Is Britain likely to become a majority Muslim country? And would it matter?

[Quackers]

Moderator Action: This thread is split off from this one in the history forum. I thought it better to move these posts out of the way to keep that thread on topic.

So, if Winner is right in his inane ramblings about Islam taking over Europe, we're actually heading in the right direction now? Sweet.

errrrr sorry to spoil the party but Islam is taking over Europe

 

[Lord Baal]

errrrr sorry to spoil the party but Islam is taking over Europe

Good, bring on the Golden Age.

You laugh now. But soon, all shall be revealed. Soon, Europe will be ruled over by a prophet like no other.

Ving Rhames with a beard: best character in film history. I don't even care what happens in the movie, that's worth it there.

 

[Plotinus]

errrrr sorry to spoil the party but Islam is taking over Europe

What's your evidence for that?

By which I mean quantifiable facts.

 

[BananaLee]

errrrr sorry to spoil the party but Islam is taking over Europe

And the Chinese are taking over your economy... Oh wait..
<_<
>_>

 

[Quackers]

What's your evidence for that?

By which I mean quantifiable facts.

Non Muslims breed below replacement rates. Muslim's far exceed even the replacement level and is growing incredibly quickly the population of Muslims in the 1970s was in its tens of thousands now its in its millions (in the UK).

"The TFR for British residents also varies by country of birth. In England and Wales in 1996, people born in the UK had a TFR of 1.67, India 2.21 and Pakistan and Bangladesh 4.90, for example.[16]" From wikipedia article "Demography of the UK".

Only recently the Government compiled the most popular names given to baby boys when born. Of couse the classics were in their - yet the government hadn't taken added up the variations of Mohammed which were amongst the top 100 and if totalled up it would of been in the top 5.


Pakistan and Bangladesh are overwhelmingly Muslim. So Muslims are breeding up to 4 times as much as native-born and double Indian origin fertility rates. Are their any "truly" free Muslim states? I don't think so. And as we end up a Muslim majority state the lights will go out and we'll descend into dhimmitude and end up like the Middle East.

I'm just astounded at the political classes who are willfully selling down the river their unique culture and civilisation in order to get Muslim votes.

 

[Tee Kay]

Yeah, get ready. Soon you'll be living in Al-Jumhuriyya al-Islamiyyah al-Britanniyya

 

[Lord Baal]

Non Muslims breed below replacement rates. Muslim's far exceed even the replacement level and is growing incredibly quickly the population of Muslims in the 1970s was in its tens of thousands now its in its millions (in the UK).

"The TFR for British residents also varies by country of birth. In England and Wales in 1996, people born in the UK had a TFR of 1.67, India 2.21 and Pakistan and Bangladesh 4.90, for example.[16]" From wikipedia article "Demography of the UK".

Only recently the Government compiled the most popular names given to baby boys when born. Of couse the classics were in their - yet the government hadn't taken added up the variations of Mohammed which were amongst the top 100 and if totalled up it would of been in the top 5.


Pakistan and Bangladesh are overwhelmingly Muslim. So Muslims are breeding up to 4 times as much as native-born and double Indian origin fertility rates. Are their any "truly" free Muslim states? I don't think so. And as we end up a Muslim majority state the lights will go out and we'll descend into dhimmitude and end up like the Middle East.

I'm just astounded at the political classes who are willfully selling down the river their unique culture and civilisation in order to get Muslim votes.

Let's not forget that birth-rates decline in modern Western states. 2nd and 3rd generation Muslim families in Australia also have a declining birthrate. This means that within a generation or two, those Muslims will be having just as few kids as everybody else.

 

[Plotinus]

Right. Immigrants from those countries may have far more children than people who are born in the UK - but those children themselves are born in the UK, and will not have as many children as immigrants. So this notion that Muslims are going to come here and reproduce at fantastic rates in every generation, out-breeding everyone else, is false.

Obviously the main reason there are far more Muslims in Britain now than in the 1970s is through immigration, not through the ones who are already here having vast numbers of children. There are still not many Muslims in the UK: according to the CIA factbook (a marginally more reliable source than Wikipedia), 2.7% of the British population is currently Muslim. That doesn't sound to me like a very large proportion.

