by David Virtue on Substack
It has a name. Robert Spencer gave it one in 2008, in the title of his book Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam Is Subverting America Without Guns or Bombs. It is the patient, unarmed advance of Islam into the institutions of the West — the courts, the campuses, the councils, and not least the churches — carried less by conquest than by the accommodation of a civilization that no longer believes enough in itself to resist.
The most militant Islamists make no secret of the goal: to outlast both Jewish resistance and what remains of Christendom, and to inherit the ground both once held.
Four Fronts, One Pattern
There are four fronts but a single pattern: churches emptied and handed over to Islam; Gulf money pouring into the universities; the demographic remaking of Europe; and an establishment that averted its eyes from what was being done to its own children.
Churches Into Mosques
The Church of the Good Shepherd in Binghamton, New York, became the Islamic Awareness Center — Masjid Al-Tawheed — in 2011. The orthodox congregation had left the Episcopal Church in the realignment over theological liberalism and the ordination of openly gay clergy. When the courts handed the property to the Episcopal Diocese of Central New York in 2009, the diocese refused to sell it back to the departing Anglicans — who had offered to buy it — and instead sold the building in 2010 to the Islamic group for roughly $50,000: about a third of what the congregation itself had put on the table, and well below the appraised value.
Christ Episcopal Church in Avon, Connecticut, was sold in 2014 for $1.1 million to the Farmington Valley American Muslim Center. Here the story runs in reverse: no congregation was robbed. The parish had already voted in 2012 to dissolve, and the diocese engineered the sale itself, celebrating it as an “interfaith partnership” in the service of “restoration and reconciliation.” Same outcome, opposite spirit — not a bishop’s hand forced, but a bishop volunteering the keys.
In Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, the former St. John’s Episcopal Church — shuttered and on the market for years as the neighborhood’s Christian population thinned and its Muslim population grew — became a Muslim community center.
In Europe, nothing surpasses Brick Lane in London: a single building raised in 1743 as a Huguenot chapel, turned Methodist chapel, then the Spitalfields Great Synagogue in 1897, and a mosque since 1976 — the whole migratory history of a city written into one set of walls.