Who Can Save Europe’s Jews? Only Its Christians.

The deracination of Europe—which Robert Wistrich accurately limns as the “accumulating layers of delusion and denial that paralyze the educated European mind”—is one of the hard facts of early-21st-century world affairs that can no longer be ignored. It is evident in the ugliness (and worse) that Wistrich describes in France. It is evident in Europe’s policy paralysis (and worse) in the face of Vladimir Putin’s aggressions, which may result in the de-facto dissolution of NATO. It is evident in the inability of individual European Union member states to address the growing gap between their social-welfare aspirations and fiscal reality. It is evident in the plunging birthrates and demographic winter that has set in throughout Europe: for the first time in human history, an entire continent is systematically and willfully depopulating itself.

The effects of this deracination have been obvious to clear-minded observers, European and American, for years, even decades. But causal analysis of Europe’s “delusion and denial” rarely digs deeply enough into the cultural subsoil from which these maladies spring. Until that excavation is done, any chance of a European recovery of decency, will, and nerve is unlikely in the extreme.

A good place to start the digging is in the 19th century, with the phenomenon that the French Catholic theologian Henri de Lubac would dub “atheistic humanism.” Here, Father de Lubac argued, was something new. Of course, there had been atheists forever. What was new was an atheism that posited the God of the Bible—the God who first made Himself known to the people of Israel—as the enemy of human freedom. This was a great reversal, for, as de Lubac reminded his mid-20th–century readers, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had come into the world as a liberator: a God who did not, like the gods of Canaan, demand appeasement through the sacrifice of children; a God who did not, like the gods of Greece, play games with even Achilles, the strongest and wiliest of men; a God who did not want his liberated people to fall back into the bad habits of the slaves they had been in Egypt, but Who gave them a moral law by which they could live their freedom nobly.