European communion: Islamophobes rejoice! EU countries are becoming more Christian.

• Author: Longman, Phillip
• Position: Book review

God's Continent: Christianity, Islam, and Europe's Religious Crisis by Philip Jenkins Oxford University Press, 352 pp.

Americans of all political stripes tend to see what they want to see in the European Union. For progressives, its example is supposed to show how a robust welfare state, including universal health care, is consistent with prosperity. It's also supposed to show how separation of church and state, multilateralism, multiculturalism, opposition to the death penalty, embrace of gay marriage, state-sponsored preschool, gun control, the Kyoto Treaty, and other progressive causes are all consistent with a just and sustainable civilization--indeed, with becoming a "moral superpower."

And so we have received books like Mark Leonard's Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century (2005), which extols the EU's ability to attract new nations into its orbit and convert them to its secular, humanistic values by force of moral example. "The EU has a way of accommodating and nurturing diversity in a liberal way," Leonard explains. "It has a set of norms that are essentially about respecting difference--the rule of law, human rights, etc., which it embodies in its relations with other countries."

Americans holding traditional religious and conservative values, meanwhile, have their worldview confirmed by a different vision of Europe. It's a Europe that forgot to have children and is now well on the way to committing slow-motion "autogenocide," that is overrun by hostile immigrants, that is economically stagnant, that can no longer afford its welfare state, that is militarily irrelevant, and that at the end of the day cannot even find the voice to defend its most politically correct values, such as freedom of speech and sexual equality, when attacked by Islamic fundamentalists.

And so we get books like Mark Steyn's America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It (2006), in which the conservative columnist writes Europe's obituary, ascribing its death to godlessness, narcissism, relativism, pacifism, and willful sterility. "Europe by the end of this century will be a continent after the neutron bomb," Steyn writes. "The grand buildings will still be standing but the people who built them will be gone. And long before the Maldive Islands are submerged by 'rising sea levels' every Spaniard and Italian will be six feet under." This spring, conservative Walter Laqueur published a more sober and mournful obituary, The Last Days of Europe: Epitaph for an...