In a 1997 New York Times op-ed, he discussed what he saw as "the growing divide between North and South in American Protestantism and the declining significance of denominational distinctions". In a 1998 article about Robert Duvall's film The Apostle, Bawer expressed surprise "that a movie with such a dark, realistic texture... should candy-coat the religious subculture in which it is set". In a 1998 review of New York Episcopal Bishop Paul Moores autobiography, Bawer described him as "a more complex figure than the privileged lefty portrayed by his critics". Europe Bawer moved from the U.S. to Europe in 1998, in part, as he later explained, because his long-term exposure to Christian fundamentalism via Stealing Jesus had drawn him to the purportedly more liberal life in Western Europe. In a 2004 New York Times article about American attitudes toward Europe, Richard Bernstein quoted a recent Hudson Review essay in which Bawer said, in Bernstein's paraphrase, "that for a time he thought about writing a book lamenting American anti-intellectualism, indifference to foreign languages and academic achievement, and susceptibility to trash TV", but in the end "didn't write that book... because he discovered that Europe wasn't so comparatively fantastic after all". After moving to Europe, Bawer contributed a number of travel articles to The New York Times about destinations in Norway and the Netherlands. He has also written scores of articles about the rise of Islam on the continent, the earliest being "Tolerating Intolerance", which appeared in 2002 in Partisan Review. While Europe Slept Bawer's book While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within (2006) concerns his belief in the threat that the rise of Islam in Europe poses to liberal values. Once established in Western European nations, Bawer maintains, Muslims avoid integration and answer only to sharia law, while avoiding the legal systems of their host nations, allowing abuse of women and gays, as well as Jews and other non-Muslims. In his conclusion, Bawer states that rising birthrates among Muslims and their "refusal" to integrate will allow them to dominate European society within 30 years, and that the only way to avoid such a disaster is to abolish the politically correct and multicultural doctrines that, according to him, are rife within the continent. James Kirchick of The New Republic wrote that the book confirmed Bawer's "intellectual consistency; witnessing American religious fundamentalism, he moved to more socially liberal