The success of “soft Jihad” and the gradual normalisation of Islamic cultural conquest in formerly Christian nations is enabled by the Christians who refuse to stand up to it. We have become accustomed in our time to opposing things which we ought to have defended and welcoming things which we ought to have opposed. When the ideology we welcomed eventually turns on us and undermines our way of life, we should not be surprised. This is what we allowed to happen. We did it because we wanted people to know we were “nice.”

We used to live in a beautiful small village in the heart of the Peak District in Derbyshire, England. My wife and I would take our carousel of children daily on all sorts of walks up and down the hills and over streams. At some point we began to notice little violet flowers that began appearing each summer around a brook surrounded by greenery. At first, it was a pleasant surprise. There seemed to be plenty of them around, so we let the children pick them and play with them. They loved to press down on the pods which would send the seeds flying out. We soon realised—pretty as these new flowers may be—that they were known as Himalayan Balsam, one of the most invasive plant species that exist. The nature of those ballistic seed pods sends seven or eight hundred seeds up to seven meters away. Due to the aggressive and monopolising nature of Himalayan Balsam, the native species are soon choked out and disappear from the region altogether—if nothing is done about it.

This comes to mind when I think about a new term that has come to prominence in recent years: “soft Jihad.” Much like the phrase “soft totalitarianism[1]”—popularised by Rod Dreher in Live Not by Lies to describe the slow but powerful impact of cultural Marxism upon Western culture—“soft Jihad” describes the way the hearts and minds of modern Western people are made apathetic to, and eventually won over to, the inevitability of their own cultural defeat at the hands of Islam.

Like all ideological infiltration of this kind, the key to its success is for those being “softly” conquered to tell themselves (1) that what is happening is not happening at all; then, (2) that what is happening was inevitable anyway, and finally, (3) that what happened was a good thing all along. In this article, I want to show some of the reasons why Islam has infiltrated Great Britain and beyond, expose Islam’s nature of political and cultural conquest, and call Christians to stand up against it.

Immigrants and Samaritans

In my own homeland of Great Britain, mass immigration is justified by the relatively recent idea of “multiculturalism,” the idea that a diversity of foreign nationalities enriches a particular national culture far and wide.[2] It is described by its ardent defenders almost like a magic spell, a liberating force for tolerance and inclusivity. We are told we must keep believing this even when it becomes very clear that it fundamentally erodes vital aspects of that very national culture, leading to the loss of liberties and freedom of speech as a direct consequence.[3] Those who say otherwise tend to be shamed as lacking in education or empathy, leading more and more people to refuse to allow themselves to think or say otherwise.

Migrant Islam has been increasing in Western Europe for decades, some of it more subtle than others. Today, boatloads of fighting-age Muslim men are still arriving on British shores day after day, week after week, year after year, posing as refugees or asylum seekers.[4] They were not invited, and yet rather than being refused entry, arrested, or deported, they are instead welcomed with open arms, put up in free hotels, given free meals, even free phones.[5] If it all sounds a little mad, that’s because it is.

It could be said that the European immigration crisis has essentially been made possible by a mutation in the logic of the Good Samaritan. That’s why even many Christians find it hard to say much against the immigration problem,[6] because secular globalists—in repugnance of the historic “Ordo Amoris” regarding the primary duty to care for one’s own family and people in the first instance[7]—have trained them to think that “welcoming the stranger” applies at a political, national level, even when it may threaten the safety of one’s own people. Those who oppose Islamic immigration too strongly are aggressively attacked and smeared for being “bad Samaritans.” Some are subjected to intensive lawfare in the hope of being driven to silence, while others may even be imprisoned for years for a single social media post in a moment of frustration.[8]

Few globalists have considered that these “bad Samaritans” actually resemble the dying man lying on the ground, rather than the bandits who put him there. In a roundabout way, the liberal tolerance agenda that led to the multicultural ideology that permeates British institutions today displays more of a tolerance for the bandits than the actual victims of injustice. No case demonstrates this more prominently than that of the Englishman, Henry Nowak, an eighteen-year-old student who was stabbed by a Sikh man while on his way home from a night out, only for the man and his family to call the police and claim that Nowak had racially abused them. Due to the freighted “anti-racism” priorities of the British police, when the officers arrived on the scene they immediately favoured the Sikhs’ testimony while denying urgent medical care to Nowak, whose quiet pleas of “I’ve been stabbed” and “I can’t breathe” were initially not believed, ultimately allowing him to bleed to death in front of them. So entrenched is multicultural ideology that a spurious accusation of “racism” may even hold the power over life or death.

