On Europe’s streets, in its campaigns, and across its feeds, an old language is returning. It is the language of exclusion, grievance, purity, and threat. What once lived at the edges of public life now appears with greater confidence in parliamentary speeches, party platforms, protest chants, and viral posts. Hate is no longer only something whispered in private. It is increasingly being organized, aestheticized, and normalized in public.
The evidence is not hard to find. In its latest survey, the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights reported that Jews in Europe still face persistently high levels of antisemitism, and that some Jewish organizations recorded increases of 400 percent or more in antisemitic incidents after October 7, 2023. The same broad climate of hostility has touched other minorities as well. In Britain, Reuters reported that anti-Muslim incidents reached a record high in 2024, while Europe’s latest Roma survey found that 31 percent of Roma and Travellers experienced discrimination because of their ethnic origin. These are not isolated eruptions. They are signs of a continent under moral strain.
From Fringe to Parliament
The political shift has been plain for some time. In the 2024 European Parliament elections, far-right parties made major gains across the continent. France’s National Rally surged. Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland helped inflict a historic defeat on Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats. Giorgia Meloni emerged stronger in Italy, where her Brothers of Italy party remains central to the governing coalition. Concerns over migration, the cost of living, the green transition, and the war in Ukraine all helped drive the rightward shift.
These movements differ by country and history, but they tend to draw from the same emotional reservoir. They promise order in the face of disorder, identity in the face of change, and national control in the face of bureaucracy, migration, and cultural uncertainty. Their rhetoric is often more polished than the extremisms of the past, but the underlying instinct is familiar. Someone else is to blame. Someone else does not belong. Someone else is weakening the nation.
Migration remains one of the most combustible issues in that story. The numbers have moved up and down, but the politics have not calmed. Frontex said irregular crossings at the EU’s external borders reached about 380,000 in 2023, the highest total since 2016. In 2024, that figure dropped sharply to just over 239,000, but the issue remained politically potent. Migration pressure does not have to be constant for migration politics to remain explosive.
The Digital Fires of Hate
In an earlier era, hatred moved through pamphlets, party cells, and radio broadcasts. Now it moves at the pace of the scroll. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue has documented how antisemitic and anti-Muslim narratives surged across social platforms after October 7, with mainstream comment sections and fringe digital spaces both amplifying prejudice. The significance is not only the volume of hate, but the velocity. A grievance in one country can be repackaged as a meme in another and then reframed as a call to action in a third.
That is one reason Europe’s present moment feels so volatile. The digital sphere does not merely reflect hostility. It industrializes it. Algorithms reward provocation. Conspiracy theories travel farther than nuance. And the emotional grammar of hate, suspicion, humiliation, revenge, civilizational fear, is particularly suited to life online.
Faith, Fear, and the Politics of Identity
What makes Europe’s present crisis more complicated is the moral language often wrapped around it. In countries shaped for centuries by Christianity, the far right increasingly invokes “Christian civilization” less as a call to repentance or discipleship than as a badge of civilizational belonging. Religion becomes not a summons to conversion, but a border marker. It is used to divide “us” from “them.”
That pattern sits uneasily with Europe’s actual religious life. In its landmark study Being Christian in Western Europe, Pew found that Christianity remains a meaningful cultural identity in much of the region even as church attendance and active religious practice continue to weaken. Many Europeans still describe themselves as Christian, but often in a way that is more civilizational than devotional. That makes faith vulnerable to political repurposing. Once Christianity is treated mainly as heritage rather than obedience, it becomes easier to wield as a weapon of resentment.
The tragedy is that the gospel moves in the opposite direction. Jesus breaks tribal pride rather than blessing it. He tears down dividing walls rather than repainting them with sacred language. “There is neither Jew nor Greek,” Paul writes in Galatians 3:28, “for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” When Christian identity becomes a rhetorical shield for ethnonational grievance, it is no longer functioning as Christian witness. It is functioning as cultural self-defense.
The Victims of the Backlash
For the people caught in the middle of all this, the cost is not rhetorical. It is physical, social, and daily.
In Germany, Reuters reported that recorded antisemitic incidents nearly doubled in 2024 to 8,627, according to the Federal Research and Information Point for Antisemitism. In Britain, anti-Muslim incidents hit 5,837 in 2024, a record level tracked by Tell MAMA. And among Roma and Traveller communities across 13 European countries, the EU’s own rights agency found that discrimination remains widespread, with poverty and exclusion still deeply entrenched.
Europe has seen this pattern before. Hatred rarely begins with catastrophe. It begins with language. With contempt dressed up as candor. With slurs that pass as jokes. With statistics stripped of human meaning. With leaders who tell majorities that their discomfort is proof of victimhood and their prejudice is merely realism. By the time violence arrives, the moral groundwork has usually been laid long in advance.
The Economic and Cultural Engine
None of this means Europe’s voters are animated only by bigotry. That would be too easy, and too false. Cost-of-living pressures, inflation, energy strain, housing shortages, war on the continent’s edge, and political distrust all matter. The FRA’s 2024 Fundamental Rights Report warned that rising living costs and racism were both threatening rights protections across Europe. One in five people across the EU, it said, had been pushed into poverty by rising energy and living costs. Economic insecurity does not automatically produce hatred. But it does make scapegoating easier to sell.
This is one of the recurring failures of liberal Europe. It is often better at speaking the language of rights than at sustaining the conditions in which solidarity can endure. When ordinary people feel economically pressured, culturally disoriented, and politically ignored, they become more vulnerable to movements that promise restoration through exclusion.
Why the Church Must Not Stay Silent
That is why the churches of Europe cannot afford the luxury of irrelevance. If hate is gaining power by offering people belonging through exclusion, then the Church’s task is to offer something better: belonging through truth, repentance, hospitality, and the shared dignity of bearing God’s image.
Silence will not do. Neither will vague appeals to civility. The Church has to be clearer than that. It must name antisemitism as sin. It must name anti-Muslim hatred as sin. It must name racism, xenophobia, and ethnic contempt as sins that deform both victim and perpetrator. And it must refuse the lie that Christian identity is best defended by political hostility toward the stranger.
There are tools for that work. The Council of Europe’s hate-speech program offers educational and civic resources for countering hate online and offline. The OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights maintains the region’s largest hate-crime dataset and provides training and guidance for law enforcement and policymakers. And the World Council of Churches has published recent anti-racist and anti-bias resources aimed directly at churches and faith communities. These are not substitutes for courage, but they are tools that courage can use.
Signs of Hope
There are, even now, signs that Europe has not surrendered entirely to the politics of fear. Interfaith and ecumenical groups continue to organize across the continent. The World Council of Churches and other church bodies are still producing anti-racism and anti-bias materials. The Council of Europe continues to support educational work against hate speech. The OSCE/ODIHR continues to press for stronger victim-centered hate-crime responses and practical training. These efforts are not dramatic enough for the algorithm. But they matter precisely because they resist the emotional economy on which hate depends.
Europe does not need a sentimental optimism. It needs leaders willing to tell the truth about what hatred does to a people. It needs citizens who remember that grievance is not a foundation for violence. And it needs churches that understand that the gospel is not a cultural possession to be defended against outsiders, but good news that exposes pride, gathers strangers, and teaches nations how to repent.
Europe stands, again, at a crossroads. It can continue allowing fear to harden into ideology and ideology into public policy. Or it can recover a deeper moral memory, one strong enough to resist the seductions of blood, soil, tribe, and myth.
The question is not whether Europe has heard this story before. It has. The question is whether it still has the courage to stop repeating it.
