Pat Buchanan Predicts the 'Death of the West' By Christine Hall CNSNews.com Staff Writer January 08, 2002
(CNSNews.com) - In what's sure to be a controversial new book, former presidential candidate and television talk show host Pat Buchanan predicts Western culture will wither and die by mid-century because America and Europe are abandoning their Christian roots, having fewer children, and allowing their lands to become over-run by non-Western, non-Christian peoples.
"Where faith dies, populations begin to die, cultures die and eventually civilizations die," said Buchanan in an interview with CNSNews.com.
The "fundamental faith of the west" - Christianity -- is waning because in Europe "and ... those parts of the United States which have embraced hedonism and materialism, the populations are dying and they're being replaced by peoples from Asia and Africa and Latin America and the Middle East who are non-Western, non-Christian peoples in many cases," said Buchanan.
"And this spells the end of Western civilization ultimately," Buchanan predicted, "because the trends appear to be irreversible. There's not a single country in Europe today except for Muslim Albania, where the birth rate is sufficient to keep the nation alive."
The demise of Western culture may not hurt the American economy, Buchanan notes. In fact, he says, economics is part of the problem.
"It is the worship of material wealth and gain and money. I'm sure we'll all be very rich, and we'll have silver caskets," Buchanan said.
Changing the Future
Buchanan believes it's possible the current trends which he has documented in his book using United Nations projections, could be reversed by a new religious awakening and a few new laws.
"We should seal the borders against illegal immigration, move the people out of the country (the 8 or 1l million who have come in illegally), [and] proceed rapidly with assimilation with Americanization," said Buchanan.
By Americanization, Buchanan means that people who wish to immigrate to America should be required to speak English and transfer their loyalty away from their country of birth to the United States.
"What the United States should do is first declare a moratorium for two years on all immigration in the United States [and] re-write the immigration laws to give priority to those who speak English -- those who are primarily from Western countries and also those who want to come here to become Americans and raise their children as Americans," said Buchanan.
The problem with many recent immigrants, he says, is that they "simply want to walk across the border to get a job."
But Americans themselves can do something to reverse the tide, Buchanan believes, like making different life choices.
"With regard to the depopulation of native-born Americans, really this is beyond politics," Buchanan explained. "It will take something of a religious conversion or a 4th Great Awakening in America for people to turn around and say, 'I really would like to live the way my grandparents did and have a large family and raise the children at home.'"
Skeptics Abound
Many scholars, however, are likely to take a dim view of Buchanan's thesis.
"Throughout the centuries of the American Republic, there have always been Cassandras who have seen our cup as half-empty, and draining rapidly," remarked Larry J. Sabato, a University of Virginia scholar, referring to the Greek mythological figure who was given the gift of prophecy, but whose warnings about calamity went unheeded.
"Pat Buchanan has joined this dubious circle with an extremely pessimistic prognostication for America's future," said Sabato. "I suspect that he will prove to be as wrong as all the other Cassandras.
Instead, said Sabato, "the United States will continue to be the strongest nation on earth and a beacon for the world, in part because of our growing diversity.
"Buchanan sees this as a threat," said Sabato, but "many others see it as the newest infusion of energy and ideas that has long kept our nation young and on the cutting edge."
Nicholas Eberstadt, an American Enterprise Institute economist and demographer, cautions against relying too heavily on assumptions regarding future population growth.
"The problem with any long term population projection is that there is very little science to [it]," said Eberstadt. "Nobody has yet come up with a way to predict how many babies the currently unborn are going to have." So, while the U.N. projections are a reasonable place to start, Eberstadt urges caution in relying too heavily on them.
Eberstadt also notes that, depending on how one counts the number of Christians and Muslims, Christians currently have the edge and are gaining in some areas of the developing world.
"The Catholic Church is a single, institutionalized religion; Islam is not," Eberstadt said.
"If you're going to hold Islam as a single religion without specifying between Shiites and Sunnis, I think you would probably lump in Protestants with Catholics as Christians, in which case you'd have about 2 billion Christians, as opposed to about 1.2 billion Muslims," said Eberstadt.
Moreover, if one is concerned about Christianity withering away, said Eberstadt, one should take heart in the swell of new Catholic and evangelical converts in developing areas of the world, such as Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. "If you're looking for Christians, there are plenty of new Christians around."
Still other critics argue that, even if all the facts and figures Buchanan relies upon are correct, it's not Christian faith that makes a moral people.
"In the 19th Century in America, the culture was [one] of self-interest, a culture where people pursued their own values and self-interest, and what we got was a thriving economy and a moral population and a wonderful place to live," said Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute.
"We're moving away from that to a more altruistic - whether secular or religious -moral system," said Brook. "And in that sense I think there's not much difference between Buchanan and the professors at the universities; they're both altruistic.
"Buchanan believes we should be sacrificing for the sake of religion or God; the professors at the universities believe we should be sacrificing for the sake of some group, whether it be some ethnic group or all of humanity. Environmentalists believe we should sacrifice for the sake of the trees," Brook continued.
"I believe our focus and ethics should be on life and living a good life."