[Quackers] You cite the TFR of various ethnic groups, that is, the number of children the average woman has over her lifetime. Let's assume an extreme case and say that all Muslims have a TFR of 4 (at the high end of the range you cite). And let's assume that this applies to all Muslims, even those born in Britain, and not just immigrants from countries with high birth rates. As we've seen, these are false assumptions, and in fact these people will have a far lower TFR. Let's also assume that the TFR for non-Muslim residents of Britain is much lower, say 1.5 (this is less than that given by the CIA Factbook but it's easier to calculate with). On these figures, the Muslim population will expand while the non-Muslim population will shrink. One generation is between twenty-five and thirty years. I'll assume the lower figure to make the changes more dramatic. That means that every twenty-five years, the Muslim population will double, while the non-Muslim population will drop by a quarter.

There are currently about 61,000,000 people in Britain. Of these, 1,647,000 are Muslims, and 59,353,000 are non-Muslims. On the figures above, it will take four generations for Muslims to outnumber non-Muslims - that's 100 years. At that point there would be 26,352,000 Muslims to 18,779,649 non-Muslims. It would take another two generations - 50 years - for Muslims to be in a really overwhelming majority (105,408,000 to 10,564,000). So the "descent into dhimmitude" which you fear would take a century and a half. But that's if we assume the highest possible birth rate for Muslims and the lowest for non-Muslims; it also requires that we assume that Muslims maintain that very high birth rate in every generation, which in fact they do not. So in reality, this point would probably not only take far, far longer to reach than a century and a half - it would probably never be reached at all. At least, not by this mechanism. In order for Britain to become a majority Muslim country, you would have to have one of two things. The first is massive and sustained immigration of Muslims over a long period, perhaps for decades. But that seems very unlikely. It's all very well to whine about how "the political classes" let too many Muslims into the country right now; but even assuming that this is a valid criticism, you can't assume that they would increase the numbers of immigrants and continue to do so for several decades. The second is massive conversion of the non-Muslim population to Islam. But that also seems very unlikely. So it seems that the take-over of Britain by Muslims which you predict is almost certainly not going to happen. If it does happen, it will be through means or mechanisms which are not yet happening, and which we therefore have no reason to believe ever will happen. If it does happen, it will be a very long time in the future.

At this point I'd like to take issue with the other thing you said:

Are their any "truly" free Muslim states? I don't think so.

Whether there are any truly free Muslim states today may be questionable. Whether there will be any truly free ones a century and a half, or two centuries, from now is completely impossible to say. I have argued that, even on the most alarmist interpretation of the figures, and assuming that Muslims will always maintain a far higher birth rate than in fact they will, it would take an absolute minimum of a century and a half for Britain to become a Muslim country. But for all we know, a century and a half from now there will be plenty of "truly free" Muslim countries. After all, a century and a half ago, neither Britain nor any other Christian country could be called "truly free" in anything like a modern sense, but they are now. So even if we agree that no Muslim country is "truly free" today, then, it doesn't follow from that that none will be truly free a century and a half from now; and indeed one might think that an Islamified Britain would be more likely to be "truly free" than a country which had been Muslim for much longer. Plus, of course, as I've said, the century-and-a-half timeframe is impossibly fast anyway. A world in which Britain really does become Muslim is a world so different from our own that it would have to be either a very long way in the future or after very dramatic changes which we cannot now predict. That means that we have no way of knowing what the form of Islam predominant in Britain in that future world would be like, or what the circumstances would be under which it would become predominant, or to what degree pre-existing social and political structures would remain intact. So to think that the supposed future Islamification of Britain will lead to technological inferiority (which is what this thread is supposed to be about) is to beg the question.

You say you're astounded at "the political classes" for allowing all this (although how anyone's birth rate is the political classes' fault, I'm not sure); sometimes, when we're astounded at something that we think incredibly foolish, it's wiser to think about it a little more carefully and see if that's what's happening after all. Because nine times out of ten, it's not.

 

[Heretic_Cata]

Wow you just pwned all the "muslim europe" people. I'm surprised someone actually bothered to take them seriously. Some things are just too stupid to even consider.

Excelent post.

Now, will the lifelong european muslim haters change their ways ?
Will we witness the extremley rare internet phenomenon of someone changing his opinion about something ?
Will the haters now find something else to hate ?

Stay tuned and find out !

 

[Yared]

Right. Immigrants from those countries may have far more children than people who are born in the UK - but those children themselves are born in the UK, and will not have as many children as immigrants. So this notion that Muslims are going to come here and reproduce at fantastic rates in every generation, out-breeding everyone else, is false.

Obviously the main reason there are far more Muslims in Britain now than in the 1970s is through immigration, not through the ones who are already here having vast numbers of children. There are still not many Muslims in the UK: according to the CIA factbook (a marginally more reliable source than Wikipedia), 2.7% of the British population is currently Muslim. That doesn't sound to me like a very large proportion.

