By Francis X. Maier
In late July, some 60,000 migrants surged into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta in North Africa from Morocco. The migrants were mainly young men. And since 99 percent of Moroccans profess Islam, the majority were, almost certainly, Muslim. Ceuta is not a Spanish colony. It is an “autonomous city” that is part of the Spanish state, with Spanish sovereignty dating back to 1580. It is, therefore, a (coveted) gateway to the European Union and a prime target for “undocumented” immigration.
Spanish police forced most of the migrants back across the border. They left behind—as the Wall Street Journal noted—a normally quiet city stunned by the chaos. All of this is now old news. But what lingers in memory is the response of the Spanish Church: an ambiguous mix of concern for the law, unease over Ceuta’s traumatized legal residents, and a marked fear that the incident would be used as a “political weapon” to polarize public opinion, demonize the migrants, and “stoke fear.”
We’ll return to that last concern—the treatment of migrants—in a moment. But first, some context and background.
Jacques Ellul (died 1994) was a distinguished French philosopher and scholar of history and sociology. He was active in the French Resistance during World War II, helping Jews escape the pro-Nazi Vichy regime. He is best remembered for his many books, including masterpieces such as The Technological Society and Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes. He was also a committed Christian (Calvinist) and a lay theologian in the Reformed Church of France. And in that role, he was an eloquent critic of Islam and of the emerging prospect of an “Islamized” Europe.
Ellul is awkward for the current secular narrative. We live in an age when Europe’s elites have repudiated the continent’s Christian past, while revising history to soften and valorize many elements of Islam. Meanwhile, Christian thinkers often minimize the chasms that separate Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in the name of mutual respect. Public voices that do not join this current are branded “racist” like Jean Raspail, “alarmist and Islamophobic” like Michel Houellebecq (for his novel Submission), or lacking in academic rigor, like the scholar Bat Ye’or.
If Ellul were alive, he could not be dismissed so easily. His solid critique of Islam is found in two of his books. In brief, he argues that the three great “monotheistic” religions have very different understandings of God, of others, and of the human person. They do not share a common foundation in Abraham. And they do not relate to their Scriptures in a similar way. This same point is made today by the French Catholic philosopher Rémi Brague, winner of the Ratzinger Prize. And this has very practical and real consequences.
Ellul especially criticized what he saw as an unreformable totalitarian trait in Islam, based on a claim of divine right. This led Islam to introduce the concept of “holy war” into religious thought. And this, in turn, triggered the Christian notion of “crusade” as a response.
For Islam, violence and coercion—when deemed necessary—are legitimate tools for the spread of the faith. They are intrinsically rooted in Islam’s original structure in a way completely foreign to Christianity. As Ellul notes, this has rarely prevented Christians from ignoring their own beliefs in pursuit of self-interest. Yet in their fundamental attitudes toward religious violence, the two confessions possess very different DNA.
For our purposes here, some of Ellul’s key thoughts on Islam appear in his preface to The Dhimmi and in his foreword to The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam, both written by the Jewish scholar Bat Ye’or (pen name of Gisèle Littman). The great value of each book lies in its rigorous study of the life of dhimmis over the centuries. Dhimmis were and are non-Muslim persons living under Islamic rule. Today there is much talk of Muslim “tolerance” toward Jews and Christians in Islamic lands. The historical record is mixed, but rarely favorable.
In theory, dhimmis are “protected” People of the Book. But in practice they never enjoy full equality with Muslims. The more orthodox an Islamic regime becomes and the more it is governed by shari’a law, the more dhimmis suffer as a subordinate class. The “rights” of dhimmis, as Ellul stresses, are granted and conditional rights, always subject to revocation. Worse still, in past centuries “massacres of dhimmis were frequent,” and brutal persecution of Christians continues today in some Muslim communities. The long-term effect of this repression is the gradual strangulation of everything non-Muslim. Examples abound. Before the Muslim conquest, the Church in North Africa had some 300 dioceses. Today they lie buried and forgotten in the sand.
Ellul concludes that “Within the ‘living context’ of contemporary history, [Bat Ye’or’s work] contains a clear warning. The Muslim world has not evolved in its way of regarding the non-Muslim, which is a reminder of the fate awaiting those who may one day find themselves submerged within it.” In short, today’s Europe, with its illusions about the nature of Islam and its moral and cultural paralysis in the face of massive Muslim immigration, is sleepwalking toward voluntary “dhimmitude.”
Which brings us back to the Ceuta event and its repercussions for the Church.
One of Christianity’s great strengths is its respect for the dignity of every human person, believer or not, as a child of God. The Church serves that dignity with exceptional skill in its support of migrants. This is an essential part of our faith. But a family—and the Church is a very large family with a very specific biblical faith—has its first obligations not to strangers, but to the health, safety, and future of its own members. Otherwise, the family ensures its own extinction.
When the Church allows itself to be perceived as more concerned with strangers of an alien faith (historically resistant and unfriendly) than with the needs of its own people—the people who will bear the cost of excessive immigration—it conspires in its own disappearance.
It has happened before. It can happen again. And that benefits no one.
About the author:
Francis X. Maier is a senior fellow in Catholic studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is the author of True Confessions: Voices of Faith from a Life in the Church.