Christian Hospitality and the Decline of Native European Populations

In October of 2013, a 66 foot long fishing boat filled with over 500 migrants left Libya and headed for port in Italy. As the ship neared the island of Lampedusa, the engine gave out and the ship began to sink. The boat eventually capsized and upwards of 360 people lost their lives before the Italian rescue mission could arrive. Reports indicated that the people on board had each paid around $3,000 to be smuggled across the Mediterranean and onto the European mainland. Since January of this year, 3,000 people are reported to have drowned attempting to reach Europe. This event was yet another in a long line of similar tragedies that inspired the Italian government to increase efforts to save migrants. Since its implementation, operation “Mare Nostrum” has spent $11 million a month or about $114 million in total. The operation has successfully saved the lives of around 100,000 people crossing over the sea into Italy.  This operation was taken up by the Italian government without the aid of the EU and was only intended to be a short term answer to the issue. The end of that program has arrived. Italy has decided to cut the program as the number of new arrivals from across the sea reaches record levels.

This piece of news caused me to reflect on the meaning of hospitality and the ethical issue faced by European governments in dealing with tragic loss of life of unwanted migrants seeking to enter the countries illegally. How might the bible be used to inform ones thinking about the meaning of Christian hospitality and how hospitality in accepting refugees might be different from accepting new permanent citizens at the potential expense of the whole nation? These topics became part of American conversations in the face of the tens of thousands of children who walked to the United States over the summer. A major ethical concern, other than what happens to illegal immigrants once they arrive, is the risks they must face along their journeys to their destinations. Is there an ethical solution to control immigration while still combating illegal and dangerous trafficking gangs? In the Italian case mentioned above, it seems that humanitarian aid to those already in the water does not only fail to address the greater issue of incessant migration from places like Africa and the Middle East, it even encourages migrants to seek passage in potentially dangerous conditions with the knowledge that they will likely be rescued by the European authorities.

Caldwell quotes two passages from the Bible to describe the Christian tradition of hospitality. Leviticus 19:33-34 commands that one should care for strangers and treat them “as one born among you.” In Matthew 25:31-46, the consequences of rejecting travelers in need are made clear. With these passages in mind, it seems clear that the answer to the ethical question of accepting refugees and migrants is obvious. Good Christians should take these people in and care for them as their own. Caldwell comments that “hospitality is meant to protect travelers in hostile territory; it is not meant to give large groups of visitors – who may include militants, freeloaders, and opportunists – the run of the place.” As I mentioned in the previous summary posts, Immigrants to Europe were initially welcomed by the native population. After their history during and after World War Two, Europeans felt an strong sense of responsibility to aid political refugees from war-torn nations. Caldwell calls this the “reflexive courtesy accorded guests. Immigrants stayed long enough to lose their ritualized role as ‘guests.’”

I would argue, and Caldwell seems to agree, that, rather than being a blessing that nations actively seek to attain, diversity can be a strain on the cohesion of a society. Natural human compassion drives people to tolerate those that are different from themselves, but it does not always cause people to fully accept or trust outsiders. Caldwell cites the work of Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam, claiming that “people living under conditions of ethnic diversity ‘hunker down.’ They trust their neighbors less and are less inclined to devote their money to common or social causes.” While a biblical argument could be made that Christians should be above such tendencies, the empirical evidence seems to suggest that an excess of tolerance in allowing for mass influx of people from different cultures could hinder the process of building real Christian communities. Rather than encouraging communities to become more accepting of outsiders, growth of minority populations causes civil strife and mistrust. As we discussed in class, being equal and one in Christ does not necessarily mean that everyone must be exactly the same. Male and female are both equals, but they have different functions and play different roles in the unfolding of Gods plan for humanity. I believe the same is true for the different ethnic human populations. Each group contributes its cultural heritage to the human story and the loss of a single culture should be regarded as a tragedy. This brings me to the main issue of mass immigration into Europe in Caldwell’s book. Low birthrates in western nations combined with the influx of foreign migrants with higher birthrates both in their host countries and globally could change the character of European society. European culture is in danger of being fundamentally altered and therefore is under threat of a being lost.

