Church: Report
Christianity in Europe
Religion,
Secularity, Secularism and European Integration (030500)
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“For given religious beliefs, increases in church attendance tend to reduce economic growth. In contrast, for given church attendance, increases in some religious beliefs -- notably heaven, hell, and an afterlife -- tend to increase economic growth.”
Some researchers argue that explanations for economic growth should be broadened to include cultural determinants. Culture may influence economic outcomes by affecting such personal traits as honesty, thrift, willingness to work hard, and openness to strangers. Although religion is an important dimension of culture, economists to date have paid little attention to its role in economic growth.
But in Religion and Economic Growth (NBER Working Paper No. 9682), authors Robert Barro and Rachel McCleary analyze the influences of religious participation and beliefs on a country’s rate of economic progress. The authors use six international surveys conducted between 1981 and 1999 to measure religiosity -- church attendance and religious beliefs -- for 59 countries. There is more information available about rich countries than poor ones and about countries that are primarily Christian. Barro and McCleary consider first how religiosity responds to economic development, government influences on religion, and the composition of religious adherence. They find that their measures of religiosity are positively related to education, negatively related to urbanization, and positively related to the presence of children. Overall, religiosity tends to decline with economic development.
The presence of a state religion is positively related to religiosity, probably because of the subsidies that flow to established religions in those countries. However, religiosity declines with greater government regulation of religion and with the religious oppression associated with Communism. Greater diversity of religions -- that is, religious pluralism -- is associated with higher church attendance and stronger religious beliefs. Countries in the sample that had low levels of pluralism include some that are predominantly Catholic (Spain, Italy, Portugal, Belgium, Ireland, and much of Latin America), as well as Protestant Scandinavia, Orthodox Greece, and Muslim Pakistan and Turkey. Countries studied that exhibit high levels of pluralism include the United States, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Australia, Malaysia, Singapore, and South Africa.
The authors turn next to the assessment of how differences in religiosity affect economic growth. For given religious beliefs, increases in church attendance tend to reduce economic growth. In contrast, for given church attendance, increases in some religious beliefs -- notably heaven, hell, and an afterlife -- tend to increase economic growth. In other words, economic growth depends mainly on the extent of believing relative to belonging. The authors also find some indication that the fear of hell is more potent for economic growth than the prospect of heaven. Their statistical analysis allows them to argue that these estimates reflect causal influences from religion to economic growth and not the reverse.
Barro and McCleary suggest that higher rates of religious beliefs stimulate growth because they help to sustain aspects of individual behavior that enhance productivity. They believe that higher church attendance depresses growth because it signifies a greater use of resources by the religion sector. However, that suppression of growth is tempered by the extent to which church attendance leads to greater religious beliefs, which in turn encourages economic growth.
- Les Picker
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The Germanic pagan religion has left its mark on customs and festivals; celebrations with bonfires and maypoles mark the Finnish and Swedish midsummer, and the Nordic Christmas bears many similarities to the midwinter feast of the Vikings, starting with the word for Christmas (sw. Jul, fin. Joulu) which comes from the Old Germanic word “hjul”, meaning the wheel of the year.
Trolls and gnomes still inhabit Nordic households, although the once revered and feared mythical beings have been reduced to the lowly caste of soft toys.
Scandinavians are among the most secular peoples on the face of the earth.
The Finns and the Sámi ought to have a common set of folklore and old relicts of religious traditions, but it is rather hard to find a common denominator for Fenno-Ugric traditions. For instance are the Sámi the only Fenno-Ugrians where shamans are known. Probably the Finns and the northern Germanians have made impressions in both directions. In any case: Bears had a central role in myths and rites, and beings ruling the nature, Haltia in Finnish, are more central in the Finnish and Sámi tradition than among other Nordeners.
The Nordic peoples were converted to Catholicism in the 10th to 12th centuries, but the Lutheran reformation embraced in all Nordic countries wiped out most of the Catholic customs and memories in the course of the 16th century. Having become a stronghold of protestantism against Catholics in the south and Greek Orthodox in the east had some unifying effect on Scandinavia even though wars between the countries kept raging on; religion was, after all, the most important basis of one’s identity well into the 18th century. The Lutheran ideal was to require the common people to be able to read the Bible on their own, which had a enormous educating effect on the Nordic peoples. This, along with the protestant work ethic, had a significant role in the forming of the Scandinavian societies, enabling their economic and cultural growth and the pioneering work that the Nordics have played in decreasing social inequality. No doubt it also shaped the national character of each country to a similar direction (a common complaint in Norden: we’re such joyless, grey and angst-ridden people ---> it’s all the Lutheran Church’s fault! :->
Even today, all, but Sweden, have a Lutheran state church to which a vast majority of the population belongs (there is of course full freedom of religion granted by the constitutions of the five countries). Paradoxically, this is probably the reason why Scandinavians are among the most secular peoples on the face of the earth. Despite its seemingly all-pervasive presence in various state institutions and the ceremonies guiding the life of the average Scandinavian, Lutheranism has in most parts of Scandinavia retreated to the fringes of culture and has little meaning to the average person. Church attendance is record-low, the liberal morals hardly reflect specifically Lutheran ideals, religion is no major issue in politics, etc. The official, institutionalized religion offered by the state churches has to a large extent vaccinated the Nordics against Christian fundamentalism of the American kind.
