Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”
Brussels is the most Islamized major city in Western Europe, with a Muslim population that stands at 25 percent (an estimated 300,000) of the total. By 2050, Muslims are projected to exceed one-third of the city’s population. The multiculturalist, globalist Left views this as a great victory for diversity, but what it means in reality is that Brussels, the home of the European Union, is on a fast-track to an Islamic monoculture. As anyone with a clear-eyed view of history and current events is keenly aware, diversity, tolerance, and religious pluralism are not Islamic values. Much like the Left, wherever Islam gains a foothold, its zealous adherents work indefatigably toward religious, cultural, and political dominance.
As a stark recent example, the Brussels city government sparked controversy last Friday with the unveiling of a new Nativity scene at the Grand-Place, the medieval market square in the city center, to mark the beginning of the Christmas season. The city said it was necessary to replace its previous, traditional display featuring the Holy Family because it had become dilapidated and delicate to transport.
According to Breitbart News, the Mayor of Brussels, Philippe Close, a self-described secularist and Socialist Party politician, reportedly farmed out the design of the new Nativity scene to the Cathedrals of St. Michael and St. Gudula, which inexplicably approved the “iconoclastic” vision of Brussels-based interior designer Victoria-Maria, and now outrage is gathering over an installation that cannot possibly be seen as anything other than an insulting deconstruction of Christian heritage, tradition, and faith.
It is always a mistake to entrust artists with a modernist bent to design religious spaces or displays, because they are incapable of elevating God over their own egos. In a nod to environmentalism, which the Left has made a religion unto itself, Victoria-Maria draped the Nativity figures entirely in recycled fabrics that look like the ugliest castoffs from a thrift shop, and the traditionally expressive faces of the life-sized figures of Mary, Joseph, the infant Jesus, the Three Wise Men, and a shepherd were all replaced with a nightmarish, pixelated patchwork of beige and brown fabrics, apparently to create “an inclusive mix of all skin tones, so that everyone can see themselves reflected.”
Let me make a couple of points perfectly clear: first, there is no need to make the Christian faith more “inclusive.” Christianity already embraces every skin color on Earth, and has since the beginning. God became man in order to redeem the whole world. In Matthew 28:19, when Jesus states, “Go and make disciples of all nations,” the word “nations” in the New Testament Greek is the plural form of “ethnos,” meaning people of a shared identity. That includes people of all ethnicities. In Mark 16:15 he commands his disciples to “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation.” You can’t get more inclusive than that.
Second, this may come as a shock to the narcissists of our secular era, but the purpose of a Nativity scene is not to see yourself reflected in the Holy Family. It is to honor and celebrate the birth of Christ, who entered the world as a real, specific, flesh-and-blood, Middle Eastern Jewish male – not as some faceless symbol of Everyman – and sacrificed himself not to affirm your specialness as you are, but to change you, to give you new life.
Sane Belgians were less than impressed with the new-and-not-at-all-improved version of a Nativity that has been entirely stripped of sacred meaning and artistry, and turned into a childish, sterile mockery. Belgian Senator Georges-Louis Bouchez described the disfigured, aimlessly positioned mannequins as more resembling the “zombies at Brussels stations than a real nativity scene.” He tweeted on X:
How ugly, a society that denies its values… This nativity scene is terrible and an insult to our traditions… It is unacceptable to see our traditions erode time and again because of so-called inclusivity. An inclusive society is one that brings people together — and Christmas is THE holiday that does that.
Bouchez called for the Nativity to be replaced “immediately, or at the latest for next year’s edition.” The plan had been for Victoria-Maria’s monstrosity to be used for at least the next five years.
As if the Nativity weren’t already disturbing enough, De Standaard reported on Saturday that the head of the baby Jesus was stolen from the Nativity scene. The perpetrator and motive for the theft are currently unknown – perhaps a Christian objecting to the sacrilege of the display? – but some media sources are describing it as a symbolic “beheading,” which lends an even darker, threatening undercurrent to the whole affair.
A Ghent University Professor of Cognitive Psychology, Wouter Duyck, suggested that a politically correct fear of upsetting Brussels’ large Muslim population was the real reason for this of the season:
In Islam, the faces of prophets are not depicted. This is the nativity scene in the capital of Europe. Whoever decided to impose a hierarchy on religions in favour of the least tolerant one? As a freethinker, I am greatly concerned about our secularity/neutrality. Co-existence and freedom of religion require precisely that you do not impose things on others. The strange thing is that it is not Muslims who are doing this (I hope).
A nonbeliever who nevertheless values the free will and religious freedom that a Christian culture affords him, Duyck questioned whether “spewing mist over one’s own traditions, values, and fundamental principles would be beneficial for integration and would facilitate living together in diversity.”
Spoiler alert: it is not. Jettisoning one’s traditions, values, and principles gives no migrant or immigrant any incentive to assimilate, which is the only way to “facilitate living together in diversity.” If anything, compromising one’s traditions, values, and principles demonstrates that you lack cultural confidence and that your culture isn’t worth defending or emulating. To paraphrase Osama bin Laden’s famous analogy, when one sees a strong horse and a weak horse, people naturally gravitate toward the strong horse. To the Muslims of Brussels, this willful defacing of the Nativity surely demonstrates that Islam is the strong horse.
The aim of multiculturalism is not to celebrate and bestow dignity upon all cultures. It is to subvert and destroy what is seen as the dominant, oppressive culture – which of course is how the Christian West is perceived – and to elevate “the Other.” There is no question that if the religious display in question here was Muslim, any attempt to water it down into some bland, inclusive, ecumenical would be met with violent resistance. But under multiculturalism, it is only Christians who are expected to compromise, if not embrace their own erasure. Besides, no one fears offending Christians.
That must change. Christians must begin, right now, defending their faith with no less righteous self-assurance than believers of any other faith. It is long past time for Christendom to reclaim its role as the strong horse.
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