On May 7, 2011, Salafi Muslims, claiming a Christian woman who wished to convert to Islam was being held against her will in St. Mina’s Church in the Imbaba section of Cairo, attacked and burned the church in a battle with Christians that left a dozen dead and 200 wounded. The post-Mubarak cabinet called a meeting on Sunday, May 8, to deal with the crisis created by militant Salafis using their new freedom to attack the Copts.
Paul Marshall of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom warns we may be experiencing another great wave of persecution, “as Christians flee the Palestinian areas, Lebanon, Turkey, and Egypt. In 2003 in Iraq, Christians were some 4 percent of the population, but they have since comprised 40 percent of the refugees.”96 From Egypt to Iran, the Vatican counts seventeen million Christians left.97
“Across the Middle East,” writes Robert Fisk in the Independent, “it is the same story of despairing—sometimes frightened—Christian minorities, and of an exodus that reaches almost Biblical proportions.”98
In an essay titled in Christ’s words, “Whoever Loses His Life for My Sake…”, Cato Institute’s Doug Bandow writes:
Although Christians are no longer tossed to the lions in the Roman Colosseum, believers are routinely murdered, imprisoned, tortured and beaten. Churches, businesses, and homes are regularly destroyed. The opportunity to meet for worship and prayer is blocked. There is real persecution rather than the cultural hostility often denounced as “persecution” in America.99
What is behind this drive to persecute and purge Christians?
With the fall of the Ottoman and European empires and the rise of nationalism from the Maghreb to Malaysia, religious identity—Muslim, Hindu, Sunni, Shia—has become part of national identity. And since American Christian evangelicals back Israel in the Arab-Israeli conflict, and America is at war in Muslim lands, Christians, whose ancestors lived in the Middle East for centuries before Muhammad, are coming to be seen as collaborators and traitors, a fifth column of the crusaders and the Zionists.
The phenomenon is not new. Catholicism came to be seen as part of Spanish identity before the expulsion of the Moors in 1492, a part of Irish identity during the long struggle against Protestant England, and a part of Polish identity under Communism, which made the Polish Pope John Paul II so powerful a symbol. Across the Middle East, Muslim identity is now conflated with patriotism, as is Hindu identity in India. Pluralism, and tolerance for Christians in particular, is on the way out. We may be witnessing the annihilation of Christianity in its cradle.
What, then, is the future for Catholicism and Christianity worldwide?
Pope Benedict XVI calls Europe “a desert of godlessness” that has embraced the “culture of death.” It is impossible to be sanguine about a Christian revival or even survival on the aging old continent. As Marshall writes, more people go to church in China than in Europe.100 In France, the “eldest daughter of the Church,” fewer than half the children are baptized and only one in eight Catholics practices the faith.101
Since the death of Pius XII in 1958, the Catholic Church in America has seen a half century of staggering decline. Latin America is less Catholic than it has been in centuries. In the Middle East, Near East, and South Asia, from Copts in Egypt to Chaldean Christians in Iraq to Catholics in Pakistan and India, communities of faithful are being martyred and persecuted by Islamic and Hindu fanatics. The once-Christian West seems less concerned with whether Christianity is martyred than whether elections will be held.
In Future Church, John Allen, Vatican correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter, sees a decisive shift coming in Catholicism’s center of gravity. In the twentieth century, Africa’s Catholic population exploded from 1.9 million to 130 million. From 2001 to 2006, reports the Catholic Statistical Yearbook, the Catholic population in Africa increased 16.7 percent, “with a 19.4 percent increase in priests and a 9.4 percent increase in graduate- or theological-level seminarians.” The Catholic population increased 9.5 percent in Asia.
