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Sure, if they don't change their mind then that makes sense. But this is predicated on them doing so.
That said I understand now I think. I'd suggest the elites wouldn't be changing their minds BECAUSE you decided you won't fight the Muslims. In fact, given I have worked with what might be called the elite in the UK, I can almost guarantee they aren't thinking about you (and your peers) at all, or that they are trying to take you for a ride at all, because they don't think about people like you or me much at all. (Which to be clear is a big problem, hence why I quit politics, its just not the same problem you think there is).
As for me, I don't think it will come to a fight at all. At least due to internal Muslims. I have extensive experience with Pakistani communities in the UK and they are being "corrupted" by western secular values quite substantially.
To be clear Islam is in my opinion a terrible religion and globally a much bigger problem than Christianity. But I expect it to lose power as its main countries advance and modernize. Reducing birth rates even in Islamic countries show it is not immune. To me the West is clearly the strong horse here. You can bribe native Pakistani and Afghani muslims with Man Utd strips. We've won so hard a tiny Westernised nation can essentially hold off the whole of the Middle East on its own.
Islam is dying. Just as Christianity is. Sunnis and Shi'ites in fight, Pakistan has problems with the Taliban. They are not united.
it makes sense that they do not think about people they do not consider significant.
curious. what they are thinking about?
Birth rates are reduced in Islamic countries, but birth rates of Muslims in countries where they are not a majority are high.
If the nation put this as a goal, maybe.
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I don’t have an opinion on the future of Islam, but the end of this paragraph seems to contradict the beginning. Islam is disunited precisely because it isn’t dead. The Shiites and Sunnis, and ISIS and the Taliban, all care so deeply about their religion and about the proper interpretation of it, that they are willing to physically fight and die for it. Citing that as evidence that Islam is dying is like citing the Thirty Years’ War as evidence that Christianity was dying 400 years ago.
And is Christianity as strong now as it was 400 years ago? Would it have been stronger or weaker without schisming?
Schisming that is not quickly and decisively dealt with is an ongoing fracture point.
In the past 400 years, Christianity became practically the universal religion in two new continents and made massive gains in a third. If by “Islam is dying,” you mean that it will thrive as a major force for the next half millennium before eventually weakening, it seems to me that your claim is pretty much meaningless. On a long enough time scale, every religion, ideology, and nation could be said to be dying, since none will survive the eventual heat death of the universe.
Now, I don’t think you mean that Islam will thrive, grow, and eventually decline, but instead that it’s already on its way out. If my understanding of your claim is correct, it seems to me that Islam’s divisions are actually a clear point of strength. For comparison, look at all the mainline Protestant churches in the US. Almost all are in fellowship with each other despite their doctrinal differences, and almost all are in absolute free fall in terms of membership and attendance, much more so than their more cantankerous theological cousins, who take their confessional distinctives seriously.
My viewpoint is probably a minority one, but I actually think it was a strength, sociologically-speaking, as the divisions fostered a competitive zeal among the different church bodies. This is most obvious in America, where Christianity is, despite its decline, still doing undeniably better than in Europe.
But the split happened in Europe. If that made Christianity stronger why would the effect be more pronounced in the US?
Hell my own country had so much zeal we are still murdering each other even now (though much less frequently thankfully). And the percentage of non-religious is almost identical between the US and Northern Ireland (27 or 28%) which is also similar to the EU (25-26%).
So it doesn't seem to be much better at keeping adherents anywhere. Just in the US selection effects means it is more geographically concentrated.
A Christianity that did not have ruinous wars and splits I would argue would be stronger. Because it showed to adherents that whatever lofty claims were made Christians were willing to kill Christians over doctrinal differences. A united Christianity that stretches from Moscow to Constantinople to Jerusalem to Rome to London to Rio de Janeiro to Washington would be a much stronger world force than it is now.
A schism that is resolved quickly might increase strength and fervor, one that rumbles on for centuries and then schisms again and again over smaller and smaller differences is hard to portray as a stronger, I would say.
To be clear though I am not saying either Christianity or Islam will fall entirely tomorrow, we are talking decades to centuries. To paraphrase the old saying. There is a great deal of ruin in an organized religion.
As aardvark2 pointed out, Europe has traditionally operated on the principle of cuius regio, eius religio, which eliminates the competitive spirit that proved to be an advantage in America. Aardvark2 is also correct in saying that attendance rates differ dramatically between Europe and the United States, even if nominal church membership is similar.
I hate to dip my toe in the pool of “lived experiences,” but I do think that might be at the root of our disagreement here. Your country recently (within living memory) witnessed decades-long violent strife over a tangled knot of politics and religion. In that context, I can see why sectarian divisions would seem like a definite weakness. From my American perspective, however, things look differently. Calls for “church unity” in this country have historically led to the creation of groups like the United Methodist Church or the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, denominations whose founding mergers were accomplished by ignoring the real doctrinal differences between their predecessor church bodies. In other words, unity has become synonymous with laxity and indifference. I don’t think true unity of doctrine was possible in 16th century Europe, which means the only other options were superficial unity (a la mainstream Protestantism in the US) or forced unity (hence the wars of religion).
As I see it, the zeal that drove armies to kill each other over the existence of purgatory is the same zeal that led thousands of missionaries to convert the populations of North and South America, and Africa, and East Asia, and India, and so forth (some with greater success than others). Today, few Christians have that zeal, but many Muslims do. The very fact that Muslims aren’t willing to paper over their differences for the sake of a superficial unity is proof that Islam is still a force to be reckoned with.
No I think my experiences are part of my world view for sure, so no need to feel bad for bringing that up.
We had a thread about Christian nationalism in the US a few weeks back and as i mentioned there, I think the differences between Christian sects are currently mostly moot in the US right now. But I think that is more fragile than people think. An explicitly Protestant Nationalism or some other fracture point can split that apart. Possibly a liberalizing Catholic church coming up against more conservative Evangelicals.
I agree church attendance is higher in the US but my point is that zeal hasn't really halted the decline in religiosity at a population level. That is roughly steady between say France, Northern Ireland and the US. Germany is even worse. Even Italy is just behind at about 25%.
And for the younger age groups its even worse still.
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Doesn't matter where schisms happened. Result is that European countries got one official church (or rarely two) with intimate relationship to state. USA got multiple independent confessions which had to fight to earn their bread. Schisms in Europe were usually followed by realignment of boundaries of chruches with states.
Obviously, vague wording of "religious" hides the differences. If you ask people more specific question, e.g. did they visit church weekly, a large difference between EU and USA reveals.
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