[Quackers] You cite the TFR of various ethnic groups, that is, the number of children the average woman has over her lifetime. Let's assume an extreme case and say that all Muslims have a TFR of 4 (at the high end of the range you cite). And let's assume that this applies to all Muslims, even those born in Britain, and not just immigrants from countries with high birth rates. As we've seen, these are false assumptions, and in fact these people will have a far lower TFR. Let's also assume that the TFR for non-Muslim residents of Britain is much lower, say 1.5 (this is less than that given by the CIA Factbook but it's easier to calculate with). On these figures, the Muslim population will expand while the non-Muslim population will shrink. One generation is between twenty-five and thirty years. I'll assume the lower figure to make the changes more dramatic. That means that every twenty-five years, the Muslim population will double, while the non-Muslim population will drop by a quarter.

There are currently about 61,000,000 people in Britain. Of these, 1,647,000 are Muslims, and 59,353,000 are non-Muslims. On the figures above, it will take four generations for Muslims to outnumber non-Muslims - that's 100 years. At that point there would be 26,352,000 Muslims to 18,779,649 non-Muslims. It would take another two generations - 50 years - for Muslims to be in a really overwhelming majority (105,408,000 to 10,564,000). So the "descent into dhimmitude" which you fear would take a century and a half. But that's if we assume the highest possible birth rate for Muslims and the lowest for non-Muslims; it also requires that we assume that Muslims maintain that very high birth rate in every generation, which in fact they do not. So in reality, this point would probably not only take far, far longer to reach than a century and a half - it would probably never be reached at all. At least, not by this mechanism. In order for Britain to become a majority Muslim country, you would have to have one of two things. The first is massive and sustained immigration of Muslims over a long period, perhaps for decades. But that seems very unlikely. It's all very well to whine about how "the political classes" let too many Muslims into the country right now; but even assuming that this is a valid criticism, you can't assume that they would increase the numbers of immigrants and continue to do so for several decades. The second is massive conversion of the non-Muslim population to Islam. But that also seems very unlikely. So it seems that the take-over of Britain by Muslims which you predict is almost certainly not going to happen. If it does happen, it will be through means or mechanisms which are not yet happening, and which we therefore have no reason to believe ever will happen.

You say you're astounded at "the political classes" for allowing all this (although how anyone's birth rate is the political classes' fault, I'm not sure); sometimes, when we're astounded at something that we think incredibly foolish, it's wiser to think about it a little more carefully and see if that's what's happening after all. Because nine times out of ten, it's not.

It is due to posts like these that I even bother lurking on CFC.

Thanks for existing, Plotinus.

 

[Plotinus]

Wow you just pwned all the "muslim europe" people. I'm surprised someone actually bothered to take them seriously. Some things are just too stupid to even consider.

Excelent post.

Now, will the lifelong european muslim haters change their ways ?
Will we witness the extremley rare internet phenomenon of someone changing his opinion about something ?
Will the haters now find something else to hate ?

Stay tuned and find out !

Thanks. I edited the post a little to add a couple of extra points. I do think that if this sort of thing is going to be engaged with at all, it has to be done rationally (and not simply asserting that these views are wrong or absurd - an assertion one way is no better than an assertion the other). But I don't think it's likely to do much good, since as I'm sure you know these sorts of attitudes generally come not from some kind of pathological hatred but just from basic fear - fear of the unknown, fear of change, fear of the "foreign". There has been a big fear in Britain ever since the Reformation of foreign religions somehow infiltrating the country and taking over. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there was great fear of certain heresies, above all Socinianism, which had the merit of being vaguely defined and vaguely foreign. In the eighteenth century there was great fear of deism and atheism (also vaguely defined, and vaguely French), despite the fact that the number of actual deists and atheists in the country could probably be counted on the fingers of one hand. There are a fair few atheists around today, but I doubt you'll find a whole lot of Socinians and deists. But the biggest and most enduring fear was of course Catholicsm. Think of the reaction to the Great Fire of London (it was only in 1831 that the Monument commemorating that event had the words removed from it that blamed the fire on "Popish frenzy"), the "Glorious Revolution" and overthrow of the Stuarts, and the Gordon riots. All of these were based on fear of Catholics, that they were trying to take over Britain. In the nineteenth century there were riots in London in the wake of the Oxford movement, when some (Anglican!) churches introduced things like candles on the altar or vestments for priests - things which to the common man meant "selling out to the Catholics". People really thought that the re-introduction of the Catholic hierarchy in Britain in 1850 was the first step in the destruction of British society, with the country being taken over by fanatics loyal only to that dastardly foreigner, the Pope. Today of course we can see that these fears were absolutely absurd in every conceivable way. The contemporary fears of Islam among some segments of the British population is exactly the same thing but with different names.