Americans had eleven cardinals in the conclave that elected Benedict XVI … the same number as all of Africa, even though Africa has twice the Catholic population. Brazil, the largest Catholic country on earth, had only three votes, which works out to one cardinal-elector for every 6 million American Catholics and for every 32 million Catholics in Brazil.102
“This has to change, and it will, certainly before 2020,” writes Penn State professor Philip Jenkins.103 With the number of bishops and cardinals from Latin America, Africa, and Asia inevitably rising, Allen sees a Church that is more Third World, Pentecostal, and Charismatic, with an African Pope before 2050. That Church may be more orthodox on theological and moral issues, but it will be far less receptive to capitalism and Western concerns.
Allen regards the steady Islamization of Europe as “a trend of massive significance” for the Catholic Church: “A Church whose primary interreligious relationship for the last forty years has been with Judaism now finds itself struggling to come to terms with a newly assertive Islam, not just in the Middle East, Africa and Asia, but in its own European backyard.”104 With Muslims outnumbering Jews in Europe 15–1 and worldwide 100–1, the Catholic-Jewish dialogue will likely be superseded by a Catholic-Muslim dialogue between two faiths that make up 40 percent of mankind. Jenkins writes of possible Muslim demands for apologies for the crusades and for return of the mosques long ago converted into churches in southern Italy and Spain—in Toledo, Córdoba, Seville, Palermo.
As Jenkins writes,
Critical theological questions abound. Most fundamentally, is Islam a separate religion, as distinct from Christianity as Shinto or Hinduism, or are the two religions sisters separated at birth and raised in different family settings? Is Islam the offspring of the devil? Or is it a Christian heresy [as Belloc argued] that could somehow be brought back into the fold?105
On moral issues such as abortion and homosexuality, the Vatican, as did the Reagan White House, stood with Muslim countries in the UN, against a re-paganized Europe. And a growing number of Muslims from abroad are now studying at Catholic colleges and universities in the United States. In December 2010, the Washington Post reported,
In the past few years, enrollment of Muslim students … has spiked at Catholic campuses across the country. Last year, Catholic colleges had an even higher percentage of Muslim students than the average four-year institution in the United States.… Some Catholic campuses are creating prayer rooms for new Muslim students and hiring Islamic chaplains to minister to them.106
Between 2006 and 2010, the number of self-identified Catholics on the campus of Catholic University in northeast Washington, D.C., fell, as the number of Muslims more than doubled, from 41 to 91. The largest group of international students by far comes from Saudi Arabia.
The same Georgetown University that ordered Evangelical groups off campus now has “a prayer room, student association and entire center devoted to Muslim-Christian understanding, and the school hired a full-time Muslim chaplain in 1990.”107
In the last analysis, for the Church, too, demography is destiny. Europe, the United States, Canada, and Australia, which accounted for 29 percent of the world’s population in 1950, will constitute only 10 to 12 percent in 2050. Latin America and Africa, which accounted for 13 percent of world population in 1950 will, by 2050, contain 29 percent of the Earth’s people. The West and South will change places in a single century. Unless the West reconverts to its ancient faith, a reconversion nowhere in sight, Catholicism will become a Church with its Holy Father in Rome and the vast majority of its bishops, priests, and faithful living in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Catholicism is well on the way to becoming a Third World religion.
4
THE END OF WHITE AMERICA
The new America in the twenty-first century will be primarily non-white, a place that George Washington would not recognize.1
—JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN
African American Historian
Obama’s victory creates the
prospect of a new “real” America.… It is no longer a “white” country …2
—JOE KLEIN, NOV. 5, 2008
Demographically, economically, and geopolitically white America is in decline.3
—THE NATION, 2009
“Civilization’s going to pieces.… I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things,” said Tom Buchanan. “Have you read The Rise of the Colored Empires by this man Goddard?”4 Tom’s friends had not.
“Well, it’s a fine book and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”5
This scene from Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby introduces “The End of White America?” a long essay in the Atlantic Monthly by music critic and Vassar professor Hua Hsu. “This man Goddard” appears to be a composite of Henry Goddard, Madison Grant, and Lothrop Stoddard.
