The Future Is Muslim And There Isn't Much You Can Do About It

When you look at resources on fertility you see predominantly Muslim countries like Niger, Mali, Somalia and Afghanistan at the top of the lists where Western, "Christian" countries like Germany, Greece, Italy and Portugal are at the bottom. Even in African countries that are ostensibly Christian, there is a sizable Muslim population and pressure from immigrants. Compare the U.S. with an average of 12.49 births per thousand people (ranking in the bottom 30% at 158 out of 224) to Indonesia, with the largest Muslim population in the world with something like 220,000,000 Muslim and a birth rate of 4 more children that the U.S. per thousand. Iran is at 17.99 and Iraq has a massive rate of 31.45. So for every child born in the U.S. there are around 2.5 born in Iraq. Other predominantly Muslim nations with unstable governments like Egypt (22.90), Syria (22.17) and Libya (18.03) far outpace America.

OK, that is a lot of demographic data but so what? There are two colliding factors at work here. One is simple numbers. People in developing countries, many of which are predominantly Muslim or at least have a prominent Muslim population, are simply having way more children than Western, non-majority Muslim countries. Many "first world" nations are far below the replacement rate, meaning that their population is shrinking by the year. The other major problem is that many of these first world nations don't have workers to replace those who retire and they desperately need workers for jobs that entitled dependents of the state won't do, not to mention needing tax revenue to fund the social promises like pensions and health care that continue to balloon in cost while revenue shrinks. Between existing national debt and unfunded mandates, most Western nations are facing a perfect storm of financial insolvency and demographic collapse. The people who are left are not going to be white, "Christian" Americans and Europeans.

One might point to stats that describe the Christian population similarly booming around the third world. Yet in the West the Christian population is not growing much at all, and in fact if you use the deeply flawed metric of church attendance the Christian population is shrinking, and at the same time the legions of retiring workers in the West are being replaced by immigrants, legal and more so illegal. The simple truth is that Muslims are out breeding Western nations by a huge margin as well as apparently being highly effective at proselytizing and eventually that increased population is going to be the dominant force in the world. The West, even in "Christian" countries has been engaged in demographic suicide for decades and there is no sign of that abating. In the 40 some odd years since Roe v. Wade we have killed off tens of millions of Americans who would now be back-filling jobs for the baby boomers. Instead those jobs sit vacant, are shipped overseas or filled by illegal aliens. There are already 1.6 billion Muslims in the world and the number grows via conversion and birth at an incredible pace. What will the world look like when the United States is no longer the dominant force and power resides in the hands of the masses of the world, many of whom are poor and Muslim?

Meanwhile the West is focused on trying to combat ISIS and company using World War II/ Cold War style warfare. The talk of "containing" ISIS and claiming victories based on seizing territory exposes a continuance of the World War II mentality where holding territory is tantamount to winning the war even though the West is fighting a diffuse enemy. Why in the world would ISIS or the Taliban or Al Qaeda want to slug it out with the military of a nation that essentially outspends the rest of the world on its military? No one thinks that at this point that would result in anything but a one sided slaughter and so they refuse to line up like targets and get slaughtered. One the other hand when the extremist groups lose territory their soldiers just drop their weapons and blend in with the rest of the population. One would have thought we would have learned this lesson in Vietnam but apparently not and now the enemy is not restricted to Southeast Asia but is everywhere including within the borders of Western states.

It seems to me that the forces of jihad are playing the long game while we in America are reflexively swinging our fists in a blind rage like a drunk in a barroom brawl, indiscriminately swinging our fists and not caring much where the blow lands. We play whack-a-mole on group and another five spring up. Our leaders thump their chests about killing "Jihadi John" and they respond by the worst act of mass violence in Paris since World War II. What is incredible to me about the attacks in Paris is not that they were so "successful" but that they don't happen more often. We certainly spent millions of dollars and countless hours of intelligence to blow up one jihadi. Give me 8-10 fanatics and some guns and I can give you a death toll that exceeds Paris without driving more than a few hours. At the same time we see "civilization jihad" being waged with no one paying much attention.

For Christians the collapse of the West and the rise of Islam means persecution unlike any we have seen since the days of the Reformation and Inquisitions. We aren't going to "win" the war against nascent Islam by airstrikes that might hit the occasional hospital, oops! Nor are we going to guard against ISIS by "vetting" refugees. The truth is that the cultural struggle is already over and we lost, the only question left is how does that aftermath look and how we prepare. The world of social media is already infested with "conservatives" trying to shut the borders and "progressives" who are trying to turn a lack of hotel rooms into a refugee crisis for Joseph and Mary. Neither approach is serious and neither does anything to prepare the church for a very different future. The problem with our existence of comfort and prosperity in the West is that we are more concerned with preserving our goodies than we are about carrying out the actual mission of the church, a mission which cannot be boiled down to "go to church on Sunday". 

I have been sounding this warning for years and if anything we are even less prepared than before, terrified as we are about terrorists and the potential loss of unfettered religious liberty. When are we going to wake up and start taking our marching orders from Scripture and the example of the church under persecution throughout history rather than from social media and 24 hour news channels?