shrink and die.