Houellebecq, Prophet of Post-Christian Europe

You can’t fight something with nothing. If the French don’t like the Islamification of French public life, then they aren’t going to stop it by doubling down on laïcisme. In Michel Houellebecq’s controversial 2015 novel Submission, the demoralized and de-Christianized French public turns voluntarily to an Islamist government, in what amounts to a vast public confession of the inadequacy of godless materialism to provide solid grounding for a way of life. Houellebecq may be decadent in his personal life—his antics are at times squalid, and he looks like he dwells under a bridge—but no novelist sees Europe’s religious crisis with clearer eyes.