Immigration and culture

In my previous post on immigration, I mentioned culture only obliquely.  I understand that this is seen as a major omission.  I am in fact broadly sympathetic to the view that Protestant culture has created the modern world as we know it and I certainly think that the Christian influence generally has made the world much more humane than it otherwise would be.  I am a keen student of history so know full well how inhumane even the great civilizations of antiquity were.

In fact, I seem to have greater faith in the power of Protestant Christianity than many other contributors and commenters on this blog do.  What I see is that New Testament Christianity keeps renewing itself.  People keep rediscovering it.  The Catholic church forgot it in the middle ages and the Protestant reformers rediscovered it.  The great Protestant churches went to sleep and forgot it and a host of new evangelical Protestant churches sprang up that have now largely eclipsed them.  The story of New Testament Christianity is a story of continual revival.  And the word “revival” is of course for that reason well-known in connection with Christian evangelism.  So New Testament Christianity is a faith of enormous power that keeps bobbing up with evergreen freshness time and time again. 

And it continues to make new conquests.  The largest Anglican communion in the world is now Nigeria and their enthusiasm for the original faith is great.  To them the hollow shell of Anglicanism that is the Episcopal Church of the USA is contemptible and heretical.  And Christianity in China is on a roll.  On some estimates there are over 100 million Chinese Christians.  The Chinese authorities even encourage it as a modernizing influence—though they do treat harshly congregations that they perceive as being under foreign control.  And there is also of course a great expansion of Protestantism under way in Latin America.

So I just don’t see Protestant culture as being under any threat.  Islam is certainly the most minor threat to it.  The one substantial threat that there is to it comes from the modern Left.  The postmodernist and politically correct crowd are doing their best to suppress it at every turn and remove it from public view.  But such attempts are really laughable.  They may even be doing Christianity a good turn.  Christianity has always thrived on persecution.

And the Catholic church is certainly no longer any threat to Protestantism.  The post-Vatican II church is itself now essentially Protestant.  A Catholic Mass is now virtually indistinguishable from many Anglican ones and obedience to the official teachings of the church is mostly just a memory.  There may be some people in rural Ireland who still obey the church’s teachings on contraception but there are not many like them elsewhere in the Western world.  A few plaster saints are about all that makes a church Catholic these days.  So any cultural threat of religious origin posed by the Catholic Hispanic immigrants into the United States is imaginary.

But there is of course more to culture than religion.  Hispanic societies are notoriously corrupt and feudal.  Do Americans want those values in their midst?  Obviously not.  But Humpty Dumpty has fallen I am afraid and I see no prospect of putting him together again.  The Hispanics are now there in their many millions in the USA and there is no realistically conceivable way that they will ever be removed.  America already lives with a large and apparently permanent black underclass.  It may have to live with a fairly permanent Hispanic underclass too.  But millions of Hispanics have risen out of the underclass into middle-class American life so the ultimate size of the Hispanic underclass problem remains to be seen.
     

Posted by jonjayray on Monday, December 20, 2004 at 06:58 AM in Immigration
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