Religious Revival or Multicultural Battle?

This paper will argue that what appear to be religious conflicts in northern Europe (and Germany in particular) are less a product of intensified or competing religious beliefs than they are a terrain of communal struggle, mostly between the Christian (ex-, post-, neo- or partial) natives and Muslim newcomers.  Focusing on the formerly-dormant debate over circumcision, this presentation will claim that the “illiberal liberalism” of secular Christendom, a doubling-down on liberal secularism, is a form of communal warfare directed against the religious customs of Muslims, whose own apparently growing religiosity itself is perhaps a protest ideology against ethnic exclusion, liberal individualism or both.  Since this particular issue also implicates the troubled history of Christian-Jewish relations and is one of the few remaining issues on which Muslim and Jewish Europeans stand on the same side, the outcome has been better than might have been expected.