Ed West's "Is Christianity killing Europe?" - and Pope Francis's assertion that "religions don't want war - the others do"!

If you're an Anglican or a Catholic, you'll have heard the leader of your church encouraging you to take in a family of Syrian refugees. This will have resulted in a lot of soul-searching, as the reaction of most Anglicans and Catholics to the suggestion was undoubtedly, "Are you out of your freakin' mind, Your Holiness?" Being Christians, we then no doubt all felt jolly guilty about our lack of caritas (well, I didn't, but I'm not a very good Christian). The problem is that Christianity is a religion of inclusion, of universality - it welcomes everyone, even (or especially) sinners. It's a religion which offers comfort to outcasts, the despised, the friendless, the wretched of the earth: in marketing terms, that's its USP - extending the warm hand of friendship and lovingkindness to distressed immigrants fleeing a war-torn land is pretty near the top of its To Do list. But, as Ed West points out in his excellent Lapidomedia article, "Is Christianity killing Europe?", extending the warm hand of friendship willy-nilly to vast numbers of Muslim refugees (not to mention hordes of economic migrants) is proving to be a suicidal act of "pathological altruism".

As Ed West puts it, "As a Catholic I’ve come to the conclusion that our contemporary version of the faith, and the actions of our religious leaders, are actually threatening our future." It's a longish article, and I would urge you to read all of it, but this extract contains the main thrust of West's argument:

This universalism is what makes European Christian countries so nice to live in, but the downside is what is called ‘pathological altruism’; that is, altruism that harms the interests of one’s own group and favours people who might not reciprocate. This did not matter while the simple fact of geography kept different parts of the world distant, and when newcomers were expected to conform, but in the jet age – and especially the smart phone age – it presents a serious weakness.

The downside of Christian universalism is that it invites settlement from people who are themselves clannish and divide the world into an in-group and out-group, often between the believers and non-believers.

And for all the sympathy one might feel for the migrants as individuals, there is no way such large-scale movement of clannish people into decadent societies will not cause social unrest.

Importing significant numbers of people from outside Europe is clearly not in our continent’s interests, yet it is hard to make the moral argument because of the logic that we should not discriminate against the outsider, something ingrained in us by Christianity.

In some ways this is a misreading of the faith, for Christianity is about voluntary altruism, whereas forcing one’s poorer countrymen to make the sacrifices (and it would inevitably fall on the poor, whose neighbourhoods would be home to the refugees), is not.

But that is a complex argument to make, and it is one that no bishop does.

And, of course, they damn well should. I - and, I'm sure, many other Christians - are fed up to the back teeth with the goofy, namby-pamby wetness of Christian religious leaders who have time and again proved themselves unwilling to consider the practical consequences of what they keep urging their followers to do: instead of doing some hard thinking and coming up with sensible advice, they've invariably plumped for feelgood platitudes. Justin Welby has been bad enough in this regard, but Pope Francis, in particular, has been wantonly, fecklessly silly throughout the refugee crisis.

Today, as he arrived in Poland, the Pope addressed the issue of the grotesque murder of an old and saintly-sounding French priest by Muslim savages as he was celebrating the Mass, and said something bracingly realistic:

"The word we hear a lot is insecurity, but the real word is war. We must not be afraid to say the truth, the world is at war because it has lost peace."

I emitted a gasp of relief at hearing those words. At last - the truth! But then the pontiff added the following:

"When I speak of war I speak of wars over interests, money, resources, not religion. All religions want peace, it's the others who want war."

What? Who are these "others", exactly? Islamic State is waging a war in the name of a specific religion. Okay, the version of Islam fuelling Isil is a decidedly fundamentalist one, but it's supported by many of the verses in Islam's holy book, the Koran - and by many Muslims. An ICM poll published yesterday showed that up to 16% of French citizens are sympathetic towards Isil - that's 16% of all French citizens, not just French Muslims. That alarming figure rises to 27% - more than a quarter - of all French citizens aged between 18 and 24!

Granted, the conflicts in the Arab world and the horrors currently being perpetrated there and, increasingly, in Europe undoubtedly have a lot to do with a pathological fear of modernity (including the emancipation of women, the acceptance of homosexuality, the loss of unearned status amongst young, angry-looking men with beards, and the terror of having to be responsible for your own thoughts, beliefs and actions) - but pretending that what's happening in the Middle East has nothing to do with Islam is either a sign of cowardice or stupidity, or both. The Catholic church - all Christians - really require the world's most significant Christian leader to stop spouting vague Marxist liberation theology clichés and start telling the truth. For God's sake. And ours.