The way our society is going, before the end of the century - perhaps well before the end - we will be an Islamic state.
It is conventional to date the decline of the influence of Christianity in Britain to the horror of the Somme. The Great War led British Christians to doubt their previous creeds about the unique merits of their faith and of a society based upon that faith, and the idea that such merits were worth killing and dying for. Robbed of the evangelising and civilising impulse (for what Good News was there to tell about the trenches? And was Ypres really “civilisation”?), and burdened by debts, the intellectual drivers of Empire were also gone. Amongst the British establishment as a whole, there was a catastrophic loss of self-confidence, and the events of the Depression were a further blow. After the Second World War we became progressively more and more obsessed with the Nazis as their defeat was the one unambiguous Good we could still believe our Society had done – a brittle straw to hold on to as we sank further and further into the waters of Nihilism.
In an Age of Nihilism, Atheism achieves an airtime it would otherwise be denied. Atheism is of course so intellectually unappealing that only very clever people can believe in it. It steadfastly refuses to even attempt an answer to all the key questions every human heart raises, preferring to stick its fingers in its ears and cry “I’m not listening! I’m not listening!” Such bankruptcy of thought and poverty of ambition means that almost no ordinary person is ever an Atheist, and this will always be so. But, absent any confident re-assertion and re-application of Christian doctrines in the modern age, Atheism has the superficial luxury of attacking, unopposed, old-fashioned varieties of Christianity the precise doctrines of which were developed in response to debates that are no longer current and hence easy to caricature as irrelevant to the modern world.
Ordinary people, therefore, see the negative version of Atheism – its attacks upon Christianity – but cannot accept its incoherent totality. Thus Atheism robs ordinary people of the sense of meaning that Christianity provides without offering anything in its place. Nihilism is all that remains, along with the superstition and vague sense that there ought to be something, some “force” or other, that Atheism can never take away.
But no society can stay mired in Nihilism and superstition indefinitely. If Christianity will not offer to play its role in leading and moulding society, there are other candidates. The divisions we see in Islam, Shiite and Sunni, Sufi and Wahhabi, reflect a faith that is dynamic and confident, expanding its application to the modern world, re-interpreting and re-applying its doctrines, debating within itself what is the best way to go, eager to take society by the scruff of the neck and tell it “This way.” All societies find such decisive leadership attractive. A few more decades of Nihilism will leave Britain desperate to be told an answer.
Having achieved initial penetration into Britain through immigration, Islam is already moving on to significant organic growth, through conversion of the incumbent population. Within a few decades it is perfectly plausible that there will be more muslims amongst the ethnically European population than amongst the ethnically Arab, Persian, African or Indian. We already see a fascination with Islam amongst the British Establishment, and as its numerical significance increases the Establishment will turn that fascination into action.
I shall finish with a very brief counter-scenario. Over the century, China may become the most important country in the world. In China, Christianity is expanding very rapidly, particularly amongst the elites, who are likely to become almost universally Christian within a couple of decades. It is just possible that, under the influence of Chinese Christianity, Western Christianity will recover its self-confidence and seek once again to mould society.
The race is on.
