The abandonment of Christianity in most European countries has been well-documented. For example, author and journalist James P. Gannon says that in five key European countries -- France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and Italy -- over the last 30 years regular church attendance has fallen from roughly 40% of the population to about 20%." As Weigel says, Western Europe has become a "post-Christian society."

Feder believes there is a clear link between a lack of faith and the loss of that sense of duty to the future that leads people to conceive and bear children. "Having lost their faith and embraced an ethic of radical autonomy," he says, "Europeans stopped going to church, stopped taking the Bible seriously, stopped believing in the future and stopped having children."

Maria Burani, president of the Parliamentary Commission for the Family and Infancy in Rome, told Citizen magazine that faith is a foundation for the kind of lifestyle that parenting requires. "If you don't have inside your head great religious and ethical principles," she insists, "you're just not going to want to go and have these kids because it's a sacrifice."

Beyond that, of course, is the fact that religious principles also restrain the often selfish behavior that grows out of the "radical autonomy" that permeates Europe. "Among the consequences of Europe's abandonment of its religious roots and the moral code that derives therefrom is a plunge in its birth rates to below the replacement level," says Gannon. "Abortion, birth control, acceptance of gay marriage and casual sex are driving the trend."

Islamification of Europe
However, the prognosis for Europe gets even worse because many of the nations there have chosen a risky path for making up for their population shortfalls: immigration. Because North Africa and the Middle East represent a relatively convenient source of cheap labor, millions of Muslim immigrants have been flooding the continent for a half century.

"Western Europe has gone from a Muslim population of 250,000, 50 years ago, to 20 million today," says Feder.

Unlike Westerners, however, Muslims typically have large families. According to Robert S. Leiken, director of the Immigration and National Security Program at the Nixon Center, higher Muslim birthrates combined with Muslim immigration have led the U.S. National Intelligence Council to project that Europe's Muslim population will double by 2025.

As a result, Colson says flatly, "[d]emographics may bring about what the Moors and Ottoman Empire couldn't: a Muslim Europe."

But so what? Isn't such hand-wringing about Muslim immigrants nothing more than utter bigotry?

Hardly, say concerned Westerners. The Islamification of Europe would bring incredible cultural changes to Europe. "In 50 to 100 years, the Europe of Shakespeare and Victor Hugo, the Europe of Rembrandt and Bach, the Europe of Churchill and Karol Wojtyla will exist only in textbooks and museums," Feder says. "Or, perhaps the remnants of Christian Europe will be subjected to the fate of Afghanistan's Buddhist statues, demolished by the Taliban regime."