And God bless the United States of America. In the postcolonial era, Europe’s sense of cultural preeminence was buttressed by the new police states of North Africa and the Levant. Though Europe’s elites have for decades used idealistic rhetoric to deny the forces of religion and ethnicity, those were the very forces that provided European states with their own internal cohesion. With these dictatorships holding their peoples prisoner inside secure borders-borders artificially drawn by European colonial agents-Europeans could lecture Arabs about human rights without worrying about the possibility of messy democratic experiments that could lead to significant migration. Kreeft, Peter. “Human Personhood Begins at Conception.” Catholic Education Research Center. At its center is the problem of religion and its role in politics. Indeed, early in the fifth century A.D., when Saint Augustine lived in what is today Algeria, North Africa was as much a center of Christianity as Italy or Greece. After the breakup of the Roman empire, that northward migration saw the Germanic peoples (the Goths, Vandals, Franks, and Lombards) forge the rudiments of Western civilization, with the classical legacy of Greece and Rome to be rediscovered only much later.

A classical geography is organically reasserting itself, as the forces of terrorism and human migration reunite the Mediterranean Basin, including North Africa and the Levant, with Europe. But the swift advance of Islam across North Africa in the seventh and eighth centuries virtually extinguished Christianity there, thus severing the Mediterranean region into two civilizational halves, with the “Middle Sea” a hard border between them rather than a unifying force. The question is thus posed: What, in a civilizational sense, will replace Rome? If it cannot evolve in the direction of universal values, there will be only the dementia of ideologies and coarse nationalisms to fill the void. The Lord over all will not be left on the shelf of anyone’s life. In this sense, the turmoil of the Arab Spring and the rise of the Islamic State, or ISIS, is only the latest iteration of the inability to resolve the most basic questions over what it means to be a citizen and what it means to be a state. Slowly, though, feudalism, whose consensual give-and-take worked in the direction of individualism and away from absolutism, gave way to early modern empires and, over time, to nationalism and democracy.

Although the idea of an end to history-with all its ethnic and territorial disputes-turns out to have been a fantasy, this realization is no excuse for a retreat into nationalism. During World War II, particularly in 1943-1944, the Soviet government carried out a series of deportations to Siberia and the Union Republics of Central Asia. In fact, Europe has been dramatically affected by demographic eruptions from the east: In the medieval centuries, vast numbers of Slavs and Magyars migrated into central and eastern Europe from deeper inside Eurasia. In sum, “the West” emerged in northern Europe (albeit in a very slow and tortuous manner) mainly after Islam had divided the Mediterranean world. In late antiquity, the religion split the Mediterranean world in two. For while empire, as Said documented, certainly had its evils, its very ability to govern vast multiethnic spaces around the Mediterranean provided a solution of sorts that no longer exists. Parents who no longer worry for their children, families who no longer mourn for their loved ones, and the faithful who finally worship without fear. As for the Algerian guest workers who emigrated to France and the Turkish and Kurdish guest workers who emigrated to Germany during the Cold War, they represented a more containable forerunner to the current migration.

Today, hundreds of thousands of Muslims who have no desire to be Christian are filtering into economically stagnant European states, threatening to undermine the fragile social peace. Today, Shush has a population of more than 52,000, according to World Population Review. Orientalism, through which one culture appropriated and dominated another, is slowly evaporating in a world of cosmopolitan interactions and comparative studies, as Said intuited it might. The cultural purity that Europe craves in the face of the Muslim-refugee influx is simply impossible in a world of increasing human interactions. The dunes safaris of Merzouga, and Chegaga are world renowned. Now can one observe the inexhaustible creativity of nature, its purposefulness, its preservation of that which is morally useful and destruction of that which is socially injurious, and yet fail to draw the conclusion that behind nature there is an all-pervading mind of whose incessant creative activity the processes of nature are but outward manifestations? An emerging movement, Theology Without Walls (TWW), draws on the models to understand the nature of a globally shared ultimate, one to which all the models may be intending to refer, reading the body of models as data and their number and inconsistencies as an interpretive challenge instead of a deal breaker (see, e.g., Martin 2020). Ramakrishna offers one such interpretation in the TWW spirit: he decides there is no need to choose between the models because each is a finite start on the “infinite paths to an infinite reality” (see Section 2.1)-each is news about an ultimate whose nature is so full that we actually need all the models to help us see it.