 

[RedRalph]

Plotonius, I wish I had you here on my side when I'm arguing with the Mrs.

 

[Heretic_Cata]

Awsome

You make learning fun.

 

[Quackers]

So it takes 100 years for Muslims to become a majority in the UK that proves my point exacly. Considering that during the rapid technological advance of the European Golden Age the Muslim world was happily living in dark age of anti-intellectualism - they didn't choose a Japanese way of Westernisation (in tech sense) or the path of Russia in the late 19th century. They were glad to live in an Islamic world which resemble more the 9th century AD than the 19th century.

I agree with you that demography is a strange science and can easily change, but from statistics today it is proof that Europe will be majority Muslim with France and the Netherlands leading the list sometime in the future. It is better than saying it will all end up fine if we just leave it alone and not do anything about it - this isn't catholics taking over in the 1850s there is a hard solid facts showing that their will be a suffocatingly large number of Muslims in Europe soon. Anyway it will come to a point that the dying ageing grey-headed non muslims will be in their retirement homes and a young confidant Islamic bulge will be having more children than the remaining non-muslims byt this stage it will be the non-muslim children intergrating with Muslims thats the true tipping point.

 

[Plotinus]

So it takes 100 years for Muslims to become a majority in the UK that proves my point exacly.

No, it takes at the absolute minimum 100 years for Muslims to become a majority - if one assumes that for that entire century, all Muslim couples have on average four children, and all non-Muslim couples have on average one and a half children, and nothing else changes. But those are entirely unwarranted assumptions, because as Lord Baal said, even if Muslim immigrants have more children on average than other people in the country, their children and their children's children do not. So none of this proves your point in the slightest.

(Also, in the calculations I did before, I only thought about each new generation and didn't take into account the figures for the previous generation, who would still be alive. That would act as a "drag" effect on the proportions. Suppose that, a hundred years from now, there were a generation in which, for the first time, Muslims outnumbered non-Muslims: but this wouldn't be true of the population as a whole, since the previous two generations would still be alive, in which non-Muslims outnumber Muslims. You would have to wait another few decades for them to die before the population as a whole was majority Muslim. So in fact, I would say that on the model imagined in my previous post, it would still take about 150 years even for majority Islam to be the case, and longer for Muslims to be the overwhelming majority - still bearing in mind that that model is wildly unlikely anyway, for the reasons already given.)

It is better than saying it will all end up fine if we just leave it alone and not do anything about it - this isn't catholics taking over in the 1850s there is a hard solid facts showing that their will be a suffocatingly large number of Muslims in Europe soon.

The only "hard solid fact" you've provided is the fact about birth rates among people living in Bangladesh and Pakistan compared to those living in Britain. But we've seen that that's not nearly enough to prove what you claim. You need to provide some kind of "hard solid fact" that proves that the proportion of Muslims in the UK or other European countries is definitely or very probably going to rise at a sufficiently high rate, and for a sufficiently long time, for those countries to become majority Muslim.

You say that your fears are unlike those of nineteenth-century Britons who feared Catholicism, but ironically those anti-Catholics could have pointed to far more "hard solid facts" to support their fears than you've provided. They could have pointed to successive legislation which removed some of the disadvantages faced by Catholics - such as the Catholic Relief Act and the Catholic Emancipation Act; the conversion of prominent Anglicans such as John Henry Newman to Catholicism; the aforementioned liturgical reforms of the Church of England which moved it in a more Catholic direction; and the optimism displayed by the Vatican in declaring that Britain was no longer "mission territory" and establishing a new Catholic hierarchy there, including the building of significant churches such as Westminster cathedral. In fact, of course, all of these did not prove that Catholics were going to take over the country at all, since they never did and as far as I can tell aren't going to do so in the near future. The same can be said for whatever "facts" are marshalled in defence of the claim that Muslims are going to take over the country. No matter how convincing these facts may appear to be (and the ones presented so far aren't very convincing at all), they all depend upon the supposition that trends which are currently apparent, such as immigration rates and birth rates, will remain the same or change in one direction (rather than the other) for a sustained period over the next few decades (or whatever the time span is supposed to be). But what evidence could there ever be that this will be the case?