The Reality Before Our Eyes

It’s true that the native-born population of Britain—like those in the US—are hardly immune to perpetrating many social ills, and especially as they move away from the moorings of Christianity in their lives. That’s why we must continue to remind patriots to return to Christ, rather than simply bemoaning the death of the culture which countless faithful Christians helped to build.

Many Britons are only just waking up, recognizing the steep price to be paid for abandoning the Christian faith in this land. A video circulated in 2025 of a Muslim man gloating over the latest Islamic takeover of an old church building in Sheffield, England. I’ve driven past that building several times before. As he walked alongside it, videoing its architectural features, he narrated gleefully: “Christianity is depleting, atheism is unfulfilling, Islam is here, and it’s here to stay . . . So, carry on making those churches for us, keep them empty, we’ll buy them in a few years’ time and make them into a mosque.”[9] Slowly, the Himalayan Balsam grows, and the native plants are choked.

It’s helpful when Muslims are honest and consistent about Islamic expansion. I expect there are far more Muslims who think what that man says, but just don’t say it out loud. He’s partially correct, too. Atheism is unfulfilling, and many churches are declining for good reason because they stopped believing their own historic beliefs and capitulated to the secular apathy all around them.[10]

Even so, you would have to have been hiding under a multicultural rock in the Arabian desert to not have noticed the social problems that have arisen in Britain in correlation with the unprecedented levels of Islamic immigration in recent years. To take the most obvious and most harrowing example, there has been a discernible increase in police-recorded rape offences in the UK, which went from around 8,000 a year in the early 2000s to a staggering 74,000 per year today.[11] Astonishingly, this is an almost 1000% increase, with the very highest spikes all coming from 2021–2025, a time during which Britain has also experienced record numbers of mass immigration by people of Muslim background.[12]

“That’s just a coincidence,” says the oblivious multicultural liberal. Really? And I suppose the Pakistani Muslim rape gangs scandal[13] in multiple towns and cities across England was also just a coincidence, as was the fact that the local Muslim communities who knew about it said nothing in order to protect the perpetrators? And what about the fact that the details of those grooming gangs were covered up by police authorities for years, in fear their exposure might incite a “race war”?[14] And was it also a coincidence that some Imams in Britain teach that underage white girls are “fair game” for abuse because they “deserve it”?[15]

Reports of Muslim rape gangs are not isolated incidents. An independent report compiled by the survivor-led Rape Gang Inquiry estimates that at least 250,000 girls have been exploited by Muslim rape gangs over the last few decades and has documented evidence of grooming-gang activity in at least 149 local authority areas—nearly forty percent of the United Kingdom.[16] These gangs were religiously motivated to carry out these rapes under the theological teaching of al-walā’ wa-l-barā’, which demands subjugation of the infidel, including sex slavery as a form of subjugation.[17] 

The cold reality is that these things are not coincidences. They don’t happen by accident. They happen as a result of our toleration and placation of wicked ideology, hiding beneath a respectable veneer. We told ourselves that wildly oppositional cultural backgrounds and values could be allowed to take root with no adverse effects for the existing culture. In what transpired, we were trained to shame the exposers of deviancy, rather than the deviants themselves.

Islamic Socio-Political Influence

For many people, however, those aforementioned “problems” are easily written off as aberrations among minority sections of the Muslim community. They look away from such things and hope they’re just blips that can be sorted out. But the facts and trajectories do not lie. Despite the fact that Islam promotes an ideology totally incompatible with Western liberal values, let alone Christian values, it is being permitted to grow in pervasive influence throughout formerly Christian nations. If not stopped, its growing political influence will radically transform what nations like Britain are at the root and branch level. In many respects, this process has already begun.

