Christopher Dawson Quotes
It is the religious impulse which supplies the cohesive force which unifies a society and a culture... A society which has lost its religion becomes sooner or later a society which has lost its culture.
Dawson, Christopher. Religion and Culture. Sheed & Ward, 1948, p. 50.
The congressman was distraught with the national immigration picture at that time. He believed that the influx of Hispanic immigrants into the United States would radically change the culture and the immigrant culture would then predominate. Throughout American history with every wave of immigration, there have been fears expressed about the culture of America. The Irish immigration, the Scandinavians, the Germans, Italians, Jews, the Chinese—all engendered fear that they would “take over” and radically change the country. The reality is that none of them took over but all made some changes and influenced cultural direction of the nation. The congressman was repeating an old refrain.
After the WWI Turkish massacre of Armenians and the casualties of WWII, large numbers of Armenians were outside of Armenia which was a part of the Soviet Union and many ethnic Russians were moved into Armenia thus dominating the country. The ethnic Armenians found themselves a minority in their own homeland,
This is a complaint similar to that made by anti-immigrant Americans. France, like most other countries of the world, has never had the large scale immigration of today, nor have they had such a large proportion of the same ethnicity at once—in this case, Muslim North Africans. There were never, before the last decades, enough immigrants of any ethnicity in France to have a choice of maintaining their traditional languages and culture and not learning French or otherwise assimilating. America, in contrast, had large immigrations of different ethnicities, and despite the erroneous beliefs of immigration opponents, these blocs of immigrants have wherever there was sufficient density—usually cities, they maintained their old language and other customs. However, their children and the next generation in almost all cases have abandoned the language and many of the customs of the old country. This was true of the Germans, the Irish, the Italians, the European Jews, the Russian Jews, the Scandinavians’, and the Hispanics with their different cultures.
This was one of the sagest pieces advice regarding Islam given in the early 20th century.
Christopher Henry Dawson FBA was a British independent scholar, who wrote many books on cultural history and Christendom. Dawson has been called "the greatest English-speaking Catholic historian of the twentieth century". The 1988–1989 academic year at the College of Europe was named in his honour.