The following is an excerpt from a previous class assignment of mine regarding the aging population in Europe:

In 1950 there were around 2.5 billion people living on the planet. After 60 years, that number has soared to over 7 billion. In 2012, the birthrate in China was 12.31 and 20.6 in India. Demographers estimate that the total count of humans will reach 9.1 billion by 2050 (European Commission ). However, this growth of population has not been evenly distributed to all regions of the world. Up to 95% of the population growth by 2050 will come from today’s developing countries. While the populations of all other parts of the world have been increasing and are projected to keep rising, European nations are experiencing a fall in their numbers. In 2011, 5.9 million babies were born in the EU which is a birthrate of only 1.59. A minimum population growth rate of 2.1 is required to prevent a nation from becoming extinct without migration (European Commission ).  People in Europe are also living longer. On average, Europeans are living decades longer than their predecessors. A combination of a low birthrate and an increased life expectancy leads to a population that is aging and shrinking. The EU population is expected to drop 14% from 729 million to 628 million. This decrease will cause a loss of 25% of the working age population while the number of elderly will increase from 101 million to 173 million over the next 50 years (Bermingham). Europe is facing a demographic crisis that will force EU governments to rework their extensive welfare systems and immigration policies to accommodate for a large increase of retirement age workers with fewer young people paying into social security. Current pay-as-you-go style pension systems that rely on a constant source of public income will face the problem of an aging population. More people will reach pension age without a sustainable amount of new contributors. By 2050 in Europe, the number of working age individuals will drop from four for every person above 65 years of age to only two. The annual average growth rate of the EU-25 GDP will fall from the 2004-2010 rates of 2.4% to 1.2% for the years 2030-2050 (European Commission ).

This decline in birthrates seems to have a correlation to the rise of the sexual revolution that took place in western nations. While this is not necessarily the ethical issue I’m focusing on in this section, it is interesting to note the impact of changing notions of gender roles on population growth patterns.  In class we mentioned the potential impact of pornography on birthrates. While this might be a contributing factor, especially in Japan, I believe the effects of changing opportunities and lifestyles of women are the main factors.  Marriage does not provide the level of security it did in the past and it is becoming less frequent in general. Changing ideas about the purpose of marriage and relationships in general have caused westerners to delay starting a family with children, opting in favor of more casual relationships and protected sexual intercourse.

4th Quarter

In chapter 9 of his book, Caldwell discusses the topic of tolerance and impunity. The chapter begins with the issue of the growing involvement of European Muslims in the politics of their host countries. European governments are increasingly having to answer to and gain approval from foreign religious leaders when they are making domestic policies. As I have mentioned in previous posts, the Muslim community in Europe remains very much connected and concerned with the issues faced by Muslims in the Middle East. The consequence of this is the ability of a growing Muslim population to shape the issues in European politics to benefit their countries of origin over their European hosts. Issues relating to Islam are dealt with through intimidation, not the normal political process. Considerable percentages of Muslims, 36% in Britain, believe that execution of is a fitting punishment for religious crimes like apostasy. Violence and threats of violence are common ways of dealing with politicians, writers and professors who contradict Islamic dogma. Caldwell lists the 4 stages of prohibition regarding treatment of Islam:

1.      “Muslims must respect Muslim law.

2.      Members of the Muslim “community,” even if they are nonbelievers or if their allegiances lie with the larger national culture, must respect Islamic law.

3.      Non-Muslims must respect Muslim law

4.      Non-Muslims must be above even the suspicion of not respecting Muslim law”

The aftermath of September 11^th was a moment that Europeans really began to become skeptical about the political attitudes of their new Muslim neighbors. Muslims held celebrations in some European neighborhoods and surveys found that the Muslims in Europe did not fully sympathize with the US after the attacks.

