That Europe is in mortal danger from the ongoing, overwhelmingly Muslim immigrant deluge and from its ruling elites’ spiritual degeneracy is beyond dispute.  This phenomenon of world-historical significance has several causes, but the most important one is in the divorce of reason from faith.  As a result, post-Christian Europe is rapidly sinking into self-destruction.

The nature of the problem is illustrated by the European Union’s Media Against Hate campaign, conducted under its Rights, Equality and Citizenship Programme.  Its sponsor, the E.U. Commission, pledges that its lawyers “will address the worrying increase of hate crime and hate speech by allocating funding to actions aiming at preventing and combating racism, xenophobia and other forms of intolerance.”  In the same vein, in his “State of the Union” address last September, E.U. Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker declared that the E.U. will keep accepting migrants regardless of what ordinary people want: “Europe is and must remain the continent of solidarity where those fleeing persecution can find refuge.”

This same mindset—a Nineteen Eighty-four-style hate-speech mania mixed with morbid self-loathing—is replicated every day in a million classrooms, editorial offices, lecture halls, government agencies, and churches all over Europe.  The game is not up, however.  While visiting all six key European countries and a dozen smaller ones in recent months, I’ve detected a Stimmung of resistance to the shackles of postmodernia and Cultural Marxism.  That impression has been validated by a string of remarkable political developments this fall.

On October 24, Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán—who supports the creation of a “migrant-free zone” in Central Europe—rejected the changes to the E.U. asylum system that had been adopted by the European Parliament four days earlier.  He sees this as the execution of the “Soros Plan” to flood Europe with an unlimited number of migrants: All 28 member states would be forced to accept “asylum seekers” against the will of their people.  Orbán’s spokesman confirmed that Budapest would reject the plan because it would amount to the “opening up of the European Union’s external borders.”  Orbán’s position is supported by over two-thirds of Hungarians.

Andrej Babiš, the “Czech Donald Trump,” has become Bohemia’s prime minister following the triumph of his party, the Association of Dissatisfied Citizens (ANO), in the election of October 21.  He is openly contemptuous of the E.U. apparat, sympathetic to Russia and Putin personally, and resolutely opposed to accepting “a single refugee.”  Babiš will easily find common ground with the Czech President Miloš Zeman, one of Europe’s few top-tier Trump supporters, who also opposes immigration and has described Islam as an “anti-civilization.”

Next door in Austria, the general election on October 15 was won by the conservative Austrian People’s Party.  Led by 31-year-old Sebastian Kurz, it was (at the time of this writing) on path to form a coalition with the “far-right” Freedom Party of Heinz-Christian Strache, a staunch opponent of the Muslim invasion.  Both want stronger borders and drastic reductions in immigration, and both agree that there is no place for political Islam in Austria.

On October 7, more than a million Poles lined the country’s 2,000-mile-long border with lit candles to pray for the salvation of their country.  That day, as it happens, was the Roman Catholic Feast of the Holy Rosary, established by Pope Pius V in 1571 as “Our Lady of Victory” after the Holy League triumphed over the Muslim fleet at the Battle of Lepanto.  The “Rosary on the Borders” was both a spiritual event and a clear statement of the political will of the Polish people.  On the same day Poland’s President Andrzej Duda warned that the E.U. insistence on ordering member countries to accept migrants could lead to the union’s disintegration.

The most important event of the season was the German general election on September 24.  The cozy bipartisan Christian Democrat–Social Democrat racket is over.  Alternative für Deutschland has entered the Bundestag with 12.6 percent of the vote and over 90 deputies.  This is an immensely important development.  The AfD is the first authentically oppositional party to enter the diet since the Federal Republic came into being in 1949.  It is the first party to represent millions of Germans who are sick and tired of not being allowed to express their views on the meaning of being German.

For over seven decades (since 1945) it has been desirable, then necessary, and ultimately mandatory for a mainstream German to be ashamed of his past.  The denazification of the early occupation years long ago morphed into de-Germanization.  An integral part of the final phase is to subscribe to postmodern liberal orthodoxy in all its aspects.  Specifically, it must include the willingness to welcome a million “migrants” in a single year, with millions more to come if the Duopoly so decides.  The result, last September, was a revolt of the deplorables.  It has not yet amounted to an uprising, but nothing will stay the same.

There is still hope for Europe.  Sharia is not the inevitable destination.  The Brussels machine and the likes of France’s Emmanuel Macron continue to talk of “ever-deeper integration,” but they are finally encountering sustained opposition from millions of Europeans who are not ashamed of their identities.  Their struggle to defend the best civilization the world has ever known against the unholy alliance of jihad and liberalism is just starting.  The outcome is uncertain, but the cause is good.