It's just like with the anti-Catholics in the nineteenth century. They thought that the changes they saw around them were part of a trend that would remain like that for a long time until Catholics had taken over. They didn't realise that the changes in favour of Catholics that were happening at that time were due to local, temporary factors which eased off as Catholics were emancipated. What happened was that as artificial restrictions on the numbers of Catholics were removed, the numbers of Catholics - and the influence of Catholicism upon non-Catholic culture - increased until a natural equilibrium was reached. There were no factors of any kind causing Catholicism to continue to expand in Britain after that point, and it hasn't done so. Surely the same is true of the rise of Islam in Europe. There are, right now, certain factors in place which are causing Islam to grow in Europe. But why should those factors remain in place decades or centuries from now? Indeed, your own evidence tells against you. You said that in the 1970s there were very few Muslims in Britain and now there are millions (well, just). So in other words, the factors which have brought about this rise in Islam have only been in place for, at most, a couple of decades. Why suppose that these are long-term factors, then?

All of this is quite apart from the fact that for this to be relevant to this thread you'd also have to provide evidence that European countries becoming Muslim many decades from now would be a bad thing or somehow undesirable; whatever you may think of Muslim countries right now, how do you know what Muslim countries a century or two from now will be like? How, indeed, do you know what a European Muslim country would be like, given that there aren't any now and never have been? How do you know that such a country would share whatever negative qualities you perceive in Middle Eastern and Asian Muslim countries today? Britons in the middle of the nineteenth century couldn't possibly have predicted what Britain today would be like, even if they had known about what kinds of immigration and religious changes there would be in the country during that period (and note, please, that the greatest religious changes in Britain in that period, namely the secularisation which began after WWII and is in its final stages today, were probably primarily due to non-immigration-related factors). Even if we knew for sure what kind of immigration and birth rates will feature in Britain or any other country over the next century, we couldn't possibly predict what sort of society there will be, let alone understand or sympathise with it, any more than a Victorian could have understood or sympathised with our society today. That is another reason why this sort of scare-mongering is so futile.

Anyway it will come to a point that the dying ageing grey-headed non muslims will be in their retirement homes and a young confidant Islamic bulge will be having more children than the remaining non-muslims byt this stage it will be the non-muslim children intergrating with Muslims thats the true tipping point.

I don't entirely follow this sentence, but if you're saying that society will really change once Muslims and non-Muslims integrate with each other, then surely this supports what I have just said. If Muslims and non-Muslims integrate in Europe in the future, then any Muslim-dominated society that emerges there will be very different from Muslim-dominated societies in other, historically Muslim countries. Why? Because these European Muslim countries will have societies that are amalgamations of Muslim and non-Muslim cultures, containing elements that were never amalgamated into Middle Eastern or Asian Muslim countries. So if what you say here is true, any Muslim European country of the future will be very different from any Muslim country that has existed to date. We don't know what it would be like. So to assume that it will bring about some kind of "dark age" or be otherwise undesirable is just to tell scary fairy tales.

 

[Yared]

So it takes 100 years for Muslims to become a majority in the UK that proves my point exacly. Considering that during the rapid technological advance of the European Golden Age the Muslim world was happily living in dark age of anti-intellectualism - they didn't choose a Japanese way of Westernisation (in tech sense) or the path of Russia in the late 19th century. They were glad to live in an Islamic world which resemble more the 9th century AD than the 19th century.

I agree with you that demography is a strange science and can easily change, but from statistics today it is proof that Europe will be majority Muslim with France and the Netherlands leading the list sometime in the future. It is better than saying it will all end up fine if we just leave it alone and not do anything about it - this isn't catholics taking over in the 1850s there is a hard solid facts showing that their will be a suffocatingly large number of Muslims in Europe soon. Anyway it will come to a point that the dying ageing grey-headed non muslims will be in their retirement homes and a young confidant Islamic bulge will be having more children than the remaining non-muslims byt this stage it will be the non-muslim children intergrating with Muslims thats the true tipping point.

Your whole point relies on the assumptions that:

1) People will have an actual need to immigrate to Britain continuously for another 100 years. It could become more stable and better in those specific regions.

and that

2) People will not go back to their original countries.

 

[Traitorfish]

And aside from anything else, it assumes that all those of Muslim descent will necessarilly be of the Muslim faith, let alone a thoroughly Islamic-traditionalist culture, which seems unlikely given the increasingly secularised nature of Western European society.

 

[Lord Baal]

Plotonius, I wish I had you here on my side when I'm arguing with the Mrs.

Back off RRW, he's mine.

