Christian conservatives predict a looming catastrophe as birthrates fall in Europe and Muslim immigration rises.

By Kathryn Joyce

Steve Mosher is telling me about wolves returning to the streets of European towns. Not as part of some Vermont-model wildlife-recovery scenario but as emblems of a harsh comeuppance mankind is due–they’re stalking out of the forests like an ancient judgment, coming to claim mankind’s ceded land. We’re sitting in a sunny Main Street cafe in Front Royal, Virginia–a beautifying ex-industrial town in the Shenandoah Valley that, as the far edge of DC’s suburban sprawl, is lately home to a surprising number of conservative Christian ministries. Mosher, president of the Catholic anticontraception lobbyist group Population Research Institute (PRI), describes his grim vision of Europe’s future: fields will lie fallow and economies will wither. A great depression will sink over the continent as it undergoes “a decline that Europe hasn’t experienced since the Black Death.” The comeuppance has a name, one being fervently hawked among a group of Christian-right “profamily” activists hoping to spark a movement in secular Europe. It’s called the “demographic winter,” a more austere brand of apocalypse than doomsayers normally trade in, evoking not a nuclear inferno but a quiet and cold blanket of snow in which, they charge, “Western Civilization” is laying itself down to die…

Read more on fundamentalism’s new fetish from The Revealer‘s Kathryn Joyce in The Nation.