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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Roland Shirk</title>
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		<title>Losing Faith and Secular Dhimmitude</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/roland-shirk/losing-faith-and-secular-dhimmitude-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=losing-faith-and-secular-dhimmitude-2</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/roland-shirk/losing-faith-and-secular-dhimmitude-2/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 21 Dec 2010 04:02:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Roland Shirk]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Does showing Muslim immigrants sensitivity training films help dissolve their orthodoxy?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/FRANCIA_.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-79620" title="FRANCIA_" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/FRANCIA_.jpg" alt="" width="400" height="267" /></a></p>
<p>My <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2010/12/the-soft-dhimmitude-of-secularism.html" target="_blank">last column </a>did   its job. I was trying to highlight some of the reasons why  conservative  Christians are reluctant to join in the struggle against  global jihad.  And this is a problem, because&#8211;apart from Muslims, the  only groups who  are having children and passing along their beliefs  almost undiluted to  the next generation are conservative Christians and  ultra-orthodox Jews  (plus the Amish&#8211;who probably won&#8217;t be relevant to  this conflict).  Witness what secular demographer <a href="http://www.bigquestionsonline.com/columns/phillip-longman/survival-of-the-godliest" target="_blank">Philip Longman </a>has to say on this subject:</p>
<blockquote><p>To be sure, in countries rich and poor, under all forms  of  government, birth rates are declining across the globe. But they are   declining least among those adhering to strict religious codes and   literal belief in the Bible, the Torah, or the Koran. Indeed, the   pattern of human fertility now fits this pattern: the least likely to   procreate are those who profess no believe in God; those who describe   themselves as agnostic or simply spiritual are only somewhat slightly   less likely to be childless. Moving up the spectrum, family size   increases among practicing Unitarians, Reform Jews, mainline Protestants   and &#8220;cafeteria&#8221; Catholics, but the birthrates found in these   populations are still far below replacement levels. Only as we approach   the realm of religious belief and practice marked by an intensity we   might call, for lack of a better word, &#8220;fundamentalism,&#8221; do we find   pockets of high fertility and consequent rapid population growth.</p></blockquote>
<p>Nor do all the many children of those true believers lapse into secularism, as previous generations did in the past:</p>
<blockquote><p>When confronted with the fact that they are being  outbred,  secularists often respond that many if not most children born  into  highly religious families will grow up to reject the faith of  their  fathers &#8212; such is the assumed allure of freedom and  individuality. This  thought comports with the life experience of the  many members of the  Baby Boom generation, who shook off the bonds of  traditional authority  in the 1960s and 1970s, and who cannot imagine  why the rest of humanity  will not eventually catch on and catch up.  Arguing against this proposition, however, are some stubborn demographic   facts. Among fundamentalist families, it turns out, the apple does not   fall far from the tree. And the more demanding the faith, the more  this  rule applies.Only five percent of children born to the most  conservative Amish,  for example, move on to other faiths or lifestyles.  The defection rate  is higher among New Order Amish, Mormons and other  comparatively less  demanding fundamentalist communities, yet they still  hold on to the  majority of their children. Moreover, what defections  they may  experience are more than offset by converts, with the net flow  favoring  conservative faiths, according to poll data gathered by  the  National  Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. Thus we  see 21  percent of converts leaving liberal and moderate denominations  for more  fundamentalist ones, and only 15 percent going the other way.  There are  many swirls and currents that affect us all as individuals,  but between  higher fertility and more successful indoctrination, the  main  demographic tide of history is clearly flowing in favor of   fundamentalism.</p></blockquote>
<p>Now, I reject the term &#8220;fundamentalism&#8221; as tendentious and   pejorative. If you want to describe people who actually live according   to the official tenets of their own religions, the word &#8220;orthodox&#8221;   serves perfectly well. What Longman shows&#8211;and what Eric Kaufmann   demonstrates at greater length in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Shall-Religious-Inherit-Earth-Twenty-First/dp/1846681448" target="_blank"><em>Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?: Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century</em></a>&#8211;is   simply this: Orthodoxy, fertility, and fidelity (from one generation  to  the next) are powerful weapons. Serbian émigré Milica Bookman, in an   unjustly neglected study <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=q_Mv2IcQ0pQC&amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;dq=The+Demographic+Struggle+for+Power&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=T4oUziMvF2&amp;sig=ClXMfPpSfzxzDW7x98hFIzyKTPY&amp;hl=en&amp;ei=ccQOTa2BBoSq8Abl0vCDDg&amp;sa=X&amp;oi=book_result&amp;ct=result&amp;resnum=2&amp;ved=0CB4Q6AEwAQ#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false" target="_blank"><em>The Demographic Struggle for Power </em></a>shows how these weapons can be decisive.</p>
