Or, the Decline of the West to you, bub. (It’s better in German.) Both Victor and Mark touched upon this subject yesterday, which brought to mind something Mark said years ago when we were interviewed together on a cable channel in New York City about the works of Andrew Lloyd Webber (this was back in our music critic/theater critic days). Discussing Webber’s passion for English churches — and paying to keep them open as objects of architectural interest if nothing else — the subject of religion came up and Mark remarked that “Britain is an almost wholly Godless country today.” Mark, more clearly than anyone else at the time, could see the future of Christianity in Britain — and it was a future as bleak and as empty as these church pews. Radical Islam was just starting to rear its head — thanks to Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, security was tight at our publisher, Viking Penguin, in London when I was on my Lloyd Webber biography tour — but few saw just how ugly it would get.

Let me just observe re the religious question that when your faith’s own clergy no longer believes in its own dogma or behaves publicly in ways absolutely antithetical to the church’s bedrock teachings (gleefully and lovingly chronicled by the New York Times at the link), then it’s no wonder the parishioners eventually come to think they’re being had, and start staying away. Worse, their progeny don’t even bother to come. Worst of all, they don’t even bother to have progeny. When a faith has lost its moral authority, it’s nothing more than an expensive game of dress-up and let’s-pretend in very large and very empty buildings that even God has had the good sense to flee. I’m a big fan of the gentle Pope Francis, but it’s Urban II the Church needs right about now — and he would put some fannies in the seats.

But it’s Victor’s conclusion I’d like to address:

Is not that the ultimate paradox: The solution to the sort of violence we saw in Britain and Sweden the past week, or to the endless acrimony over “comprehensive immigration reform,” is that the Western hosts will so accede to multiculturalism that the West will be no longer unique – and therefore no longer a uniquely desirable refuge for its present legions of schizophrenic admiring critics. If the immigrant from Oaxaca can recreate Oaxaca in Tulare, or the Pakistani second-generation British subject can carve out Sharia in the London boroughs, or a suburb of Stockholm is to be like in one in Damascus, then would there be any reason to flee to Tulare, London, or Stockholm?

To which I would answer yes. Because what if the goal is not to “flee to” Tulare, London, or Stockholm, but to eliminate those places by changing their essential nature from Western to whatever brand of home-country or ummah religio-cultural jingoism a sizable portion of the immigrants subscribe to? Along the southwest border of the U.S., some Mexicans have spoken for decades of a new Reconquista, effected peacefully via immigration and birthrates until the question of who shall be sovereign is no longer open. And does anyone seriously argue that the Muslims flocking to Sweden and elsewhere in Scandinavia have the slightest desire to “become” Swedish, Norwegian, or Danish? Or is a far more likely explanation that some come for the free stuff, a few to better themselves — “immigration” in the sense most Americans understand the term — while others form the advance guard of an invading force that seeks to occupy the city, county, or country and then transform it into precisely what it was that they “left behind”?

Seen that way, there’s no paradox at all.