Goddard was a eugenicist who translated the Binet intelligence test into English, introduced the word “moron” to the field of intelligence testing, and wrote the first law requiring that mentally challenged children be given special education. Grant authored The Passing of the Great Race, which separated Caucasians into Nordic, Alpine, and Mediterranean peoples, with the Nordic being the superior stock. As this raw passage reveals, Grant was deeply into eugenics:
Mistaken regard for what are believed to be divine laws and a sentimental belief in the sanctity of human life tend to prevent both the elimination of defective infants and the sterilization of such adults as are themselves of no value in the community. The laws of nature require the obliteration of the unfit and human life is valuable only when it is of use to the community or race.6
Pure Social Darwinism.
Stoddard authored The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, which warned that the carnage of the “White Civil War” of 1914–1918 and the population explosion in Asia and Africa meant Europeans were facing racial inundation, the loss of world supremacy, and the death of their civilization. “Colored migration is a universal peril, menacing every part of the white world.” Yet “The Rising Tide of Color is eerily serene, scholarly, and gentlemanly, its hatred rationalized and in [Tom] Buchanan’s term ‘scientific.’” Published by Scribners, the book was a “phenomenon.”7
Ivy League-educated, Grant and Stoddard were respected in academic circles and belonged to an elite that supported the eugenics movement, Margaret Sanger, and sterilization laws. Stoddard, though unashamedly racialist, was something of a prophet. He predicted Japan’s rise to power, its war with the United States, a second European war, the fall of the Western empires, mass migration of peoples of color to the West, and the rise of Islam as a threat to Western civilization.8
What Tom Buchanan and “Goddard” feared Professor Hsu welcomes: “The End of White America is a cultural and demographic inevitability.”9
According to the 2010 Census white Americans will be a minority in 2041.10 Among those under eighteen, whites will become a minority in 2019. Every American child born after 2001 belongs to a generation more Third World than European.11 Questions about the future arise. If the end of white America is a cultural and demographic inevitability, “What will the new mainstream of America look like—and what ideas or values might it rally around? What will it mean to be white after ‘whiteness’ no longer defines the mainstream? Will anyone mourn the end of white America? Will anyone try to preserve it?”12
One reaction Professor Hsu reports is that, among cultural elites, some are shedding their white identity. “[I]f white America is ‘losing control,’ and if the future will belong to people who can successfully navigate a post-racial, multicultural landscape—then it’s no surprise that many white Americans are eager to divest themselves of their whiteness entirely.”13 Indeed, who would want to be numbered among Stupid White Men, the title of Michael Moore’s 2002 bestseller about a people oblivious to what is happening to them?
The day after Obama’s inaugural, television host Larry King blurted out to an uneasy Bob Woodward a secret desire of his son. “My younger son Cannon … is eight. And he now says that he would like to be black. I’m not kidding. He said there’s a lot of advantages. Black is in. Is this a turning of the tide?”14
“This is the decade of Tiger Woods and Barack Obama.… [of] race combinations,” says U.S. Census Bureau head Robert Groves, who looked ahead with excitement to the 2010 figures. “I can’t wait to see the pattern of responses on multiple races. That’ll be a neat indicator to watch.”15
Professor Hsu cites examples to make his case that in the popular culture it is now un-hip to be white, and artists are seeking to escape any white identity.
Successful network-television shows like Lost, Heroes, and Grey’s Anatomy feature wildly diverse casts, and an entire genre of half-hour comedy, from the Colbert Report to The Office, seems dedicated to having fun with the persona of the clueless white male. The youth market is following the same pattern.…
Pop culture today rallies around an ethic of multicultural inclusion that seems to value every identity—except whiteness. “It’s becoming harder for the blond-haired, blue-eyed commercial actor,” remarks Rochelle Newman-Carrasco of the Hispanic marketing firm Enlace.16
One gets the drift. But while the music man cites artists embarrassed by their white identity, he also sees the white working class seceding into social-cultural enclaves like Nashville and NASCAR. The “core grievance” of this emerging minority “has to do with cultural and socioeconomic dislocation—the sense that the system that used to guarantee the white working class some stability has gone off-kilter.”17
Here the professor was dead on target. The Tea Party and town hall protests of 2009 were almost wholly white affairs. Mocking them, Rich Benjamin, author of Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America, explains what these folks fear:
By 2042, whites will no longer be the American majority. This demographic projection sounds a frightening alarm to the likes of … Joe Wilson. It heralds significant change to our nation’s culture, electoral politics and distribution of resources.