 

[Plotinus]

Since this is supposed to be the History forum, rather than the Guessing The Future forum, I wanted to flesh out the analogy I drew between contemporary fears about Islam and early modern fears about Catholicism, at least in England. The analogy strikes me simply because I have trawled through a bit of early modern popular religious literature (only scratching the surface of that vast volume) and you really do just see the same old fears and prejudices coming across again and again. If I had access to the library right now I'd order a few of these pamphlets up and give you some quotes. Unfortunately I don't. I do, however, have access to Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, gender, and seventeenth-century print culture by Frances Dolan (Cornell University Press, 1999), which has some nice quotes from some of this literature.

Take, for example, Reflections Upon the Murder of S. Edmund-Bury Godfrey, published in 1682 by Captain William Bedloe (what a great seventeenth-century name). He describes Catholics as:

...a People generally of debauch'd and murderous Principles, that bear no Consciences towards Hereticks, persecuted by Penal Laws, allur'd by the recovery of their Abby-Lands, encourag'd and supported by great Interest in the Kingdom...

Then we have A True Narrative and Discovery of Several Very Remarkable Passages Relating to the Horrid Popish Plot by Miles Prance (not such a great seventeenth-century name), from 1679, which tells us the following about Catholics:

...no Defeat can daunt them, nor scarce any Disappointment discourage them; no sooner is one Plot discovered, but they presently lay another. For 'tis a Rule that their Priests injoyn their people to believe, I may I am confident say of most, as firmly as their Creed, That their Religion shall infallibly one day or other be restored and established again in England; and being thus verily perswaded, they bear up under all Miscarriages, and still vigorously pursue the main design, though in New Methods, and with different Instruments.

Many people believed there were hundreds of thousands of Catholics in Britain, all working against the crown and ready to perform dastardly acts of terrorism at a moment's notice. Dolan says:

The apostate Thomas Abernethie warned that in England there were "five or six thousand" Jesuits and priests, and that the "populous multitude of Papists" extended "to many thousands." Witnesses testifying to the cause of the London fire in 1666 claimed that there were 7,000 Catholics in London and 1000,000 in England; they also reported Catholics' boast that they were "able to raise Forty thousand men" within twenty-four hours.

This is why the one occasion when some Catholics really did try to carry out a barbarous act of terrorism - the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 - made such a huge impact upon the national consciousness: here was proof positive that Britain was full of evil, treacherous Catholics! We may think of Bonfire Night as just a jolly old tradition today but for centuries it retained an immense symbolic power: beware the Catholics. Just remember Henry Sacheverell, who preached a sermon at St Paul's Cathedral on 5 November 1709 (just over a century after the plot itself). Witnesses testified that his face was bright red with passion as he railed against the government of the day and its liberal policies towards non-Anglicans: he accused politicians of basically inviting latter-day Guy Fawkeses into the country and handing them a match. His rhetoric was so extreme that he was actually put on trial for treason himself; he was found guilty but given a very light sentence. Popular opinion was almost entirely in favour of Dr Sacheverell, who people regarded as a plain-speaking man who spoke for the masses, and his light sentence was regarded as a victory - although many thought it was too harsh and rioted.

Funnily enough, some Protestants recognised that the fears of Catholicism were overblown, and tried to point out (while still emphasising how horrid Catholicism was) that there weren't really many Catholics about. Take Joseph Glanvill, who published The Zealous and Impartial Protestant, Shewing Some Great, but Less Heeded Dangers of Popery in 1681, and who wrote:

People are mightily given, and generally so, to multiply the number of Papists, and they do it in common talk, at least ten-fold... Did they know how inconsiderable their real numbers are, they must certainly sit down, and be quiet.

In fact, Dolan says that the evidence suggests that Catholic numbers were increasing throughout this period - but nothing like as quickly, or in as great numbers, as the anti-Catholic writers thought. We don't know what proportion of the population was actually Catholic but it may have been something like 1.5%.

Let me quote a few pages of Dolan (pp. 34-38) where she gives lots of examples of the kind of attitude which Catholics faced, and how it was bound up with a fear of the stranger within and the hostile foreigner without:

