Soft Jihad and the Sound of Church Bells

On Islamic Cultural Conquest, Part IV

The capitulation of Britain to its multicultural conquerors is reflected in our apathy towards the outposts of Christian civilization in our midst.

Over two decades ago I spent three weeks in a very Muslim country working with an underground church. This was a place where churches were regularly infiltrated by government informants posing as Christian converts. This country was serious about quashing any spread of Christianity within its borders.

You could feel it. You could even hear it. I vividly remember the prayers blaring out from the Mosque loudspeaker five times a day, wherever you were. You could barely think or get anything done without being confronted by that eerie sound. It never let up; it never allowed you to forget where you were. It punctuated everything, imposing itself upon you. It was a palpable demonstration of the cultural dominance of Islam being inescapable from the religion of Islam. Even if not every Muslim understands that yet, that is the logical end-goal of their religion.

As I argued in the penultimate article of this mini-series, it may be easy to view the recent Islamic prayers at Windsor Castle as innocuous if you looked at it without any lens for the symbolic value of cultural and religious tradition. We might be tempted to say that was just some people saying some religious things out loud inside an old building, and think nothing more of it. But we know it’s more than that. What happened (and what has been happening) is “significant”. That is, it’s a “sign” of a deeper reality.

It was not simply an act of religious hospitality on the part of our nation; it was demonstrable self-surrender and conquest. The site of those prayers mattered because this was a manifestation—in real space and time—of the ideological conquest which has been in motion for decades.

On Multicultural Foreignness

An important question for British people to ask in all this is: what was it about hearing those prayers in Windsor Castle that felt uncomfortable (if it did)?

I think it is due to the very public nature of those prayers, and the very “foreign” nature of those prayers. There seems to be a palpable sense that such prayers do not belong there, that they are literally “out of place”. This will be jarring for some to hear or admit. Are you even allowed to say that you don’t want something to be somewhere because it is “foreign” to that place? Is that not “xenophobic”?

Think about why challenging “foreignness” per se jars with us. Why does it sound “out of place” within normal “respectable” society? Is it not because such a view is itself now “foreign” to how we have been taught to think? Is this knee-jerk rejection to any and every anti-foreign sentiment not itself a kind of blanket “xenophobia” against anything which might challenge the multicultural ideology we’ve apparently been told we must adhere to at all times and at all costs?

I’m certainly not saying all “foreign” culture is bad, of course, nor even that foreign people or foreign cultures have no place in a nation like Britain. Concepts like “cultural enrichment” may well be abused by multicultural ideologues (as Douglas Murray has often pointed out) but this doesn’t mean foreign culture is entirely void or corrosive to our culture at every level. I am saying rather that there are some things (and far more than many would admit) which simply do not belong and which cannot belong without radically transforming what is already there.

“But that’s a good thing!” says the multiculturalist. Is it? What would that even mean? That all changes to societal norms are automatically “good”? Is the loss of all heritage and culture “good” because it makes room for Something Else? And when that Something Else is also moved aside to make room for Another Something Else, are we again to rejoice and to condemn those who say “no”? Where does it stop? Who ends up “winning” this game of perpetual culture-shifting? There is no answer because there is not meant to be an answer.

One thing which is clear is that “multiculturalism” will not withstand Islamist advances in the long run. As an ideology multiculturalism is inherently weak and porous. It is only “enforced” because it was first permitted to flourish in eroding Christian nations who had already begun to secularise. Such nations foolishly upheld it even as it slowly supplanted the very values necessary to uphold multiculturalism as a functional idea, like peace, compassion, and charity. Multiculturalism is unable to police its own borders because it does not truly believe in them. How could it? It stands for the perpetual undermining of borders, the perpetual erosion of distinctions, the perpetual virtue of the melting pot.

But a “strong” religion like Islam will not tolerate this. And understandably so. If I was a Muslim, I would not want to submit to multiculturalism. It is incompatible with Islamic conviction. In time, it will be obvious that Islam merely made use of multiculturalism, which it utilised as the gatekeeper that opened the citadel in order for Islamic culture to assert itself.

Hearing those Islamic prayers in a place like Windsor castle felt jarring not only because such prayers are “foreign” to our ear and tongue. They are culturally and religiously foreign too, representing a way of life that is “not our own”, and one which does not, in the long run, mean well for our society as we know it. It is appropriate to say (and it ought to be said) that such public prayers—being broadcast as though they were “normal”—cannot belong here if we wish for “here” to be here for all that much longer.

Islam is incompatible not only with Christianity but even with the ideologies that routinely attack Christianity from the other side, such as multiculturalism, feminism, and LGBTeology. At some point, we really do need to choose. Remember the dilemma of the footballer, Jordan Henderson—an avid advocate of LGBT+ causes—who joined a club in Saudi Arabia where public displays of the rainbow are not quite so welcome… Unsurprisingly, he very quickly “altered” the volume of his public LGBT+ support:

"So if I wear the rainbow armband, if that disrespects [Islamic] religion, then that's not right... Everybody should be respectful of religion and culture."

The very liberalism that enables Islam to thrive in a historically Christian culture is directly quashed when asserted within a fully Islamic culture. This is why we cannot afford to be naïve if we wish for Britain, or England in particular, to remain what it currently is.

English Pagans and Church Bells

“But England is already lost,” some say. “Its people already abandoned the church bells long ago for secularist consumerism.” In many ways, this is actually true. The English who now see the fabric of their country disintegrating cannot complain all too loudly about Muslims if they themselves have abandoned the faith that gave their country its identity in the first place.

The average secularist may well reply to my earlier observation on public Islamic prayers that they feel precisely the same way about church bells here in England. Earlier this year, my family and I stayed at a cottage rental next to the parish church. The owners of the cottage seemed to go to painstaking lengths to forewarn us about the sound of the church bells, even to the extent of providing us with earplugs! Why? Because they had received such a volume of complaints from previous guests.