It is known that Muslim communities tend to engage in bloc voting, meaning they have been able to gain significant influence in numerous parties, even those which are purportedly “on the Right,” such as the Conservative Party or Reform UK. There are currently around four million Muslims (out of around 66 million people in Britain) according to the Muslim Council of Britain and the 2021 UK census.[18] Yet the mayors of many of England’s major towns and cities (including London, Newham, and Tower Hamlets) are Muslims; there are nearly 2000 mosques,[19] over 80 sharia courts and over 50 Sharia Councils,[20] and for many years now, parents have come to expect that their children will face lessons on Islam as if it was a mandatory requirement.[21]

Read More

1. See Rod Dreher, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents (New York: Sentinel, 2020); Pod of the Gaps, “Episode 10: How to Be a Christian Dissident,” podcast audio, SoundCloud, March 5, 2021, https://soundcloud.com.
2. See Aaron Edwards, “Multiculturalism and Rootlessness,” That Good Fight (Substack), August 15, 2024,
   https://thatgoodfight.substack.com.
3. “Christian Preacher Vindicated after Arrest, Prosecution and ‘Non-Crime Hate Incident’ Threat for Questioning Quran,” Christian Concern, July 26, 2025, https://christianconcern.com.
4. See Aaron Edwards, “Multiculturalism, Nation, and Church: Why Christians Should Care about the Cultural Surrender of Britain,” That Good Fight (Substack), July 12, 2025, https://thatgoodfight.substack.com.
5. Migration Observatory, “People Crossing the English Channel in Small Boats,” University of Oxford, June 5, 2026,
   https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk
   ; UK Government, “Asylum Support: What You’ll Get,” Gov.uk, accessed June 29, 2026, https://www.gov.uk/asylum-support/what-youll-get.
6. Aaron Edwards, “5 Reasons Christians Don’t Like to Oppose Immigration: A Plea for Clearer Thinking and Bolder Speaking,” That Good Fight (Substack), September 13, 2025,https://thatgoodfight.substack.com.
7. See Matt. 15:24; Rom. 1:16; Mark 7:11; 1 Tim. 3:4–5.
8. James Tapsfield, “Mum Jailed over ‘Racist’ Migrant Hotel Tweet after Southport Stabbings Is Denied Temporary Release to See Ailing Husband,” Daily Express, April 5, 2025, https://www.express.co.uk.
9. David Atherton (@DaveAtherton20), “Another church is converted to a mosque in Sheffield. The Muslim says ‘Islam is here to stay. The British may not like it’” X, March 24, 2025, https://x.com/DaveAtherton20/status/1904204429898760521. “When the Church Shrinks Back,” Decision Magazine, Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, April 1, 2024, https://billygraham.org.
10. This number only includes those offenses reported to the police. The actual number is likely much higher. See Ellen O’Mahony, “Record Number of Rape Offences Recorded as Minister Pledges ‘Urgent Action,’” The Independent, April 23, 2026, https://www.independent.co.uk.
11. “Sexual Offences in England and Wales Overview: Year Ending March 2025,” Office for National Statistics, November 4, 2025, https://www.ons.gov.uk.
12. Gabrielle Wilde, “Rupert Lowe’s £600k Grooming Gang Inquiry Hears Shock Claims of ‘Eid Rapes’ and Police Cover-Ups,” GB News, February 4, 2026, https://www.gbnews.com.
13. Baroness Louise Casey, National Audit on Group-Based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse (London: Home Office, June 16, 2025), https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk. See also the Jay Report (Rotherham, 2014).
14. Hayley Dixon, “‘Imams Promote Grooming Rings,’ Muslim Leader Claims,” The Daily Telegraph, May 16, 2013, https://www.telegraph.co.uk.
15. The Rape Gang Inquiry, The Rape Gang Inquiry Report, chaired by Rupert Lowe MP (2026), 8, https://static1.squarespace.com. I am thankful for Knox Brown, who alerted me to this report.
16. The Rape Gang Inquiry, Rape Gang Inquiry Report, 8.
17. “British Muslims in Numbers: Census Summary Report 2025,” Muslim Council of Britain (March 2025), https://mcb.org.uk.
18. Muslims In Britain, “UK Mosque Statistics / Masjid Statistics,” as of June 2026 (directory last updated February 2026), https://www.muslimsinbritain.org/statistics/statistics01.php.
19. Denis MacEoin, Sharia Law or “One Law For All?” (London: Civitas Institute for the Study of Civil Society, June 2009), https://www.civitas.org.uk/content/files/ShariaLawOrOneLawForAll.pdf. 
20. Hannah Baldock, “The Truth about Sharia Law in Britain,” Spiked , October 15, 2025, https://www.spiked-online.com; Paul Smalley, “Parents Are Pulling Children from RE Lessons—So They Don’t Learn about Islam,” The Conversation , May 9, 2018, https://theconversation.com. 
21. Doug Mainwaring, “WATCH: Boy Scout Refuses to Bow to Allah during Mosque Visit,” LifeSiteNews, May 27, 2026, https://www.lifesitenews.com.