This week's terrorist attack on a Christmas market in Berlin killed 12 and injured 56.
Who would have thought a decade or two ago that a nativity scene would need armed guards?
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| Heavily-armed police guard the nativity scene at Canterbury Cathedral in Kent, England Credit: David Parker, Daily Mail |
There are now close to 50 million Muslims in Europe. About half of those are in the EU countries that include Germany, France, Sweden etc.
Paris is now the home to more than 2 million Muslims.
There are more than 1 million Muslims in London. The mayor of London is a Muslim and Mohammed is now the most popular name in the United Kingdom.
Muslims made up about 6% of the population of Germany even before it starting welcoming hordes of Muslim refugees. In 2015, an estimated 1 million Muslim refugees entered Germany. I could not find a reliable estimate for the total in 2016 but arrivals of refugees by sea alone has exceeded 300,000.
Let's put that number in context.
There are less than 1.5 million Jews in Europe. By comparison, there were almost 10 million Jews in Europe in 1939. Do you begin to get a better idea of why there is little support for Israel in Europe or the United Nations anymore?
There are an estimated 3.3 million Muslims living in the United States.
The other striking fact about the numbers of refugees in Europe is the proportion of them that are male. A UN report stated that 75% of the Muslim refugees last year were "young, fit, males." Only 12% were children and 13% were female.
As Mark Steyn observed in looking at those statistics,
"That's not the demographic distribution of fleeing refugees, but of an invading army."
Indeed, that is the problem in Europe. Demography is destiny. Europe's destiny is being determined right now. The Europe we have known in our lifetimes increasingly looks like it will be a distant memory in the not too distant future.
Based on current trends, it is only a matter of time before Europe will be subsumed by the Muslim invasion. How long it will take may depend on how long it takes to get more Muslim women to join the Muslim men in Europe.
On the other side of the world there is something just as startling occurring.
The rise of Christianity in China.
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| A church service in China Credit: Jason Lee, Reuters |
Religion was outlawed in Communist China during the ruling tenure of Mao Tse Tung. The People's Republic of China is still officially an atheist nation but the role of religion has been changing rapidly in that country since the death of Mao in 1976.
China only had 1 million Christian Protestants in 1949. By 2010, it had 58 million Protestants. Professor Fenggang Yang, a professor at Purdue University and an expert on religion in China, predicts that in less than ten years China will have more Protestants (160 million) than there will be in the United States.
Yang further predicts that by 2030 "China's total Christian population, including Catholics, would exceed 247 million, placing it above Mexico, Brazil and the United States as the largest Christian congregation in the world."
All of this has not gone unnoticed by the Communist Party in China where Christians are now said to outnumber members of the party. This is more than a little troubling to the Communist leaders.
This has led Chinese authorities to begin new crackdowns on the churchgoers by passing laws that criminalize Christians if they do not pledge allegiance to the state. The government is also dictating that all religions have to become "Chinese" to try to bring them under state control. This seems directed at the astounding Protestant church growth. The Catholic Church long ago entered into a doctrine of appeasement with the Chinese government so it is not the thorn in the side that the Protestants are.
It will be interesting to see what the next couple of decades bring. Nobody knows for sure where it all leads. In Europe or in China.
However, it appears there will far fewer Christmas celebrations in Europe and far more in China than we have become accustomed to.
Merry Christmas to all...wherever you are!
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