Every time someone in Europe stands up these years and says we have a problem with Islam, the conversation moves almost instantly to the same place.
Toward paragraphs. Toward section 266b, toward headscarf bans, toward sharia monitoring, toward deportation and repatriation, toward new demands, new rules, new laws, new restrictions, most recently toward the term remigration.
The reflexes are technocratic - and they seem responsible and they gather broad support. Especially if they're made by nationally known politicians and made with performative anger on social media. Because they resemble action. They resemble healthy civic duty. And they always take the conversation the same way.
But allow me a brief moment to expand that frame - and explain something that is rarely addressed. Because it is - in my understanding - precisely there we go wrong. Not because the paragraphs themselves are wrong -
But because we believe that's where the battle must be fought.
Keep your tongue straight in your mouth here. Focus for the few minutes it takes to read, before you decide what I'm writing means.
You can do that afterward.
What we face cannot be solved with legislation.
Because.
Islam, understood as the political-theological system that does not permit separation of religion from law, society and state power, rises against Europe on a metaphysical level.
EVERYTHING that happens within this system is in its essence about what a human being is. What a society is. What truth is. What order is. What one must. What one may not.
It is a revealed truth - unbending, eternal, final. A total claim about all of reality, right down to the bottom of the creation of all things, and about Man's role in it. A complete worldview from top to bottom.
It is as deep as anything can reach inside Man. Because it is not an idea or a politics. It is how one lives a life in accordance with the deepest thing Man knows and is capable of experiencing -
God.
Or for Muslims - Allah.
For the believing Muslim, this is not an opinion one has. It is reality itself.
And we respond to this with… a well-formulated but somewhat bloodless and thin-armed announcement… from… a Ministry of Integration.
And believe that can solve it...
I will not write cuckoo.
So I refrain from that.
And smile instead a little at the naivety - presumably along with every true believing Muslim in the kingdom.
Regardless. It is not a question of being too strict or too mild in the answer we give here. It is a question of us answering AT LEAST one category too low. We attempt to meet an ontological demand with a small juridical note. And a juridical note cannot bear the weight of what comes toward us - and it's not because the juridical or legislation as such is weak.
It is because it is wrongly dimensioned. It simply does not capture the magnitude it must contend with.
I want to cut deeper into this, because it is not easy to grasp. Especially if you are a well-trained and conditioned Northern European and Scandinavian who has always done as told. Because legislation has already more or less followed your own values and worldview. You have never been forced to feel a distance between the one and the other.
And to that comes something even more important. Most of us have never spent time thinking about what faith actually is. How deep it reaches into us as humans. Or what it means that something can come toward us precisely at that level.
Yes. Also in you.
The difference between the two categories is simple.
Legislation - the juridical - says what you may.
A worldview - the ontological - tells you what you are.
Law regulates (perhaps) your behavior. But Worldview defines your reality. These are two completely different levels. And when something comes toward us that tells us what a Human is, what a society must be, what God demands, and we respond with a paragraph about how many hours of language instruction are obligatory. Or a cross-ministerial committee that will map the scope of the problem over three years. Or the eight thousandth debate program in prime time with three slightly woolly experts and a string of politicians who indignantly believe it's about racism.
Then we're not answering too softly.
We're answering in entirely the wrong place.
It is as if someone stepped into your living room and told you that your family, your faith and your nation ceased to exist from today, and you responded by pointing out that he had forgotten to take off his shoes, and would he kindly do so.
And here lies the other trap, which is worse than the futility of our answer and response.
When a civilization attempts to solve a spiritual problem with technical means, it does not merely fail neutrally. Its answer almost always ends by deforming itself.
Think of it this way. As a solution to the problem, the state begins to monitor, register, restrict, control and suspect. It builds apparatuses and systems that promise to protect society, the citizen, you and me. But when it has finished building this entire apparatus, it is no longer what it wanted to protect. Because the medicine has become the disease.
We end up with a Europe that has saved itself by ceasing to be itself. And I do not write that lightly - because it is not a possible future. It is the entirely specific exact future we are currently moving into, if we do not stop.
And right here lies the question that almost no one in public conversation dares to ask. A very simple question, which I have addressed again and again these past weeks. Or years.
WHAT . IS . IT . WE . ARE . DEFENDING?
Most cannot answer.
They start by saying something superficial like "democracy". They say "freedom". They say "values". That sort of thing. But if you ask further and deeper into it, to understand what they actually mean, like - where does democracy come from, where does freedom come from, where do values come from, then the answers get thin. Some who have thought about it a bit begin to talk about the Enlightenment and the Constitution and the UN Declaration of Human Rights, as if it fell from heaven in 1948.
It did not. None of it did. It ALL grew out of something. And this "something" is a very particular conception of what a Human is.
And that conception is - Christian.
The individual person's inalienable and inviolable worth. Conscience as the highest inner authority. Equality before the law. The possibility of forgiveness. The stranger as the one we have an obligation toward. The servant's priority over the ruler's. The suffering one as the one who sees truth most clearly.
Everything we call European values, everything most people walk around believing is neutrally human, is Christian-shaped. Even though we have forgotten it. Even when we deny it. Even when we are atheists, we are Christian atheists. That is the foundation we stand on. And what we long ago stopped relating to, that we stand on.
But we do.
That is the first thing we must recognize. The simplest level. What we might call the symbolic recognition. And acknowledgment. Just to see where we come from. Just to say this aloud.
But there is a level beneath that again, and this is where it becomes truly serious. Because a civilization cannot live long on a symbol without source. A symbol without its origin is like a tree that has been dug up and placed in a vase. It can stand beautifully for a time. It might even bloom once more. But it dies.
As surely as amen in..
That is what is happening with the West right now. We are trying to live on the afterglow of something we have rejected. Or perhaps worse. Which we have been taught by the Man on Television's "Culture" that we must reject. We are trying to harvest fruit from a tree whose roots we have severed. And that lasts one generation, MAYBE two. No more do we get. Then it's over.
Then the de-Christianization of Europe is complete. And the vacuum established so a new metaphysic - another worldview - can take over the space.
If we are to endure, there is something we must acknowledge. Something far more concrete than the fluffy "Christian values." Something far more unyielding. And it is difficult. I understand that well. I myself spent 42 years of my life just to reach the question. And from there five more years before I recognized the tip of it.
At the beginning of our civilization there does not stand an idea. There stands a person. There stands a man from Nazareth, whom his contemporaries called God. And what he said and what he was, ordered - that is, oriented, sorted, structured and explained - an entire world's understanding of what a Human is.
Logos. The Word. The order in which reality is meaningful, and in which truth is not an abstraction but a person one can meet. That is what we have forgotten. That is the recognition that lies beneath all other recognitions. And it is the only one large enough to meet what comes toward us.
Because it is at that level - in that depth of Reality - Islam comes rising. With an explanation that reaches from Beginning to Eternity. About the Whole. And no small legislation ever dams that up.
I know what I'm asking. For most it is an enormous leap from where they stand. But one does not need to land all the way to begin walking. It is enough to be willing to explore it - as a search for truth, as faith, or because it is the only way back to who we are.
Because we cannot legislate around it. We cannot technocratize our way out of it. And we cannot restrict ourselves to a solution without suffocating ourselves in the attempt.
We can only remember Him.
❤️🔥🪽
...
Good evening, friends.
Hope you have had a lovely Ascension Day and had time to take a little break from it all. ☀️
