Europe: The Dark Continent
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Posted: 05/05/08
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Europe: The Dark Continent
By Thomas E. Brewton
The light of God's truth has been snuffed out in Europe, now the
least Christian and the most secularized and socialized part of the
world.
This week, Black Rock Congregational Church is focusing on worldwide
missionary programs and the 20-plus missionaries that the church
supports. In that connection, rather than a traditional sermon, we
at Black Rock-Long Ridge Congregational Church (North Stamford,
Connecticut) heard a report by Dr. Ted Noble, one of those
missionaries. His subject was the appalling decline of Christianity
throughout Europe.
Fewer than one percent of Europeans are Christian believers.
Elsewhere, especially in Africa and Asia, the percentage is much
higher and growing. Europe has become a spiritual wasteland in which
people look to the political state for their salvation.
In the 19th century, Africa, the Dark Continent, was looked upon as
the great field of activity for Christian missionaries. Conditions
are the reverse today. American Episcopalians, for example, who seek
a return to the Bible and a turning away from the secularized social
gospel that has overtaken their church, now look to African
bishoprics for support.
Dr. Nobel talked mostly about the opportunities and the needs for
missionary work in Europe. But it's important also to ask why Europe
is in spiritual decline.
This is an impelling question, since Christianity's greatest, lasting
impact was in western Europe. After the final fall of the Western
Roman Empire in the 5th century, Christianity was left as the only
civilizing force in western Europe. Without the Catholic Church in
Rome, libraries and education itself would not have survived.
Concepts of civilized law and order, based upon the Roman Empire's
codex, were preserved in Christian canonical law.
The Eastern Roman Empire, based in Constantinople (later Byzantium,
today Istanbul), survived the onslaught of Islam for another thousand
years until 1453. But Constantinople was not able to exercise much
direct influence upon western Europe after the fall of Rome.
Christian city states all around the eastern Mediterranean and into
Russia, parts of the Eastern Orthodox Church, were continually
subjected to Islamic jihad after the 7th century.
Europeans, before the evolution of strong nation states in the 16th
century, thought of themselves as inhabitants of Christendom. It is
thus accurate to assert that everything that we know as western
civilization is an exclusive product of Christianity emanating from
the church at Rome.
What went wrong?
The short answer is the French Revolution of 1789.
That cataclysmic event destroyed Christian civilization and
instituted the religion of socialism, first in France, then
throughout Europe.
In the simplest terms, French philosophers of the ill-named
Continental European Enlightenment (the 18th century) decapitated
Western civilization. The human soul and conscience, moral codes,
and the relationship of each individual human to the universe and his
fellow humans were tossed into the trash heap. The Western world was
figuratively reduced to a headless body that reacted blindly to
external, physical stimulae.
The secular, atheistic religion of socialism (in the United States,
liberal-progressivism) ignores peoples' spiritual needs. It asserts,
instead, that only material needs for water, food, clothing shelter,
and sex count in political society. In socialist religious theory,
all of these things can be administered by the secular political
state in ways that permit state planners to manipulate and control
every aspect of human social behavior.
No one can logically accept that liberal-socialist doctrine and
simultaneously support the metaphysical, natural-law principles that
were the basis of our Declaration of Independence and our
Constitution, Jefferson's inalienable human rights flowing from our
Creator God.
Philosophical materialism implies that the human soul is a myth;
there is only the physical tangle of nerves, muscle, and bones
constituting the physical human body. Non-material qualities like
personal responsibility, piety, patriotism, and morality are
dismissed as value judgments, lost in the morass of moral
relativism. Karl Marx, for example, sneered at religion as the opium
of the masses, calling it a fiction created by the ruling class to
stupefy and subjugate the workers.
Dismissing the Mind of God and the natural law that flowed from it,
intellectuals of the French Revolution believed themselves capable of
manipulating humans, in the mass, as if they were puppets. They
expected their secular religion of socialism to bring harmony and
perfection to human life.
Instead, they took the Western world back to the lawless days of the
hordes of Genghis Khan, when the sword was the only source of order
and right. The millions of dead and maimed in two World Wars and the
murders of tens of millions by the French Revolutionary councils,
Napoleon, Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Mao, and Castro are the
legacy of French socialistic materialism and secularity.
Europe, once the driving force in world culture, has become a hollow
shell that the inflow of Muslim immigrants will crack and overwhelm
in coming decades, unless Christian missionaries succeed in bringing
Europeans back to Jesus Christ.
Thomas E. Brewton is a staff writer for the New Media Alliance, Inc.
The New Media Alliance is a non-profit (501c3) national coalition of
writers, journalists and grass-roots media outlets.
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