The Christian civilization of Europe is a dying ember, a ghost of its glorious past. The decline in religiosity, the growth of secularism, and the collapse of traditional Western values all attest to this fact. Walking down the streets of Europe, one hears mostly the echoes of a Christian civilization slowly fading into memory.

There’s a palpable sense of cultural exhaustion in the West right now, a sense of living through the late stages of dissolution. One thinks of the magnificent lines of Gloucester in Shakespeare’s King Lear:

These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend
no good to us…
love cools,
friendship falls off, brothers divide: in
cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in
palaces, treason; and the bond cracked ‘twixt son
and father…
We have seen the best of our time.

Nevertheless, all is not doom and hopelessness. Indeed, Christian faith demands that we always maintain hope, especially in the grimmest times. We’ve seen a recent surge in religiosity among young people, along with other stirrings of possible renewal within Western culture. In fact, history, particularly Christian history, consists of a series of near-defeats that give way to unexpected renewal and the emergence of something even better than what came before.

One of the greatest sources of hope may lie outside the West altogether. While many European-influenced nations are abandoning their Christianity, Africa and Asia are embracing it and have the fastest-growing Christian populations in the world. At the turn of the 20th century, Africa had only about 10 million Christians; today, more than 700 million. The portion of the world’s Christians living in sub-Saharan Africa is projected to rise to 38% by 2050.

Africa isn’t suffering from the self-strangulation of collapsing birthrates that are smiting more “developed” countries either. A map of global fertility rates clearly shows where the future of the world lies (blue indicates negative birth rates, while red indicates positive birth rates).

The combination of growing religiosity and growing population in Africa suggests that this continent may play an important role in shaping the future, even providing the key to re-Christianizing the West. It’s not hard to imagine that, just as Irish missionaries radiated out to the pagan lands surrounding them in the early Middle Ages, African missionaries of the future might cross the Mediterranean to re-evangelize the neo-pagans of Europe.

Ross Douthat has made a convincing argument that African immigration into Europe might assist Europe in rediscovering its Christian roots. “In a world where every culture and society can seem to be converging, Africa is the outlier: relatively poor in a world of affluence, still wartorn in a world more at peace than in the past, increasingly religious rather than secularizing, youthful in a graying world, and fertile in an age of sterility,” Douthat writes in “The Decadent Society.” “The continent’s situation is far more complex and hopeful than Western cliche often suggests … its exceptionalism could make Africa a source of renewal, or a place where a genuine alternative contemporary modernity takes shape.”

Africa is bound to influence the future of Europe and the wider world simply from a numbers perspective, Douthat explains. As Europe’s population shrinks and Africa’s grows, some degree of African immigration seems likely. According to Douthat, there could be seven Africans in Europe for every one European by the 2090s.

That kind of demographic shift will inevitably involve some bumps along the way. But, optimistically, one result could be a recovery of faith in Europe if the Africans entering it bring their Christianity. Historically, renaissances generally emerge when something old is rediscovered and combined with something new. In Europe’s case, the rediscovered aspect would be its Christianity, while the “something new” would be African culture more broadly. Douthat cites a speech by African Cardinal Robert Sarah, in which the prelate “imagined his fellow Africans leading a reinvigoration and enrichment of a portion of the Western inheritance–the Christian part–even as he asked European Christians to join him in defense of African cultural distinctives against Western leaders who. . .would prefer the continent to converge with European decadence.”

No doubt, this possible future would involve its own challenges, and not a little uncertainty for native Europeans confronting such a big cultural shift. But it may just give Europe a path out of its current stagnation and religious tepidity.

It’s not just Africa’s Christianity that might prove a balm to the West, either. It’s also the fact that the more agrarian African culture has remained more rooted in basic realities that make absurd ideologies like transgenderism unthinkable. In an interview with “Hearth & Field” Father Joseph Fessio explains:

[M]y hope for the life of the Church is in Africa. They are closer to soil and nature and what God has created directly. They can see the ideologies for the abstractions from reality they are. They can avoid some of the polemic and destructive ideologies that are so harmful and tend to destroy faith. Don’t get me wrong, we depend on modern technology and have to accept some of the abstractions and artificialities of the world we live in. But getting back to soil is important.

We tend to think of agrarian life as rather backwards. Yet it’s worth noting how closely the West’s loss of faith has correlated with its movement away from an agrarian economy and toward industrialization and technocracy. There might be wisdom in looking to a continent that – though less successful than America or Europe by economic metrics – is more successful by the metrics that matter most.

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The republication of this article is made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal.

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