We must understand Wilson’s outburst by exposing its past and future context—including what I call “The White People Deadline,” 2042.18
Benjamin’s book reads like a Baedeker to the bolt-holes to which whites are fleeing to huddle as multiracial America approaches.
During the Sergeant Crowley–Professor Gates dustup in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Obama’s subsequent “beer summit,” New York Times columnist Frank Rich also cited the year 2042, noting the fears it had engendered:
That reaction [to Gatesgate] is merely the latest example of how the inexorable transformation of America into a white-minority country in some thirty years—by 2042 in the latest Census Bureau estimates—is causing serious jitters, if not panic, in the white establishments.… [W]e’re just at the start of what may be a 30-year struggle. Beer won’t cool the fury of those who can’t accept the reality that America’s racial profile will no longer reflect their own.19
When Tea Party activists raucously protested outside the Capitol as Democrats passed Obama’s health care bill, Rich saw visions of Kristallnacht, the Nazi pogrom against the Jews in 1938—and race as the “real source of the over-the-top rage.” By 2012, he wrote, “non-Hispanic white births will be in the minority. The Tea Party movement is virtually all white.… Their anxieties about a rapidly changing America are well-grounded,” for what is coming is a “national existential reordering” unseen since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 made “some Americans run off the rails.”20
With the Tea Party triumph in 2010, Tim Wise of the Daily Kos, in “The Last Gasp of Aging White Power,” wrote that this victory by white folks is but a battle won by a dying tribe in a lost war:
For all y’all rich folks, enjoy that champagne, or whatever fancy ass Scotch you drink. And for y’all a bit lower on the economic scale, enjoy your Pabst Blue Ribbon, or whatever shitty
ass beer you favor.
Whatever the case, and whatever your economic station, know this. You need to drink up. And quickly. And heavily. Because your time is limited. Real damned limited. So party while you can, but mind the increasingly loud clock ticking away in the corners of your consciousness. The clock that reminds you how little time you and yours have left.21
Listening to Larry King, and reading Rich Benjamin and Hua Hsu, one is reminded of the comment of 1960s essayist James Baldwin of The Fire Next Time fame: “As long as you think you’re white, there’s no hope for you.”22
On MSNBC’s Morning Joe on inauguration day, Tom Brokaw saw in Obama’s triumph payback for white bigotry Brokaw had witnessed: “Having been in the South in the ’60s and Los Angeles, in Watts and northern urban areas, when we were evolving as a country, I’m thinking of all the bigots and the rednecks and all the people that I met along the way. I’m saying to them, ‘Take this.’”23 Robert Reich seemed of a similar cast of mind. When Obama’s stimulus bill came before Congress, the former secretary of labor, now a Berkeley professor, testified to his hopes as to who should benefit and who should not: “I am concerned, as I’m sure many of you are, that these jobs not simply go to high-skilled people who are already professionals or to white male construction workers. I have nothing against white male construction workers, I’m just saying there are other people who have needs as well.”24 Reich got his wish. By mid-2009, unemployment among women had reached 8 percent, but among men it was 10.5 percent, the largest gap ever recorded by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.25 Among male construction workers, unemployment rose in the Great Recession to 19.7 percent, while illegal aliens held 17 percent of all construction jobs, up from 10 percent in 2003.26
Suicide of a Superpower_Will America Survive to 2025? Page 13
