Secular Europe’s Failure: Why Only Christ Can Stop Islamization

For decades, Europe has tried every secular tool at its disposal to manage the growing presence of Islam on our continent. Integration programmes came first: interfaith dialogue, women’s rights courses, free-speech challenges like the Danish Muhammad cartoons, and bans on the burqa and full-face veils. Despite these earnest and often costly efforts, most have fallen short. Now, with illegal immigration surging— particularly in the United Kingdom—a newer, tougher approach has gained traction among conservatives: remigration and the deportation of illegal immigrants.

These measures may well be overdue and necessary in many ways. Yet an honest question lingers: will they truly reverse the Islamization of the West? International law, unless fundamentally changed, ensures that many Muslims already here have the legal right to stay—and to practise their faith freely, as democratic societies with religious liberty demand. And if remigration proves a dead end, what then? What is the next step?

We must finally try the one thing we have not yet attempted—the very thing our secular ideology has long forbidden, yet which might have spared us so many difficulties: approaching the matter religiously. That is, speaking with Muslims about God and gently introducing them to the Gospel.

There has been a staggering, almost wilful blindness to the religious heart of Islam’s presence in the West. From Barack Obama and Theresa May to François Hollande, Angela Merkel, and many political leaders today, the message has been unwavering: whatever tensions Islam brings to Europe, “it has nothing to do with religion.”

They say this partly because they see religion as irrelevant, partly because Western secularism clings to the illusion that ignoring the religious dimension will make it vanish, and partly because religion feels too dangerous to confront head-on.

Even the starkest events have failed to break through. On the morning of 26 July 2016, two young Islamists forced their way into the Catholic church in Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray, northern France, and slit the throat of 86-year-old Father Jacques Hamel while he celebrated Mass at the altar—an act echoing the martyrdoms of Christianity’s first centuries. Yet President Hollande insisted it was not religious violence but an assault on the Republic: “To attack a church, to kill a priest, is to profane the Republic.”

This refusal to see religion as central has shaped integration policy throughout the West. In Denmark—a country that has pursued a particularly resolute secular approach—politicians placed deep faith in the social-democratic recipe: give Muslims education, jobs (especially for women), decent housing, cars, and the full welfare system, and their religious worldview would quietly melt away into secular materialism. The experiment has collapsed. Far from secularizing, many Muslims have grown more devout, and some more radicalized, precisely in encounter with the prosperous, godless West.

The numbers bear this out. A 2015 poll by TV 2/Megafon found that four out of ten Danish Muslims (around 40%) believed Danish laws should be based at least partly on the Quran rather than solely on the Constitution. 

The 2013 WZB Berlin Social Science Centre study by Ruud Koopmans, surveying Muslims in Germany, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, and Sweden, revealed that 65% believe Sharia should take precedence over national law. In Denmark in 2009, one in five Muslims preferred Sharia-based laws over the constitution. A 2025 Ifop poll in France showed 57% of young Muslims aged 15–24 favouring Sharia over republican laws (15% fully, 31% partially); overall, 46% of French Muslims share this view. In Britain, an ICM poll for Channel 4 found 23% prefer Sharia to British law.

This deepening religious commitment is visible all across Europe’s landscape. Over the past fifteen years, mosques and Islamic prayer spaces have multiplied dramatically, mirroring both population growth and stronger devotion.

In France—Europe’s Muslim powerhouse with roughly 5–6 million Muslims—mosques and prayer rooms have doubled from about 1,500 in 2001 to over 2,300 in 2025, often supported by private donations or foreign funding from Turkey and Saudi Arabia, despite laïcité rules.

In Germany, mosque numbers have risen from roughly 2,500 to between 2,500 and 2,963, with traditional minaret-bearing structures more than doubling since 2004.

In the United Kingdom, mosques grew from around 1,500 in 2010 to 1,800–1,900 purpose-built ones today (a figure which rises up to 2,838 when including temporary venues), with former pubs, churches, and warehouses transformed into Islamic centres—especially in London and the Midlands—marking an eighteen-fold increase since the 1990s.

These figures make it plain: in societies that cherish religious freedom, political measures alone cannot stop a faith from spreading. Could there be a connection between the fact that the most secular, post-Christian nations—Sweden, Germany, France, and Britain, where church attendance has collapsed—are the very ones struggling hardest with integration failures and parallel societies?

We must ask ourselves one piercing question: What would Europe look like today if, thirty years ago, we had sent pastors and priests into asylum centres and Muslim communities? Might much of the radicalization have been averted?

Of course, we are not speaking of forced conversion—only of Christians and clergy warmly inviting Muslims into honest conversation about who God truly is. In a widely viewed YouTube talk titled “11 Areas where ISLAM IS FAILING, especially in the UK,” Christian apologist Chris from Speakers’ Corner shares how many Muslims he meets in central London harbour quiet doubts about their faith and are surprisingly open to hearing from Christians—especially when Muslim scholars struggle to answer tough challenges. The reality is simple: if Christians do not engage them, radical imams often will.