            The reemergence of anti-semitism in Europe is also directly linked to the growing Muslim population that supports political Islam.  Jews are victims of violent attacks in the streets and their property is vandalized by gangs. This use of violence is justified by Muslims claiming to be the “victims,” “Laboring under socioeconomic disadvantage in Europe as well as occupation in Palestine…. An increasing number of Muslims saw themselves, in fact, as the “new Jews.” Caldwell goes on to write “the ideology of diversity and racial harmony…. Now became the means through which anti-Jewish fury was reinjected into European life.” The Jews themselves were the new Nazis. This situation is made even more ironic when one considers that, as Caldwell puts it, “an immigration of the sort that brought Muslims in such numbers to Europe would have been unthinkable without the anguished moral self-examination the Holocaust brought in its wake.” Anti-Semitism has been advanced under the banner of anti-racism.

3rd Quarter - Dual loyalties and gender equality

            The development of television and the internet has often accelerated the assimilation of minority groups into the broader society. However, the programs and information being accessed by the troubled immigrant communities discussed earlier appears to be assimilating non-Europeans into the cultural of “globalized Islam” rather than Western society. Muslims in Europe remain focused on issues of their homelands and other Muslim countries. They are increasingly identifying more with Muslims fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan than their fellow European citizens. Caldwell describes Islam as a “hyper-identity,” overshadowing all other loyalties and forging a sense of solidarity between Muslims around the world.

            The problem with this is the danger of dual-loyalties for European Muslims. Caldwell cites reports of 150 British nationals who were fighting as insurgents two years into the Iraq war. Skip forward several years and the current situation in the Middle East is now witnessing over 3,000 individuals from Europe joining ISIS in its Jihad as of late September, 2014. This demonstrates the problem of the radicalization of Muslims even after they have moved to Europe. Now fear of a terrorist attack in the United States and Europe is mounting and the disturbing number of volunteers ISIS is receiving from Europe is not doing much to improve relations between native Europeans and immigrant populations.

            Caldwell goes on to address the issue of differentiating extremists views on Islam and ‘real Islam.’ He states that “one reads about ‘poorly trained, mostly foreign imams’ who incite young men to terrorist or ‘poorly trained judges’ on sharia courts. The blame never falls on Islam itself but always on something aberrant, adventitious, exogenous, atypical, something imposed on it by an unrepresentative handful of nutcases, misinterpreters, Svengalis, and secret agents. The public is generally unconvinced.”  Caldwell asks “what religion requires expertise – even ‘training’- to keep it from being dangerous in the hands of its practitioners.” Although the native masses were skeptical of Islam, voicing these concerns was rarely done in public.

            In the spirit of secular government, European governments approached policies concerning religion using a system of trade-offs. Preventing students from wearing veils in public schools was achieved by a ban on displaying crosses on campuses as well. Tony Blair’s attempt to close down known radical Mosques was abandoned. Caldwell comments “no doubt it could have been arranged if the government had been able to find a few churches radical enough to close, too.” He makes a further point that “since atheists, agnostics, and Christians don’t use freedom of religion in Europe nowadays, freedom of religion comes to mean freedom of Islam.” Caldwell criticizes Western liberals for hoping Islam will modernize while “their regime of tolerance has erected a wall around Islam that protects it from all the external pressures that beset Christianity between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.” European politicians also attempt to equate criticism of Islam with racism and xenophobia. Furthermore, those who do ridicule Islam are confronted or at least threatened with physical violence in a way that criticism of Christianity could not match. This point was emphasized by the different responses to the controversy over a Danish newspapers publishing of cartoons depicting Mohammed in 2005. Muslims rioted, kidnaped, boycotted and created signs reading, “Massacre Those Who Insult Islam.” Western Europeans saw the controversy as an issue of Muslim intolerance while Muslims felt the issue was about Western disrespect.

            “The price for managing Islam would be paid in rights.” This is a point Caldwell makes several times. In order to secure social order, European governments must sacrifice the rights and traditions of its native citizens. One western value that Europe may refuse to concede to Islam is the equality of the sexes. Gender equality, as Caldwell puts it, “is the one area where Europeans retain both a deep suspicion of Muslim ways and a confidence in their own institutions that is free of self-doubt.” Still, Europe is having to pay a price to protect its young girls from backward traditions its immigrants have brought with them. Female genital mutilation has made defensible possible policies that would have previously been detestable to even consider. Policies requiring government supervised gynecological inspections of little girls have been brought forward, and subsequently rejected, as a measure to prevent forced mutilation.  It seems that in order to maintain a multicultural society, a nation must sacrifice the rights of its citizens to maintain social order.

