BIFURCATED BLIGHTY:

Shot: “Thousands of people took to the streets of central London on Monday, blockading some of the UK capital’s busiest roads and bridges, and gluing themselves to street furniture, to raise the alarm over a mounting climate crisis.”

—CNN today.

Chaser:

First Things has done a good thing in publishing the testimony of Jacob Williams, a British convert to Islam.  Aside from the fact that I always find it fascinating to learn why people embrace a religion into which they were not born, Williams’s essay reveals how and why the pathetic weakness of UK (and European) Christianity has left a vacuum that Islam is prepared to fill. This is a fascinating essay. Williams begins by talking about the sense of meaninglessness pervading contemporary Britain:

Anomie was one thing; the ferocious renunciation of tradition I encountered at university was quite another. I had hoped that the spiritual emptiness of wider society was a result of ignorance, and that the academy—especially the ancient, venerable, Gothic academy of Oxford—had preserved what I vaguely imagined was my country’s noble heritage. Studying philosophy did provide some engagement with an intellectual inheritance, but for anyone moderately interested in public life, the campus movements for “social justice” were impossible to ignore. All of these—whether their goal was the liberation of women, of LGBT persons, or of ethnic minorities—seemed to have the same vision of man: a deracinated, protean aggregate of desires. These movements gained in strength every year. Formerly apolitical spaces were distorted by the need to appease one demand after another. The culture of the university, once imbued with the brash boyishness of the English public schools, now accommodated the sterile, strenuous inclusivity of progressive zealots.

After three years of this, I was frustrated and alienated. I needed a purpose. Philosophy classes had sharpened my inquiries, but they didn’t rectify the meaninglessness all around me. My utopian peers found their purpose in crusades against racism and homophobia, but their contempt for England revolted me. I chose a different course and embarked on a search for God.

Their contempt for England revolted me. And so he ended up becoming Muslim. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Read on.

—“Why Convert To Islam?”, Rod Dreher, today.

As G.K. Chesterton famously never said, “When a man stops believing in God he doesn’t then believe in nothing, he believes anything.” But when that “anything” is nihilism and dissipation, no wonder others seek much more bracing stuff.