How Different Would Europe be without Christianity?

John Stonestreet | BreakPoint | Friday, April 29, 2016

How Different Would Europe be without Christianity?

Is Europe a continent? This is not a trick question.


















The most famous example of this “inevitable opposition” is, of course, the Crusades. While the Crusades are endlessly debated, one thing about them isn’t: The European forces saw themselves primarily as a force of Christians, which was their shared identity and basis for unity.


Christianity was the source of the “cultural and political” elements that make Europe a continent and not simply a glorified peninsula at the end of the Eurasian landmass.


And that prompts the obvious question: What do you call Europe without Christianity? Kaplan’s answer, in keeping with his 2012 book, “The Revenge of Geography,” is that “classical geography is organically reasserting itself . . . [reuniting] the Mediterranean Basin, including North Africa and the Levant, with Europe.”


That reunification is being hastened, of course, by waves of hundreds of thousands of Syrian and African migrants, who by the way, “have no desire to be Christian.” This phenomenon threatens “to undermine the fragile social peace” as well as undermine the modern European project.


If so, it’s a self-inflected wound. European elites have long worked overtime to downplay their Christian heritage, and have “used idealistic rhetoric to deny the forces of religion and ethnicity.” The most famous example of this was the preamble to the EU’s constitution, which omitted any mention of Christianity as a source of Europe’s “values.”


This is, historically-speaking, nonsense. It’s also self-destructive since, because, as Kaplan tells us, Christianity is one of the forces “that provided European states with their own internal cohesion.”


Without Christianity, Europe is hobbled in its attempts to resist the “reassertion of classical geography.” In other words, if Europe is eventually “islamicized,” as many predict, it will only be because it was first “de-Christianized.”





Publication date