Second Quarter - Clash of Civilizations and Cultural Segregation

The rise of Islam led to one the most quintessential examples of a clash of civilizations. It was the growing power of the Muslim world that propelled the center of Christian power to shift from the Mediterranean to the northern lands of Charlemagne. As the Roman Empire crumbled, the only source of defense Christendom had against the rising tide of Islam would come from newly converted Nordic peoples. It was Charlemagne’s own ancestor, Charles “The Hammer” Martel who led his Frankish army to victory over the Umayyad Caliphate at the Battle of Tours in southern France in 732. The threat of Islamic dominance created the very idea of Christendom that would unite Europeans against a common arch-enemy. From this conflict would arise seven bloody crusades and 1,400 years of continuous Jihad.

Caldwell then returns to the post-war period of mass immigration of Muslims into Europe. He highlights the growing proportion of young Europeans with foreign born parents in all countries in Western Europe. At the time of Caldwell’s writing, the total Muslim population of Europe was about 20 million including native populations in the Balkans. He cites the U.S. National Intelligence Center’s claim that this number is expected to double by 2025. The sheer scale of the immigration over such a short period of time has been creating conditions of social and cultural conflict. An example of how this change in demographics is changing national characteristics is the situation in Austria. Experts from the Vienna Institute of Demography claim that Islam will become the majority religion of people in Austria under the age of 15 by the middle of the century and that the percentage of Catholics would drop from 90% of the population in the twentieth century to under 50% in the twenty-first.  

As I mentioned in my previous post, parallels exist between the situation of African-Americans and the immigrant populations in Europe. Large apartment housing projects, constructed to house industrial workers, turned into breeding grounds for crime and lawless zones. Most examples of this type of conditions are found in France. There are, as Caldwell writes, “areas where the police would not go – more from reluctance to provoke unrest than from fear or indifference.” Contrary to the views of European elites of new immigrants as an enriching and revitalizing force, these ghetto-like areas of crime were a direct result of the massive influx of new citizens who became isolated from the rest of society. Caldwell compares the 1995 French film La Haine (“Hate”) to the American West Side Story in that they both contained unrealistic depictions of violence that was contrary to the actual situation of brutal gang violence.

Caldwell then deals with the issue of ethnic segregation. Multiculturalist lobby groups attempted to argue that London was becoming less segregated, claiming that a neighborhood should not be considered segregated simply due to the lower number of native white residence. Caldwell claims this argument is wrong because:

A neighborhood with no native English people can be diverse, but it cannot be integrated you define your terms so that any neighborhood with a large number of minorities in it can be called “mixed,” then any increase in minority population will result in an increase in mixed neighborhoods, which can be presented as a boon for social harmony, no matter whether the new-comers integrate or not.

This use of statistics by social science was interpreted by many natives as a way of “bullying people into disbelieving what they were seeing with their own eyes.”

            The question is now “whose fault was this isolation?” Although non-Europeans are well represented in many professions, the most recent generations seem to be falling back into “parallel worlds.” That is, the process of assimilation seems to be going in reverse in some places. Caldwell quotes a journalist saying “A lack of job qualifications is readily excused by alleged discrimination on part of the Germans – and the result is a growing aggressiveness from, say, young Turks, which then leads to rejection in fact.” This is one of the great problems with societies dealing with multiculturalism. The same problem is faced in the United States, where a cycle of discrimination leads the minority group to perceive even greater levels of discrimination, breeding distrust and strengthening the pervasiveness of “ethnic islands.” A solution to the problem of different people simply living next to each other to a situation where different people actually develop intimate bonds remains evasive and all attempts of forcing interactions has proved ineffective. The level of prejudice faced by the initial wave of immigrants and refugees in Europe was minor compared to the history of discrimination faced by the waves of immigrants to the United States. The children of immigrants in Europe are viewed with more suspicion today than their foreign-born parents were when they arrived. Consecutive generations seem to become more isolated and ideologically separatist than the ones before. Caldwell asserts: “that is where Islam came in.”