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.
Towards paragraphs. Towards paragraph 266b, towards headscarf bans, towards sharia surveillance, towards deportation and repatriation, towards new demands, new rules, new laws, new restrictions, most recently towards 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 done with performative anger on social media. Because they look like action. They look like healthy civic spirit. And they always take the conversation the same way.
But allow me a brief moment to expand that frame - and explain something that's rarely addressed. Because it is - in my understanding - precisely there we go wrong. Not because the paragraphs themselves are wrong -
But because we think that's where the battle should stand.
Hold your horses here. Focus for the few minutes it takes to read, before you decide what I'm writing means.
You can do that afterwards.
What we're facing 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, all the way to the bottom of creation itself, 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's 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 holds. It is reality itself.
And we respond to this with... a well-formulated but somewhat anaemic and thin-armed announcement... from.. a Ministry of Integration.
And think that can solve it...
I won't write *cuckoo*.
So I'll refrain.
And smile instead a bit at the naivety - presumably together with every true believing Muslim in the kingdom.
Anyway. It's not a question of being too strict or too lenient in the answer we give here. It's a question of us answering AT LEAST one category too low. We try to meet an ontological demand with a small juridical note. And a juridical note cannot bear the weight of what's coming towards us - and it's not because the juridical or legislation as such is weak.
It's because it's wrongly dimensioned. It simply doesn't capture the size it needs to contend with.
I'd like to carve this deeper, because it's not easy to grasp. Especially if you're a well-trained and conditioned Northern European and Scandinavian who's always done as told. Because legislation has already more or less followed one's own values and worldview. One has never had to feel a distance between the one and the other.
And then there's something even more important. Most of us have never spent time thinking about what faith actually is. How deep it reaches in us as human beings. Or what it means that something can come towards us precisely at that level.
Yes. In you too.
The difference between the two categories is simple.
Legislation - the juridical - says what you may.
A worldview - the ontological - tells you what you are.
The law regulates (perhaps) your behaviour. But the Worldview defines your reality. They are two completely different levels. And when something comes towards us telling us what a Human Being is, what a society should 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 over three years will map the problem's extent. Or the eight thousandth debate programme in prime time with three slightly indignant experts and a string of politicians who indignantly think it's about racism.
Then we're not responding too softly.
We're responding in the completely wrong place.
It's 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'd forgotten to take his shoes off, and would he please do so.
And here lies the other trap, which is worse than the uselessness of our answer and response.
When a civilisation tries to solve a spiritual problem with technical means, it doesn't just fail neutrally. Its answer almost always ends up deforming itself.
Think of it this way. As a solution to the problem, the state begins to surveil, register, limit, control and suspect. It builds apparatuses and systems that promise to protect society, the citizen, you and me. But when it's finished building this entire apparatus, it's 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 don't write this lightly - because it's not a possible future. It's the completely specific exact future we're heading into right now, if we don't stop.
And right here lies the question that almost no one in public conversation dares ask. A completely simple question, which I've addressed again and again these last few weeks. Or years.
WHAT . IS . IT . WE . ARE . DEFENDING?
Most can't answer.
They start by saying something superficial like "democracy". They say "freedom". They say "the 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 the values come from, the answers become thin. Some who've thought about it a bit start talking about the Enlightenment and about the Constitution and about the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as if it fell from heaven in 1948.
It didn't. None of it did. It ALL grew out of something. And this "something" is a quite specific conception of what a Human Being 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 towards. The servant's priority over the ruler's. The suffering one as the one who sees truth most clearly.
All that we call European values, all that most people walk around thinking is neutral human, is Christianly shaped. Even though we've forgotten it. Even when we deny it. Even when we're atheists, we're Christian atheists. That's the foundation we stand on. And that we long ago stopped relating to, that we stand on.
But we do.
That's the first thing we must recognise. The simplest level. What we could call the symbolic recognition. And acknowledgment. Just to see where we come from. Just to say this aloud.
But there's a level beneath that again, and this is where it gets really serious. Because a civilisation cannot long live on a symbol without source. A symbol without its origin is like a tree that's been dug up and placed in a vase. It can stand beautifully for a while. It might even bloom once more. But it dies.
As surely as amen in..
That's what's happening to the West right now. We're trying to live on the afterglow of something we've rejected. Or perhaps worse. That we've been taught by the Man in the Television's "Culture" that we should reject. We're trying to harvest fruits from a tree whose roots we've cut. And it lasts one generation, MAYBE two. We get no more. Then it's over.
Then the de-Christianisation of Europe is complete. And the void established so a new metaphysics - another worldview - can take its place.
If we're to endure, there's something we must acknowledge. Something far more concrete than the fluffy "Christian values." Something far more inescapable. And it's difficult. I understand that. I myself spent 42 years of my life just reaching the question. And from there another five years before I recognised the point of it.
At the beginning of our civilisation there doesn't 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 - a whole world's understanding of what a Human Being 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's what we've forgotten. That's the recognition that lies beneath all the other recognitions. And it's the only one large enough to meet what's coming towards us.
Because it's at that level - at that depth of Reality - Islam comes rising. With an explanation that reaches from the Beginning to Eternity. About the Whole. And no small legislation ever dams that up.
I know what I'm asking. For most it's an enormous leap from where they stand. But one doesn't need to land all the way to begin walking. It's enough to be willing to explore it - as a search for truth, as faith, or because it's the only way back to who we are.
Because we can't legislate around it. We can't technocratise our way out of it. And we can't restrict ourselves to a solution without suffocating ourselves in the attempt.
We can only remember Him.
❤️🔥🪽
...
Good evening, friends.
Hope you've had a lovely Ascension Day and had time to take a bit of a break from it all. ☀️