Europe's cultural decline

From a Mona Charen column about Europe's rejection of its Christian past:

Europe today is a society adrift, untethered to the source of its greatness. It is, to use the great Jewish American writer Will Herberg's formulation, "a cut flower culture." And just as Europeans are losing the elemental desire to preserve their civilization, Muslim immigrants stand ready to vindicate the loss of 1683. It is not inconceivable that European civilization — post-Christian, politically correct and too weary to take its own side in a quarrel (to paraphrase Robert Frost) — may yet deliver to the Muslim world a delayed victory.

As I've noted before, modern thinkers are stuck in a time warp. Their view of Christianity got locked in at the beginning of the 17th Century, when a look back over Christian history did present a fairly mixed bag of things. On the one hand, Christianity had united the entire European continent in a monotheistic doctrine that had eradicated the horrific human sacrifice cults that populated much of pre-Christian Europe, and that gave those formerly pagan cultures the dignity of a soul. On the other hand, pre-modern Christianity was responsible for the Inquisition, which wiped out Jews, Muslims, and Christian heretics with a heavy, brutal hand; the Thirty Years War in Europe; the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre; Witch Hunts; etc. The thing is -- and this is big headline stuff -- this type of pre-modern Christianity is gone; it doesn't exist anymore. The brutalities and prejudices of that Christianity have been efficiently coopted by Communism, facism, and radical Islam. Christianity has repositioned itself as the bulwark against these horrible "isms" and nobody on the Left, despite a 200 year head start, has yet figured that out.