In 1600, John Baxter warned his readers that "home-bred enemies" and "household foes" were "most hurtfull to the health of the Church." "Admirable and Notable Things of Note" (1642) cautions that "of our enemies, the civill enemy is the most dangerous, and as his practice hath the least suspition, so have they the most danger, by this means working his designes from all means of p[r] evention." Catholics depend on their very proximity to infiltrate and distract their opponents. Joseph Glanvill alerts his readers: "We look so intently at the danger that makes the loud Noise, that we little heed the Enemy behind the Bush, that is ready to shoot us off." The only protection is a vigilant scrutiny of those close at hand. A 1679 commentary on an Elizabethan act of Parliament "to preserve the Queens person, and Protestant Religion and Government, from the Attempts of the Papists" seizes the opportunity to recommend that readers watch out for "the restless attempts of... an Inveterate, Implacable Enemy within us" as well as "the present Threats, and great Preparations of a Successfull Potent Enemy without us." The purported scheme of the Gunpowder Plotters - to dig tunnels under the House of Parliament and blow it up from below, literally becoming "the secret Underminers of our Quiet," as "A Moderate Expedient for Preventing of Popery" (1680) described them - gave vividness and legitimacy to such anxious imaginings, and haunted anti-Catholic discourses throughout the century.

From a Protestant perspective, what was particularly objectionable about Catholics was that they directed their animosity against their own kind. (The same might be said, of course, for the very Protestant vituperations from which I will now quote, but their authors did not see it that way). Comparing the days of Purim to the Gunpowder Plot to the detriment of the latter, for instance, George Hakewill explained that the "powder treason" was worse because "there [Purim], Pagans and Infidels, Persians and Amalakites conspired against the Israelites: heere native English and professed Christians, (though in truth most unworthy of the name of either) conspired against their own Countreymen." Similarly, fifty years later Andrew Marvell explained that papists were worse than pagans, Jews, or Muslims, because "these were all, as I may say, of another Allegiance and if Enemys, yet not Traytors." Catholicism, in contrast, claimed to be a branch of Christianity yet flouted its principles; worse, the pope wanted to police the Christianity of others, labeling them heretics. In 1680, Henry Care complained in even more vivid terms about the way Catholics turned their animus against other Christians rather than against "infidels," assumed here to be an appropriate target of antagonism. "There are swarms of Catholick Bog-Trotters, desperate Monsieurs, roaring Bullies, and Atheistical Swaggerers in all Corners of the Town, that no doubt had rather be Riffling their Neighbours, and Cutting of Throats by Surprize here at home, than venturing their rotten Carkasses in the field against the dreadful Black Folks of the Land of Fez." On the one hand, Care associated murderous Catholics with foreigners, the Irish ("bog-trotters") and French ("monsieurs"). The difference and inferiority of the Irish, often associated with their Catholicism, was already sometimes understood as racial; that is, as a matter of blood. This racialization would gain momentum in the following centuries. On the other hand, the whole thrust of Care's passage is to censure Catholics for assaulting their neighbors "here at home," rather than killing "dreadful black folks" elsewhere, which, he assumed, was an acceptable, indeed laudable, activity. All of these texts presume that it is appropriate to turn against those who are unlike you but "unnatural" to turn against your own kind. Yet they also articulate their fear that Catholics are unnatural in just this way; they are natives, Christians, neighbors here at home as well as traitors and murderers.

The widespread interest in domestic insubordination and familial murder provided polemicists with a rich stock of images and terms for describing what I have called elsewhere the "dangerous familiar." Drawing on this stock, Protestant polemicists persistently constructed Catholics as domestic insubordinates: servants who served two masters, or treacherous wives, empowered by their intimacy with their intended victims. One vision of the apocalyptic consequences of the Gunpowder Plot, had it succeeded, prognosticates that "servants had ruled over us: and none could have delivered us, out of their hands: our inheritance had bene turned to the straungers, and our houses, to the Aliants." Even the pope, who usually stood for the strangers and aliens who would enter in once the unruly servants opened the doors, is cast as himself an insubordinate. In 1602, Andrew Willet related that "Professing himself a servant, [the pope] doth his own will and not his masters"; "The Araignement and Execution of the Late Traytors" (1606) concurred that "servus servorum saies hee that would be Dominus dominorum servant of servants, that would be maister of maisters." Such descriptions of the pope cast him as the insubordinate dependent who haunts so many English stories of domestic violence and disorder. Representations of the Catholic threat were thus simultaneously stories of national and of domestic betrayal, emphasizing undermining from within as much as invasion from without. Hakewill, for instance, fantasized that if the Gunpowder Plot had succeeded, "wee should neither have lyen quietly in our beds, nor have sate quietly at our tables, nor have walked quietly in our streets, nor have travelled quietly in our waies, much lesse have mett quietly in our temples but every place would have beene full of feare and danger and horror and bloud." The familiar is not always more frightening or contemptible than the strange, nor did early modern English culture inevitably locate threat in the known rather than the unknown. But in the particular situation of Catholics and Catholicism in early modern England, familiarity, similarity, and proximity were not a comfort.

