Peter Kreeft on EWTN: Muslims are “Conquering” Europe Through Their Mothers

Longtime Boston College philosophy professor Peter Kreeft recently appeared on Raymond Arroyo’s EWTN show and made some eye-opening comments about Muslims that skew closely to a white nationalist trope that white people are being “replaced” through demographics.

Kreeft – who was on Arroyo’s show in part to plug his new book, “How to Destroy Western Civilization and Other Ideas from the Cultural Abyss” – was responding to a question from Arroyo about falling birthrates in the West. Kreeft then made the claim that Europe “is in the process of becoming a Muslim continent.”

That statement – that Europe is becoming “Islamicized” through demographics – is an inflammatory claim you often see in some far right outlets purporting to be Catholic and among conservative Churchmen like Cardinal Raymond Burke, who has opined that it is “patriotic” to restrict Muslim immigration. The trope plays on grievances regarding cultural decline in the West, emphasized in this context via sexual immorality, the widespread use of contraception and secularization. Also at play are anxieties over the potential downfall of Western civilization and a degraded Christianity, deep-seated fear of Muslims and the nightmare of living in a dystopian Islamic Europe.

There’s no doubt that because of internal movements of peoples within the Eurozone, urbanization and changing social mores in the age of globalization, as well as immigration and the flight of refugees from Africa and war-torn countries in the Middle East, demographics – including the growth of Muslim communities – have been changing Europe over the last couple of decades.

The Europe of our grandparents – a continent of homogenous nation-states where the Catholic Church still had somewhat of a privileged place in public life – doesn’t really exist anymore. The EU member states today are secularized and have a religious, ethnical and racial diversity that would have been unimaginable for my parents, who didn’t emigrate from Portugal until the early 1970s.

Immigration is also often a controversial political issue because it introduces large numbers of people who have cultures, languages, religions and customs that are very different than their host country. The reason why immigration can trigger nativist impulses is because we fear “outsiders” moving in and changing our neighborhoods and communities with their “foreign” ways of life and “strange” ways of doing things.

The anxiety of being “replaced” by a foreign other is reflected in the document that articulates the vision of the nativist “America First Caucus,” which holds up “Anglo Saxon traditions” as ideal and denigrates immigrants who arrived in this country after 1965 – that would include my family – as a drain on the nation. One of the leading figures of that so-called “Ango Saxon Caucus,” by the way, is Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Q-Anon sympathetic congresswoman who was recently portrayed in an EWTN news report as a courageous pro-life witness.

You throw in factors such as race and Islam – which is often depicted in Western media as a violent Jihad-obsessed religion of terrorism – and you can have a real political powder keg on your hands.

“Casting ordinary mothers and families as an existential threat like that puts Muslim communities at risk,” said Jordan Denari Duffner, a Catholic scholar of Christian-Muslim relations who has an upcoming book on the topic entitled “Islamophobia. What Christians Should Know (And Do) About Anti-Muslim Discrimination.”

Duffner told me that Arroyo and Kreeft, in the beginning of their conversation, were echoing the “great replacement theory,” which she noted has fueled right-wing anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic attacks in a number of places, including the Christchurch mosque shootings in 2019 that left 51 people dead and another 40 wounded. It’s the same kind of rhetoric that can animate a white Texas man to pick up an AR-15 and shoot Mexicans in an El Paso Walmart in order to stop the “Hispanic invasion” of the United States.

“I’m most troubled by (Kreeft) talking about birth rates as a way that Muslims are ‘conquering’ Europe,” Duffner said. “When I heard him say that, I couldn’t help but think of all of the Muslim mothers who have been physically assaulted in the presence of their children in the US and Europe.

“I find it troubling that the great replacement theory has been normalized in so many Catholic settings,” Duffner added. “Not just EWTN, but also the fact that Turkson would show that video.”

Duffner was referring to a 2012 episode where Cardinal Peter Turkson came under fire for screening a controversial video critical of the growth of the Muslim population in Europe. Cardinal Turkson, a native of Ghana, later apologized and said his intention was not to denigrate Islam but to raise legitimate concerns about the future of Christianity in Europe.

By the way, the Pew Research Center has crunched the numbers in analyzing potential demographic scenarios in Europe. A “high” projection where Muslim refugees continue to flow into Europe indefinitely into the future would have Muslims making up 14 percent of Europe’s population by 2050; nearly triple the current share but still considerably smaller than the populations of Christians and non-religious people in Europe.

As for Kreeft, he’s been known in the past to be gracious when speaking of devout Muslims, often emphasizing their sincere devotion and love of the Blessed Virgin Mary, among other things that Catholics and Muslims hold in common. I think that’s why it might be surprising for some of his longtime admirers to hear Kreeft warning viewers of Arroyo’s EWTN show that Muslims are “conquering” Europe through their mothers.