Christendom did not fall because it was defeated. It fell because it forgot what it was and why it was important.
After Tours, Lepanto, and Vienna, the West proved it could resist Islamic expansion when it understood the stakes. It learned hard lessons about borders, belief, and the cost of weakness. And for centuries, those lessons held.
Then something changed. The armies did not fail. The ideas did. By the early modern period, Europe began to experience a transformation more radical than any invasion. The Christian worldview that had once shaped law, culture, and public life was slowly displaced by a new vision of man and society.
We are speaking, of course, of the “Enlightenment.” The Enlightenment focused on man as the center of all things. It promised reason without revelation. Politics without theology. Morality without God.
This shift did not happen overnight. It unfolded gradually, beginning with a suspicion of religious authority and ending with a rejection of religious truth altogether. Islam did not overthrow Christianity. The West itself privatized it.
Faith became a personal preference rather than a civilizational foundation. Nations ceased to see themselves as Christian societies and came to regard themselves as neutral spaces in which all beliefs were interchangeable.
But neutrality is a myth. Every civilization rests on moral assumptions. When Christianity was removed from public life, it was not replaced by relativism. As the West lost confidence in its beliefs, it began to reinterpret its past. Victories once seen as acts of survival were recast as crimes. Defenses were reframed as aggressions.
Eventually, the Crusades became the beginning of violence rather than a response to it. Centuries of Christendom fought and died for the faith at the hands of Islam. And yet, Christendom was replaced altogether by this secularized notion of our history. It was no longer Christendom, but "The West." This revision did not come from new evidence. It came from new guilt.
The West came to believe that power itself was immoral. That asserting borders was oppressive. That defending identity was dangerous. When civilizations lose faith in their own legitimacy, they inevitably invite challenges. When a culture no longer believes it has the right to exist, it will not defend itself for long.
This was not humility. It was a surrender of memory. It was giving up the truth itself. And while it was not wholesale, it has been enough to erase from shared memory the roots that drove our ancestors to protect our culture for two thousand years.
And, while the West secularized, Islam did not. Islam did not undergo an Enlightenment that separated mosque from law. Sharia remained a comprehensive system governing belief, family, economics, and politics. Islam never accepted the Western premise that religion should retreat from public life. This asymmetry matters. Even though over the course of centuries, the West innovated technologically and grew in power, it remained divided.
A civilization that believes in nothing publicly will always struggle to coexist with one that believes in everything publicly. Western leaders assumed that Muslims arriving in Europe and America would naturally adopt secular norms. That faith would soften over time.
That Islam would become cultural rather than authoritative. That assumption was not grounded in Islamic theology or history. It was a projection. In the twentieth century, mass immigration accelerated this imbalance.
Western nations opened their borders without demanding assimilation into Christian moral frameworks. Multiculturalism replaced integration. Difference was celebrated, but cohesion was abandoned. Islam did not need to conquer militarily. It simply needed to arrive intact.
Mosques were built. Islamic schools formed. Parallel legal norms emerged quietly through family courts and community pressure. Practices incompatible with Western values were accepted in the name of tolerance.
The West had disarmed itself morally. Sociologist Ruud Koopmans has shown that Muslim integration in Europe has consistently lagged behind other immigrant groups, particularly where religious identity remains strong. This is about worldview. The West’s inability to respond has been further compounded by guilt.
Colonialism became the master explanation for all conflicts. Western nations were taught that they alone were responsible for global injustice. Any assertion of sovereignty was framed as an act of oppression. Islamic violence was reinterpreted as a reaction. Islamic separatism as a grievance. Islamic law as culture.
Meanwhile, Christian expression was increasingly treated as dangerous or exclusionary. A civilization ashamed of itself cannot defend itself. The result is what we see today.
Islam advances not through conquest but through demographic concentration, legal activism, and intimidation. Speech is restricted. Criticism is socially punished and, at times, violently. Politicians hesitate. Institutions comply.
This is not because Islam is stronger than before. It is because the West is weaker. The West forgot that tolerance is not the absence of boundaries. It is the fair enforcement of them. Without boundaries, tolerance becomes submission.
As the saying goes, history often rhymes. Late Roman elites also believed their civilization was too enlightened to defend itself. They outsourced defense. They accommodated enemies. They lost confidence in their gods. Islam did not defeat Rome militarily at first. It inherited a world already hollowed out. The same dynamic is visible today.
We must strengthen Christendom by remembering the truth. The West must remember that Christianity built the moral architecture it now takes for granted. Human dignity, equality before the law, limits on power, and compassion for the weak are not universal defaults. They are Christian gifts.
A civilization that forgets this will give those gifts away to those who do not share the values that produced them. The question facing the West is not whether Islam will change. The question is whether the West will remember what it is. Because a civilization that does not believe in itself will be ruled by one that does. The story does not end with ideas alone.
In the next installment, we turn to the modern age, where theology meets terrorism and ancient doctrine reemerges in contemporary violence. From the collapse of Christian populations in the Middle East to the rise of contemporary jihadist movements and the events of September 11, we will examine how the past never truly passed. The war did not end. It adapted.
