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Some of the listed elements describe Protestant Christianity, but certainly not (3) and (5), and I would argue not (1). Because Islam requires knowledge of Arabic and because the required pilgrimage is Mecca, the growth of Islam aids the growth of Arabs in a way that doesn’t apply to Protestant missionaries. The center of Protestant Christianity was never an area plagued by religious terrorism, although it has a history of political terrorism, because the center has been a singular church or a collection of hands-off church collectives. Protestant Christianity is a faith-based religion that promotes orthodoxy about perhaps one dozen facets of faith, whereas Islam is mainly orthopraxic with most of a person’s focus being the correct prayer routine at correct hours in correct language, fasting at correct times, etc, although it also possesses amuch stricter orthodoxy as well. Islam has significantly less leeway about interpreting rules than Christianity because it eschews parables and exaggerations. It is legalistic.
There are plainly substantial reasons why what happened to Christianity may not happen to Islam. And let’s not forget the racial angle: Islam began as an Arab supremacist religion; artifacts of that still exist today. For Arabs in America, their religion is the whole celebration of their racial achievement, which does not apply to Christian Protestants.
There's plenty of overlap with Orthodox Christianity, more than Protestantism, but much of its sphere of influence was forcibly conquered by Islam, then ground down over centuries.
So Muslims are more warlike, sure. I guess complicated by all the equally warlike Slavs taking up "Third Rome" rhetoric and putting a pretty hard stop to expansion Northward. It does seem probable that, ultimately, any civilization that doesn't want to be ruled by Islam has to physically fight it off.
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Catholicism functioned, for a long time, as an effective spreader of Romance languages, which - insofar as I've heard - often differ from each other approximately similarly to Arabic dialects differing from each other.
Catholicism spread knowledge of Latin among the elite, but didn’t really spread non-Iberian Romance languages.
Of course late Medieval Latin national dialects weren’t necessarily mutually intelligible, but that’s strictly an elite thing.
My understanding is that adoption of Catholicism and Spanish went pretty much hand in hand during the Latin American colonization, and the Jesuit missions spread both.
Hence I said non-Iberian(so not Spanish and Portuguese)- and even for Spanish the situation is complicated; full-bloodedly indigenous Catholics mostly spoke indigenous languages up until independence, but mixed people and whites spoke the colonial language. Actually Latin America has plenty of mostly-indigenous speaking areas still to this day in a way the US doesn't, and that's after nominally-secular post independence governments tried their best to get Quechua and Maya speakers to switch to Spanish exclusively.
I'm less familiar with Brazilian history, but at least in the Spanish colonies- speaking mostly Spanish was a sign of having at least some Spanish ancestry and turned into a national identity marker that would be expected of everyone regardless of their place in the racial hierarchy in the 19th century. Catholicism often resulted in learning Spanish but during the colonial period the church wasn't particularly interested in replacing indigenous dialects, and sometimes inconsistently tried to provide services in Guarani and Quechua.
What sort of services are you thinking of? It can’t be the mass, surely, since that wasn’t permitted to be celebrated in the vernacular until post-Vatican II. Or were exceptions made for Latin America?
Preaching and catechism in Quechua was obligatory for priests in Peru immediately after the counter-reformation- in fact, the modern dialect of southern Quechua descends from the form standardized to be taught to missionaries. Nahuatl was the standard vernacular in Spanish missions from Mexico until the very late 17th century, even when the sacraments were performed in Latin.
And, it should be noted- Catholic missionaries to animist peoples, both today in Africa and New Guinea and in the renaissance to Indians, typically try to push mass attendance but emphasize confession as a draw to new converts. Providing priests fluent in indigenous languages is obviously important to this endeavor, and early missionary accounts note Indians walking for hundreds of miles to go to confession and returning to their home villages.
It’s rather fascinating to me that confession is seen as a draw to converts, given the strong resistance to it among many members of my own church body. When the denomination was organized, congregations were initially required to introduce private confession wherever possible, but that provision was dropped within a decade or so due to massive pushback from the laity. I wonder if the difference is just that private confession seems “too Catholic” to many Protestants, while pagans have no such hang-ups, or if there are other factors at play.
Animist pagans typically live in superstitious terror of having offended powerful and invisible beings through misconduct. Confession is quite a draw to them, therefore- missionaries to places with lots of animists will still tell stories about poor villagers walking several hundred miles through hostile territory because they’ve heard their sins can be forgiven by a more powerful God than the ones they’re so afraid of.
Third world villagers who’ve never seen a Bible are not the same thing as wiccans who do drugs and dance around naked- the latter don’t like the idea of confession any more than Protestants usually do.
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It empirically isn't doing much for the growth of the Arab population right now. Most Muslims are not Arabs.
Northwestern Europe was ravage by religious warfare for hundreds of years. A lot of people died over this. At that time, "political" and "religious" was not a very firm distinction.
De jure yes, but de facto Protestantism was extremely orthorpraxic. Calvinists insist that good works do not purchase salvation but are instead a product of salvation, but in practice this is a purely semantic distinction. There's a reason 'puritanical' is shorthand for 'rigid scrupulosity.'
It's already happening. Even Saudi Arabia, the financial powerhouse behind the spread of Wahabbism, is liberalizing rapidly. The Iranian mullahs can't even keep their country from periodically exploding into anti-regime protests. MENA fertility rates have more than halved in the past half-century.
Most Muslims are not Arab, and also empirically the Arab population grows. The population of the Arab world grows at the same time that they export Arabs overseas and despite its increasing development which is significant.
Religious warfare which involved political claims occurred. That’s like the Shia vs Sunni proxy war in Syria and Iraq, which is as political as it is religious. But there was nothing like your typical Muslim “because your congregation is liberalizing I will commit an attack” ideology. That’s novel to Islam. Protestants didn’t blow up a building when someone started teaching girls how to read.
I don’t think you understand how orthopraxic Islam is. Calvinists don’t define hierarchies of good works versus bad works with their commensurate rewards in heaven. Calvinists don’t cling to authoritative transmissions of Jesus which make mandatory thousands of small actions and make commendable certain other actions. As an example, in Islam they legislate the direction of your pointer finger in prayer, every syllable of the Quranic reading, the upkeep of your beard. You are comparing apples to orangutans. In Calvinism, the question is “do you believe and do you behave morally according to my view”. In Islam, it’s “do you believe according to this long list and do you do these long lists of actions.” The five obligatory prayers where every syllable and movement must be precise is an example of this sort of legalism. The Muslims who do not follow legalism are called Quranists and they are not even a percent of global Islam. There’s no Muslim sola scriptura movement of note, which secularization used to desacralize.
More and more slowly, as they become more prosperous, like other ethnic groups:
https://www.prb.org/resources/fertility-declining-in-the-middle-east-and-north-africa/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/806110/fertility-rate-in-the-arab-world/
Primarily, Arab birth rates are high because most Arabs are still poor. They are about half that of the DRC, where most people are even poorer than most Arabs.
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They didn't have suicide belts yet but angry mobs of Catholics/Protestants going around attacking each other and destroying buildings for religious reasons were extremely common during the Wars of Religion.
Catholicism is even more legalistic than Protestantism and it isn't doing much better. So is your argument that Islam is just far enough on the hyper-legalism spectrum that it will manage to endure?
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