<p>Indeed, the Muslim birthrate, and their resistance to modernization   and secularization are very weapons they will use to dominate the cradle   of Western civilization. The secular liberals of Europe are not having   nearly enough children to replace themselves, nor are they passing  along  a vital, fighting faith (in anything at all) to those few they do   produce.</p>
<p>Given how intellectually backward, culturally alien, and externally   repugnant Islam seems to most secular Westerners, we have long been able   to fool ourselves that it has no real future&#8211;that modernity will  prove  a sufficiently potent acid to eat away this creed, as it eroded   Christianity so quickly in the 20th century. That lie our parents told   themselves is what allowed them to invite millions of Muslim immigrants   into Europe, and permits them today to lobby for Turkey&#8217;s inclusion in   the E.U. Because many of us could never imagine choosing the religious   beliefs and attitudes toward childrearing that marked our grandparents&#8217;   generation, we blithely assumed that young Turks or Algerians growing  up  in our midst would make the same choice; once little Ahmed met the   likes of <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2010/06/samantha-goes-to-the-gulf.html" target="_blank">Samantha Jones</a>,   surely he wouldn&#8217;t settle for one of those hijabed women who hang   around at the mosque&#8211;or hordes of little mouths to feed, when birth   control was available?</p>
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		<title>Give &#8220;The Camp of the Saints&#8221; This Christmas</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/roland-shirk/give-the-camp-of-the-saints-this-christmas-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=give-the-camp-of-the-saints-this-christmas-2</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/roland-shirk/give-the-camp-of-the-saints-this-christmas-2/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 14 Dec 2010 04:42:55 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Roland Shirk]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=79028</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The visionary author who predicted, three decades ago, the self-destruction the West is currently engaged in.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/saints1.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-79029" title="saints" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/saints1.jpg" alt="" width="400" height="597" /></a></p>
<p>If the dangerous clowns of Nigeria&#8217;s <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2010/12/books-him-bad.html">Boko Haram </a>(&#8220;Books,  Him Bad!&#8221;) are escapees from an unpublished novel of Evelyn Waugh, the  builders of the Ground Zero Victory Mosque and their sickening enablers  are creatures whose mischief is even blacker: They are living, breathing  characters torn from the pages of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Camp-Saints-Jean-Raspail/dp/1881780074/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1292289458&amp;sr=1-1" target="_blank">The Camp of the Saints.</a></p>
<p>Really, only Jean Raspail could have come up with this scenario:  Muslims fly a plane into the largest building in America, then finagle a  way to buy a piece of the crash site for pennies on the dollar using  shadowy money they cannot account for, then claim that America&#8217;s freedom  of religion (which they reject on Islamic principle) must permit them  to build on the site, then they have the infinite gall to apply for  government money to build it&#8211;all the while a Christian church destroyed  by the Muslims is being blocked by the very same city government, which  is run by a Jewish liberal, who&#8217;s betraying his own people&#8217;s interests  so that he can make inroads with his financial news services in the  Middle East. The only way this story could be more lurid and implausible  would be if NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg had made his fortune selling  rope.</p>
<p><em>The Camp of the Saints</em>, by the prize-winning French novelist  Jean Raspail, has &#8220;awakened&#8221; countless Westerners to the dangers of  mass, non-Western immigration since its publication in 1973. Translated  into English, publicized in the pages of <em>National Review </em>(back  when that magazine&#8217;s target market was adults) with a review by Jeffrey  Hart, the novel is a bracing, sobering look at the suicidal liberalism  that has infected Western elites. In the book, a mass exodus of refugees  from India loads itself onto boats and announces it is sailing for the  West. (Ironically, for us, the people aboard the ships in <em>The Camp of the Saints </em>are  actually meant to be Hindus&#8211;who have proved, in fact, to be the most  cooperative and productive of immigrant groups. Never mind: it&#8217;s merely a  metaphor.)</p>
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