The article argues that European protests, synagogue and church attacks, and conflicting marches reflect a deeper dispute over national identity after rapid dechristianization left only thin “values” in place of shared stories and rituals.

It describes decades of multiculturalism-by-omission, the importation of foreign conflicts, and the rise of revanchist politics, while noting that states are now choosing sides through border controls, return regulations, and speech restrictions.

The author acknowledges counter-evidence—school protests rooted in funding disputes, attacks not uniformly linked to local communities, falling irregular arrivals, and Olivier Roy’s view that identity anxieties predate migration—leaving open whether the culture-war frame describes or amplifies the conflict.

Europe’s governments keep announcing that they have a migration problem, or a security problem, or a budget problem. The people in the streets, and the people watching them on their phones, are fighting about something more basic: who is the “we” in “we the people,” and what is it owed?

Consider the year’s events in one frame. French school protests become a transatlantic shouting match within a day, with Donald Trump declaring that “this isn’t about schools, this is about Islam wanting to take over a once great country.” London policing plans for a weekend with a Tommy Robinson march and the Nakba commemoration on the same day, with at least 4,000 officers keeping the routes apart. Synagogues burn in London, Liège and Skopje. Churches burn in German towns. Mosques are targeted too. Everywhere there are flags, and everyone understands that a flag is not a decoration. It is an allegiance claim.

On this reading, the specific grievance in each case, a school, a stabbing, a ruling, is a pretext. The cause is that Europeans no longer share an answer to the question their ancestors settled by force, or by default: what binds this society together?

The culture-war account begins with a vacuum. Europe was a Christian civilization in culture for a thousand years and then, within two generations, stopped being one. As the sociologist-philosophers of this camp point out, secularization gave way to large-scale dechristianization in religious and cultural terms, especially after 1968. The old glue, church, parish, a shared calendar and moral grammar, dissolved. Nothing replaced it except an abstract creed:........

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