Belloc on Eurabian War

The festivities in France prompted me to take a few Belloc books onto the front porch with me this morning. I ran across this passage in The Great Heresies:

The missionary efforts made by great Catholic order which have been occupied in trying to turn Mohammedans into Christians for nearly 400 years have everywhere wholly failed.

What does this say about efforts to convert Muslims to a Western order that is informed by the Christian (or Judeo-Christian) religion?

Religion, after all, informs every culture. Everyone but the most obtuse secularists understands this.

Now, by "religion," I mean any higher order of belief and, in particular, explicitly religious beliefs. But in the absence of explicitly religious beliefs, lesser beliefs step in as ordering forces: a strong military/police state, belief in a free market, faith in technology, whatever. In the West today, Christianity has been greatly weakened, so it shares the plane with many other higher ordering beliefs.

I kinda view Western culture today as a mosh pit where the different beliefs thrash about, crashing into each other, sometimes forming alliances in one area, but then turning on their allies in other areas. Christianity is the oldest and biggest head banger in the pit, but there are enough other moshers to put it down. It's a wild scene.

Enter Islam (in the form of Muslims immigrating to Western Europe and the United States). It sees the mosh pit's brutality and uncivility, but not necessarily its virtues. Moreover, as evidenced by Belloc's quote above, Islam is uncompromising. Just as the individual Muslim cannot be converted, the Islamic religion cannot be converted to Western norms, not even in part, since Islam has an entire sociological system around its beliefs. Islam, in other words, won't thrash about in the mosh pit. It would rather just take out a gun and shoot the others.