Sometimes I wonder

Although that is certainly not true of many people, sometimes I really wonder.

The modern West considers more or less no longer open to question to tolerate religions and religious practices; and no longer throws anyone's religion on their face. Even modern anti-Semitism (and that would go as far back as the 19th Century) is no longer about "they killed Jesus" or "they eat Christian babies on Passover" but about conspiracies in banking and politics (which ironically, is an anti-Semitism that works in Muslim countries where the old Christian anti-Semitism would be "so what?").

Yet Muslims, Mormons and Witnesses are near-universal exceptions to the rule of openness.

Of course, they vary from person to person, region to region. But nearly everyone is more open to discriminate against any of them than they would for about anyone else.

Clearly this is not racism, or not just racism, because US Black Christians are not held the same as US Black Muslims; or in Europe, white Muslims from Eastern Europe are still viewed with the same suspicions as tanned, brown and black Muslims from Asia and Africa.

It is also not a fear about the loss of traditional Western European Christianity. For all the quasi-Christian talk (and in the US, popularity among actual Christians), Islamophobes are not very good Christians either, and actually tend to defend liberalism for most while denying it to Muslims, not to defend some form of Papocesarism. Yet it's also not about secularism itself, which in the USA and a lot of Europe is more threatened by Christian movements than Islamic movements.

It's certainly not about fear of losing the Western position as leading civilization either. While that might happen in the relative short term, the immediate winner would be China and the Chinese civilization, not Islam. But the fears are not about reading Confucius rather than Aristotle, but the Quran rather than... what? I don't even know what? (and no, as I argued, it's not the Bible that is the what)

And for all the talk about the demographic time bomb... Well yes, I do buy the demographic time bomb arguments about Eurabia. But the Islamophobes are unwilling to take the next step and become natalists in their own land. Even in the USA, where it wouldn't really be controversial, you need actual Christians to be natalists, which Islamophobes are, I repeat, not. Evangelicals, Catholics, and, yeah, Mormons, have a better record reproducing than Islamophobes do.

Part of me thinks that this is a Neo-Crusader, so to speak, definition of the West, less by what it is, and more by what it is not - and it is not Islam. And therefore threatened by the prospect that Muslims might become as common a part of the West as Catholics, Protestants and Jews. I find it somewhat ironic, because a lot of what is said about Islam is just as true of Christianity, and a lot of what is said about Islamic cultures and countries is also true of the almost-Western Catholic countries of the former Spanish and Portuguese empires. The demographic and broadly cultural arguments certainly sustain in the case of the USA and Latin Americans migrating north, probably even more than they do for Europe and Arabia.

But if I am right, that is petty.

The West has a lot to define itself by. And a lot to be proud of (even if it also has a lot to remorse for).

It shouldn't reduce itself to being not-Islam.

And such a definition wouldn't even save it. It's uninspiring and bankrupt in a time when Brazil and India speak of "The Global South" and China projects alternatively its modern production chains and its millenarian history.