With the holiday season upon us, and with hatred and murder dominating the home pages, it seemed as good a time as any for something more cheerful and light, something to soothe our souls and take our minds away from all that ails us.

Or not. At least not today.

Today, because we just can’t help ourselves, let’s consider our glorious Christian heritage and the future of Western Civilization. That’s an easy lift, no?

For starters, I’ll forgive you if you think these are already lost causes. One look at the empty cathedrals of sickly Europe, the wellspring of the modern world, will do that to you. Take “Great” Britain, for example. Would any country worth its salt have tolerated — indeed, tried to cover up — the decades-long atrocities committed by familial Muslim Pakistani rape gangs against thousands of predominantly lower-class white girls?

Or what about Germany, that continental bully, that vaunted starter of world wars, which is now so flabby and flaccid that it can’t even admit to the colossal failure of its multicultural experiment, and can’t even protect its women from mass sexual assault on New Year’s Eve by marauding gangs of North African Muslims?

It might be that Europe is already lost, might be that it destroyed most of its fighting DNA in the two cataclysmic land wars of the last century. The deaths of 20 million or so young men will tend to do that to a continent — and so will the unchecked flow of immigration of people whose ideals and values and religion are incompatible with ours. Indeed, it might be that Western Civilization is destined to make its last stand in Fortress America.

And if that’s the case, if Europe really is kaput, then we here in the United States need to heed the warning. Europe serves as our DEW Line, our canary in the coal mine, but only if we pay attention to what’s happening there.

Earlier this year, I wrote about how Harvard professor Samuel Huntington coined the term “Clash of Civilizations” in 1993, and how his book of the same name, published three years later, listed numerous civilizational “fault lines” with a decidedly Muslim flair to them: Bosnia, Chechnya, the South Caucasus, Central Asia, Kashmir, the Middle East, and Sudan.

Three decades later, we can add Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Gaza, Yemen, Nigeria, and numerous other fault lines to this mix. And Australia, it seems. Is it just me, or does anyone else detect a pattern here?

President Donald Trump certainly seems to see a pattern. Last week, as the AP reports, his administration published “a new national security strategy that paints European allies as weak and aims to reassert America’s dominance in the Western Hemisphere.”

Someone has to sound the alarm, right?

The report has ruffled a lot of feathers, but rightly so. The European continent’s trajectory bears watching as an early indicator of what could be in store for the United States — culturally, ethnically, and religiously — if we don’t heed its warning. The AP continues:

The U.S. suggests that Europe is being enfeebled by its immigration policies, declining birthrates, “censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition” and a “loss of national identities and self-confidence. … Should present trends continue, the continent will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less. As such, it is far from obvious whether certain European countries will have economies and militaries strong enough to remain reliable allies.”

As historian and classicist Victor Davis Hanson writes, “Americans … are worried that Europe is not just stagnating but is on a trajectory of permanent decline — with dire consequences for the entire Western world. As for symptoms, the U.S. cites a steadily declining European share of world GDP. It points to Europe’s unsustainable 1.39 fertility rate, which ensures a steadily smaller, older, and costlier native population.”

That fertility rate is most alarming. It should be around 2.1 to maintain a population. Europe is, frankly, in a demographic death spiral, and the only thing lessening this spiral is the fecundity of its Muslim population. As more than one brutally honest Muslim has bragged, they’ll overtake us with the wombs of their women.

The Trump administration isn’t as obsessive about the Muslim issue as yours truly, instead writing, “We want Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence, and to abandon its failed focus on regulatory suffocation,” adding, “We will oppose elite-driven, anti-democratic restrictions on core liberties in Europe, the Anglosphere, and the rest of the democratic world, especially among our allies.”

That regulatory suffocation is a great point, but Europeans have, over the years, shown themselves to be more accepting of Big Government nanny-statism than we here stateside.

Of course, not everyone agrees with the Trump administration’s assessment. Not everyone believes that Europe is going out of business. The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, for example, think the Trump administration’s take is either misguided or overblown.

But who’re ya gonna believe — The Journal? The Times? Or your lying eyes?