Catholicism was also associated with the unfamiliar and foreign, as Care's reference to "bog-trotters" and "monsieurs" suggests. This association offered the reassurance that Catholicism was not a residual English belief and practice, at war with a newer arrival, but rather something that people believed elsewhere and tried feloniously to import into England. From this perspective, the threat lay not in local, known Catholics but in what Caroline Hibbard terms "the specter of international Catholicism, both monolithic and conspiratorial." This specter haunting the English Protestant imagination corresponded to the real power of Catholic countries, especially if they mobilized English Catholics as a potential fifth column, creating an alliance between "Rome's Rogues abroad, and Plotters here at home," to quote a 1679 broadside. The part of English Catholics that enabled them to conspire with foreigners could be understood as itself foreign; John Baxter, for instance, referred to the "Italianated" hearts of English Catholics. In some texts, all that was wrong with Catholicism could be summed up as "Roman"; in others, "the Spanish Inquisition" stood for all of the violence, injustice, and corruption associated with (and displaced onto) Catholicism.

The focus for xenophobia shifted from year to year, depending on both conflicts and potential alliances. The fear and hatred of Spain, for instance, was aroused as much by Mary Tudor's marriage to Philip II and the proposed "Spanish match" between the infanta and Prince Charles as by the Armada. The court under the Stuart kings became a focus for anxieties about this international Catholicism because, according to Miller, "the Catholicism of the court tended to be alien and cosmopolitan; the court was full of foreigners and Irish." Here, too, the privileged position of Catholics in relation to other nonconformists provoked more hostile antagonism because it made them seem more powerful. Viewed as participants in international (indeed, antinational) communities and conspiracies, Catholics could never be viewed as loyal and trustworthy members of the English nation. Thus their recourse to a constellation of leaders outside of England, which distinguished them from other religious nonconformists, also made them more suspect.

At the level of conduct, this desire to associate Catholicism with strangers made "unknown Catholics" more vulnerable to attack, more likely to be singled out in moments of crisis. According to Robin Clifton, for instance, "many alarms centred on Catholics who were strangers locally, often because they were refugees or vagrants. When a disturbance centred upon Catholics known to the locality they were almost invariably recusants living just beyond the town affected... Where the Catholics suspected of conspiracy fell into neither category, the reason for alarm was usually some striking and alarming departure from their customary behaviour." Perceiving Catholics as foreign and unfamiliar rendered volatile an intransigent yet dormant anti-Catholicism through the animating power of xenophobia.

The language in texts written for publication these days is more temperate, but I see little difference in the basic fears that are at work. The passages where Anglican pamphleteers imagine a world in which Guy Fawkes succeeded, one of triumphal papistry running a kind of English Spanish inquisition, may seem absurd to us now, and rightly so; but they're not so different from those who fear Muslims today, going on about the new Dark Ages, dhimmitude, and "lights going out" as all these horribly un-English hordes descend upon us. Like their forebears three or four centuries ago, they also predict that "our inheritance had bene turned to the straungers, and our houses, to the Aliants" and that "every place would have beene full of feare and danger and horror and bloud" - indeed, that these things will come to pass. But there was no real substance to these fears in the seventeenth century and there isn't now.

 

[Quackers]

Crikey Plot are you Muslim or Catholic? Lol putting that aside. You say that we can't tell what a European Muslim-majority will look like in 100 years I'm being objective and saying hey look at all the Muslim-majority countries over here they are not free they have state religions etc, etc. And your points about Catholicism are true their was a fear of "popery" in the UK and that is down to all the bloody religious wars fought in Europe our troubles with Catholic France and Spain and our victories which we used to further the protestant/anglican cause.

However their are some very deep differances between fear of Catholicism and Islam then and now that is demography. If their are more Muslims - I'm not going to put a timescale on it but their will be one day - in the UK it will be a country run by deeply religious Muslims and those countries aren't catergorised as free. With the fear of Catholics it wasn't a fear of them becoming the dominant majority it was catholic emancipation and popish liturgical practices which scared people.

The Catholic fear was whipped up by Anglican clergy worried that Popery would take over England. In this day and age their is no worry nay even no discussion about it, maybe perhaps amongst endangered individuals across the poltical spectrum. But for all the facts and evidence which supports it no one wants to talk about in fact the Anglicans of today wanted and they got Sharia law in the UK. Even a Swedish cabinet minster said "we should be nice to the Muslims now so they'll be nice to us in the future" (Or along those lines). Their is a terrifying lack of faith in our own civilisation when we willingly accept other cultures with frankly inferior ideals to ours!