At the same time the highest ends of our culture seem content to say – at best – that the world is complex and that we must simply embrace the complexity and not look for answers. At worst it says openly that all this is quite hopeless. Of course, we live in an age of extraordinary prosperity, which allows us to be comfortable even when we are despairing. But it might not always be like this. Even today, when the sun of economic advantage still shines upon us, there are people who notice a gap in our culture and are finding their own ways to fill it.

For some years now I have been especially struck by numerous accounts I have heard first hand and also read from people who have chosen to convert to Islam. Partly these stories are striking because they are so similar. They are almost always some variant of a story nearly any young person could tell. They generally go something like this: ‘I had reached a certain age [usually their twenties or early thirties] and I was in a nightclub and I was drunk and I just thought, “Life must be about more than this.”’ Almost nothing else in our culture says, ‘But of course there it is.’ In the absence of such a voice young people search, and they discover Islam. The fact that they choose Islam is a story in itself. Why do these young men and women (very often women) not reach out and find Christianity? Partly it is because most branches of European Christianity have lost the confidence to proselytise or even believe in their own message. For the Church of Sweden, the Church of England, the German Lutheran Church and many other branches of European Christianity, the message of the religion has become a form of left-wing politics, diversity action and social welfare projects. Such churches argue for ‘open borders’ yet are circumspect about quoting the texts they once preached as revealed.