Reflecting on the immigrant invasion of Europe, Tom Piatak wrote on the loss of Western man’s will to survive. Here’s my gloss.

Europe lost its will to survive and is being invaded by immigrants: It discarded its Christian faith, which plunged its birth rate to half the replacement level, meaning rapid extinction no matter what. The vacuum is being filled by foreigners arriving by the millions, encouraged by a religion, Islam, that retains strong belief and encourages children.

Other things have made matters worse, such as the idiotic U.S. and European destruction of stable regimes in Iraq, Syria and Libya. But previous involvement in those areas, as during the Crusades or the 19th Century, meant the implantation of European colonies or client regimes

But look at this map in BBC News of new migrations from Turkey, through the Balkans, then to Germany. Compare that to the European part of this map of the Ottoman advance, 1300-1600. It’s the same route, only without the Janissaries.

For that matter, it’s the reverse of the inland routs of the Crusaders.

What we’re seeing is the end of the so-called “Enlightenment” project of disemboweling Christian civilization, replacing it with a secular simulacrum that kept some of the “nice” parts of Christianity—tolerance, high culture, scholarship (all twisted into something else, such as political correctness); while discarding the parts it didn’t like—the supernatural, sacrifice, monogamy.

The dirty secret of the “Enlightenment” was that it depended on Christian “breeders” to keep having children. That’s because the “Enlightenment”—the word itself was an advertising jingle—killed off birth rates. That fact was dramatized in one of Winston Churchill’s books on World War II, where he noted the low French birth rate since French Revolution meant not enough soldiers to fight Germany with its high birth rate that continued to be encouraged, including under Kaiser Wilhelm II.

Now that Christian belief is almost gone, so are the European babies.

At this point, the only thing that can save Europe, stop the invasion and drive out the home-grown “Enlightenment” demons is prayer and fasting.