This is not a one-off. It should not escape notice that within the last year alone there have been several articles in The Telegraph reporting instances of British people complaining about church bells in the “idyllic” countryside villages to which they recently moved:

• ‘Loud church bells are making our idyllic village life a misery’ (July 2024)

• ‘Village newcomer complains about church bell chiming all night’ (Dec 2024)

• ‘Villager complains Sunday morning church bells are chiming too early… at 9.30am’ (Feb 2025)

Perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised but it really does feel infuriating to hear of such ignorance and false entitlement. Such people likely made their money in the big multicultural cities, never challenging what was gradually happening to those places at the time because they were safe in the knowledge that they could one day escape to a nice “peaceful English village” away from all those troubles, only to complain at one of the ever-present audible symbols of those villages.

Such people appear to have little conception that at the going rate of Islamic advance, uncontrolled immigration, mass housebuilding, declining church attendance, and a Prime Minister who seems to think “Islamophobia” is the greatest threat to British society, in half a century’s time there may be no such thing as “the English village” at all. If such a radical transformation were to occur, it would not be unrelated to the grumbling disdain of such people for something as apparently trivial as the sound of church bells on a Sunday morning.

Those who complain about church bells don’t seem to understand the extent of the problem, nor even the symbolic origins. When Christianity spread across Europe in the Middle Ages, church bells were a key marker against paganism. This is why church bells were often outlawed in many pagan cultures, such as the pre-Christian Vikings in Scandinavia. Rimbert (830-888) notes this fact in his biography of the first missionary to the Danish Vikings, with one editor adding an insightful footnote:

“There was a widespread Christian belief that devils, and therefore the heathen gods, were afraid of the sound of church bells. It is possible that the heathen Danes had come to share their belief, and that on this account they objected to the use of bells by the Christians.”

Isn’t it interesting that over a thousand years later, today’s secular Netflix-gorging inheritors of Christian Europe also appear to exhibit a growing disdain for church bells which is at least reminiscent of those “heathen gods” who were once supplanted by the land, at just the time when another heathen god is knocking on the door to move back in?

The churches which still punctuate our national and continental landscape are not an “inconvenience” to the consumeristic lives of the secular urban rich. They are, in fact, outposts of Christian civilization. It would be better, for sure, if such places were full of vibrant faith rather than becoming mere relics of a bygone faith and dying a slow death of tourist attendees and lukewarm retirees. But such places still are physical markers of Christ’s conquest which remind our nation of its story, of its true roots. We must hope and pray they remain standing to keep telling that story, rather than one day being converted into mosques.

The Coming of the Mosque or the Return of the Church?

What is abundantly clear is that there will be no return to “Great” Britain without a return to the great God who once made Britain great, when there were men and women of faith in the land unwilling to hold a harmless “private belief” in their hearts but willing instead to put their Christianity into practice by forging institutions, laws, norms, songs, stories, cathedrals, and church bells (!) as the outward fruit of that inward faith.

Modern Britain has traded the culture-transforming spirit of our Christian forebears—the kind that once built bell-ringing churches in every hamlet, village, town, and city in the land—with a pitiful passivity replete with “each-to-their-own” platitudes which dilute all genuine convictions into a pathetic insubstantial mush. Many Britons are only just waking up, recognising the steep price to be paid for the abandoning of Christian faith in this land.

A video circulated recently of a Muslim man gloating over the latest Islamic takeover of an old church building in Sheffield. I’ve driven past that building several times before. As he walked alongside it, videoing its architectural features, he narrated gleefully:

"Christianity is depleting, atheism is unfulfilling, Islam is here and it's here to stay... So, carry on making those churches for us, keep them empty, we'll buy them in a few years' time and make them into a mosque."

It's actually helpful when Muslims are honest and consistent about Islamic expansion. I expect there are far more Muslims who think what that man says but just don't say it out-loud. He's partially correct, too. Atheism is unfulfilling, and many churches are declining for good reason because they stopped believing their own beliefs and capitulated to the secular apathy all around them.

If you are a British patriot who sees these problems, who doesn't want Britain to turn into an Islamic nation in 50 years' time, may I impolitely suggest that you start by going back to church yourself (preferably one that hasn't yet utterly capitulated to liberalism)? The answer to Islamism in Britain does not lie in the mere values and buildings and bells of the Church but in the Saviour of the Church who gives such things their meaning. In short: Britain needs Christ.

There are a growing number of Right-leaning patriots in our time who want to push back against Islamic expansion. They may not wish to hear this, but if they wish to achieve any long-term success they must first repent and follow Christ with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength, that they might put their hands and feet to work on the greatest building project the world has ever known: the kingdom of God.

So, yes, the exiles must return to the churches. But the churches must also return to the exiles. They may begin to do so by shaking off their cowardice, waking up to the problems on their doorstep, and responding to them appropriately in light of the Church’s own high calling and authority, that the churches of the land might become not mere cultural relics but living outposts once again of Christ’s kingdom.

Look once again at those famous words of Jesus to his disciples in Matt. 28:18-20. What on earth do you think “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you” is supposed to mean if not a summons to change the world in the name of Christ? To declare that "Christ is Lord" is not just an abstract phrase applicable only to the clouds of heaven. It has real-world implications in real time for all things for all time (cf. Eph. 1:22-23).

So what’s the difference between the imposition of the sound of church bells and the imposition of the sound of Islamic prayers? It’s quite simple, really. One tells you that you live in a country that is (or was) saturated with the ethics of Christianity. The other tells you that you live in a country that is (or will be) saturated with the ethics of Islam. The question is: which one do you want your children’s children to live in?