That churches can reach Muslims—and that Muslims are not inherently hostile to them—is clear from Danish experience. During the 2015 Syrian refugee wave, the Churches’ Integration Service found that around 70% of migrants turning to church-based meeting places were Muslims. Secular authorities frequently could not—or would not—address their deep religious longings, leaving people alienated by cold bureaucracy. For most Muslims, faith matters far more than the democratic freedoms they are expected immediately to embrace. When local offices dismiss or reject talk of God, many naturally turn to churches for help: shared meals, legal guidance, language classes, contact families. Yet many churches, shaped by the same secular atmosphere, hesitate to move beyond practical aid and speak openly about God and the Gospel. What if evangelization had been a natural, unapologetic part of that welcome? Might many have chosen Christ over Muhammad, thereby sparing themselves and Western societies much heartache? Research consistently shows that Christian migrants—and those who come to faith in Christ—face far fewer integration challenges.

Sceptics may wonder if Muslims in the West would really respond to the Gospel. Yet look at what is happening in Muslim-majority lands: Christianity is growing explosively, as never before in history, even under fierce repression.

Iran offers a striking example. By 2023, mosque attendance had fallen so sharply that the culture minister called it “highly alarming,” with active mosques down by a third. In 2025, President Masoud Pezeshkian proposed repurposing mosques for public services to revive them, admitting that 70–80% lack prayer leaders and 50,000 remain closed. At the same time, estimates from ministries like Elam and Transform Iran suggest 1–3 million converts from Muslim backgrounds to Christianity, with underground house churches tripling since the 2010s, digital discipleship reaching over 25,000 monthly, and new believers leading entire families and neighbours to faith. Persecution breeds secrecy, yet the church grows through loving, personal witness.

The same pattern appears elsewhere. In Algeria—one of the largest convert communities in the Muslim world—estimates range from 50,000 to 200,000 Christians, mostly former Muslims in the Kabyle region, with house churches growing at around 8% annually despite closures and restrictions. In Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim nation, church leaders estimate Christianity may reach 20–30% of the population (well above the official 11%), with millions converting in recent decades, often in charismatic settings amid social pressure. Afghanistan’s known Christians have risen from a handful in 2001 to 10,000–20,000 or more today, sustained in utmost secrecy. In Iraq, over 5,000 Muslims have converted since the early 2000s, with new churches appearing in Baghdad and Kurdistan despite grave risks. Sudan has witnessed millions turning to Christ since the 1990s, fuelling vibrant growth amid conflict.

This prompts another urgent question for Europe: why are Muslims converting to Christianity in places where the faith is banned, persecuted, or heavily restricted—yet in open, tolerant Europe, with welcoming churches on every corner, many grow firmer in Islam and some even become radicalized?

Representatives of the St. Nicholas Tavelić Network for Morisco Catholics—TavNet, a lay-run Catholic missionary network for Muslim converts based in the UK—work from the conviction that it is far more fruitful to talk about who God is and what He desires from us than to debate which civilization is superior today. They point out that many Muslims view Christianity as synonymous with a libertine, permissive culture they cannot embrace. As converts themselves, they see this firsthand. One shared: “I see people—my own family—I wish had a better impression of Christianity so it would be easier for them to convert. In many multigenerational Muslim families, it is the younger generation that has grown more religious over time—precisely because godlessness has spread and authentic Christian culture has faded away.”

For these former Muslims, now Catholic and active in TavNet, there is no doubt: if the Church could show a stronger, more vibrant, healthier Christian example, far more Muslims would come to Christ. They lament that the Church has grown too passive and that it is no longer the “city on a hill” of which Jesus spoke in the Sermon on the Mount. Secularism has made the Church almost agnostic about its own traditions—everything is questioned anew from the beginning. Muslims notice this inconsistency. Coming from a Muslim background before becoming Catholic, one of the most discouraging things can be the sense that Christians lack firm conviction, that their faith simply drifts with the times, without a transcendent principle shining down as the Quran does for Muslims.

Islam’s arrival may even be the providential wake-up call we so desperately need: not chiefly to push Muslims away, but to stir genuine Christian revival within our own hearts and communities. The Church must face its responsibility to be that shining city on a hill and to draw Muslims toward Christ. No government can accomplish what the Church, at its best, has the power to do. We should not evangelize among Muslims to make Islam vanish, but out of love for truth and love for our neighbour. In true neighbourly love, we cannot wish our Muslim friends to remain in spiritual falsehood or bondage.

Europe’s deliverance from Islamization will not come through politics alone, but through spiritual renewal. This has never been a political battle; it is spiritual warfare. Christians and thoughtful conservatives must step forward with the bold, loving, evangelistic spirit of our forebears, offering the living Christ rather than clinging to policy dreams that have only deepened Islam’s presence. Only the Gospel—shared with humility, genuine warmth, and unshakeable conviction—can change hearts, heal societies, and reclaim a continent for the truth that once defined it as Christendom.

This essay appears in the Spring 2026 issue of The European Conservative, Number 38:19-21.