I CANNOT imagine why the decision-makers of Europe don’t follow Church Times columnists on Twitter/X. They could learn so much. Earlier this year, after J. D. Vance’s performance at the Munich Security conference, Gerry Lynch wrote a simple summary of our new world: “The Atlantic Alliance is over, adapt or die.” Last week, Elon Musk retweeted a graphic that showed the peeling back of the EU flag to expose a swastika beneath, with a caption about the Fourth Reich. I don’t think he meant it the way I read it: as the moment in a Bond film when the supervillain reveals his plans.
More to the point, the US National Security Strategy was published, which makes explicit the hostile contempt in which the Trump administration holds Europe. In particular, it hates the European Union and the model of European social democracy, and sees the future in terms of a racialised apocalypse: “Economic decline is eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure. The larger issues facing Europe include activities of the European Union and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty, migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence. Should present trends continue, the continent will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less.”
Wolfgang Münchau, writing in UnHerd, has a well-informed take, unsympathetic to both sides: “Europe’s politics are stagnating. Yes, there is a real danger of ‘civilizational erasure’, but the cause is not immigration. Instead, it’s this overdependence on the US; this has created political inertia and a collection of failing states.
“Americans see Europe as the world’s museum. And Europeans have long conformed to this stereotype. They are the champions of preservation and conservation, obsessed with protecting listed buildings and medieval villages, while at the same time suffering from housing shortages. There was a time when Europe’s classical music and literature was modern. But today, Europe is a cultural theme park, owned by American entertainment companies. That’s what I call civilisational erasure.”
Meanwhile, Kalshi, an American betting site, allows customers to bet against one another day by day on whether particular villages on the front line will be captured in the latest Russian offensive. The bets are settled using satellite imagery. The horrors of the war are turned into a virtual Colosseum, in which gladiators fight for the entertainment of the spectators. And these are the people lecturing us on the preservation of Christian civilisation.
Münchau thinks that we cannot, or at least will not, stop this colonisation. Western Europe, which once ruled the world, will end, as most empires do, in plundered ruins. And it will not be the poor and desperate immigrants who plunder us, but the richer and more powerful empires, whether they be China, Russia, or the US. All of them, of course, have an interest in playing up the divisions on racial, religious, and national lines, just as we did to the peripheries of our empires in our time.
This geopolitical shift is going to have profound religious consequences. In Europe, at least, Christianity is going to become a marker of black and white people, and Islam for brown people. (The situation in the US is more complicated, since the Hispanic minority there are both brown and Christian; so they must be demonised in other ways.)
The Church of England ought to be able to withstand this division, but it is fighting against its own past here. There is a reasonable argument that state Churches invented European nationalism quite as much as national armies did. There will always be a market for Churches that sanctify our most aggressive impulses.
YET people still write about the Church as though it were an organisation. A flurry of plug pieces for a Channel 4 documentary on John Smyth proved this yet again.
In The Times, Andrew Billen (who is usually very good) wrote that Smyth had been “recklessly exiled” to Africa by “the church”. Well, if the C of E can can exile anyone just like that, the Government should put it in charge of border security.
Sophie Barnes, in the Telegraph, was closer to accurate: “The family moved from Hampshire to Africa in 1984, after the Anglican church upheld complaints from his Winchester College victims”; but, again, one wants to ask, who is this “Anglican church”? The Iwerne trustees?