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“Although North America and Europe have become increasingly secularized during the past half century, leaders in those two continents can no longer afford to ignore religion.”
by John G. Stackhouse, Jr.
It is practically axiomatic among many educated elites today that in North America and Europe, religion doesn’t matter. It is a proposition well worth considering. Of course, such an assertion will seem preposterous to most Americans, 85 percent of whom affirm the religion of Christianity. It will seem especially bizarre to Americans after the events of September 11, 2001, in which religion seemed to matter very much indeed. Yet a scan of evidence available to sociologists and historians suggests that religion generally is indeed at a low ebb in North America and Europe, and ebbing further. As the events of September 11 made clear, however, religion does matter very much elsewhere in the world, and the world is now here. Ignoring religion at home may make sense according to much of the available data, but other information indicates that national leaders—and anyone else who cares about our public life—would be foolish to ignore it entirely.
For those who are concerned about the health of traditional religion, and especially Christianity, in Europe and North America (what I will refer to as the North-West), the news has been generally bad for a long while. Four trends in particular have been widely noted:
* the decline of Christianity,
* the rise of New Religious Movements (NRMs),
* the increase of adherents of other world religions, and
* the increasing number of North-Westerners who claim “no religious affiliation” at all.
Christianity in
Decline?
The strength of a people’s adherence to Christianity can be measured by two kinds of statistics. The first kind is affiliation: regardless of their theological knowledge, moral rectitude, church attendance, or any other measure of religious authenticity, how many people continue to identify themselves as Christians—or are identified by officials as such?
These numbers actually look strong—very strong—for the North-West. Canada is just behind the American total (85 percent), with 80 percent of its population affirming a Christian identity. In Britain that figure is 83 percent, and Ireland, predictably, is much higher, at 97 percent. Upon crossing the English Channel, the numbers stay up in the Benelux countries: Belgium at 88 percent, Netherlands 80 percent, and Luxembourg 94 percent. Spain and Portugal reflect their intense Christian heritage at approximately 93 percent each. In Scandinavia, the numbers are also high: Denmark at 92 percent, Norway 94 percent, and Finland 93 percent. (Sweden is the anomaly at 68 percent, and this figure likely points to the vexed question of how affiliation is accounted for in each country, rather than to such a strong cultural difference from its Scandinavian neighbors.) The numbers drop significantly when we get to France (71 percent) and Germany (76 percent), but these are still large majorities. Switzerland and Austria remain quite high in Christian identification, at 88 percent and 90 percent, respectively. Among Italians, self-identified Christians account for 82 percent of the population, and in Greece the figure is 95 percent.
In the east, the numbers remain high even in countries once behind the Iron Curtain: Poland is at 97 percent (tying it with Ireland for the top spot), Bulgaria 81 percent, Romania 88 percent, Croatia 95 percent, and Lithuania 88 percent. The conspicuous exceptions are the Czech Republic (63 percent), Estonia (64 percent), Latvia (67 percent), Russia (57 percent), and, of course, Bosnia-Herzegovina (35 percent Christian; 60 percent Muslim) and Albania (39 percent Muslim, 35 percent Christian, and 25 percent nonreligious or atheist).
What is perhaps most striking about these statistics is how few people are left over to fill the remaining categories of NRMs, other world religions, and religious “nones.” In terms of self-identification, the North-West continues to be overwhelmingly Christian. Yet something is obviously wrong with this picture. Christianity certainly appears to the casual observer to be declining or even already moribund in most of Europe and in much of North America. Thus, to assess actual levels of vitality, sociologists also use church attendance statistics, because Christianity—unlike some religions—expects people to participate regularly in corporate worship. (The New Testament itself rarely commands, but rather assumes, church attendance.) Sociologists therefore track church attendance as a key measure of religious seriousness: Do people actually care enough about Christianity to get out of bed and go to church?
These numbers paint a much less positive picture. The United States has maintained a steady level of approximately 40 percent weekly church attendance since World War II. Some European countries—especially those in which religion plays an important role in ethnic identity, and particularly in the face of an external threat—also report relatively high attendance. Poland and Northern Ireland are the most salient examples, each with over 50 percent weekly attendance.
Generally, however, church attendance is low in Europe, with average weekly churchgoing in ten countries at less than a quarter of the population. Italy and Portugal are the highest in Western Europe with perhaps a third attending, while the Netherlands, France, and Scandinavia compete for the lowest (5 percent or less). Germany and Britain are not doing much better, at approximately 10 percent. European churchgoing has declined so drastically, in fact, that some surveyors have begun counting monthly rather than weekly church attendance as an official indication of regular attendance.
Canada offers a peculiar case of recent, intense secularization in this respect. As late as the 1940s, considerably more Canadians than Americans attended church regularly; a national average of more than 60 percent was reported in 1946. In a little more than a single generation, however, Canadian church attendance has plunged to European levels, with a national average now just above 20 percent—a drop from about two-in-three to two-in-ten in only half a century. The Netherlands is perhaps the only other country to have secularized so quickly, also during this period after World War II. Social scientists and historians have not come close to consensus as to just why both countries moved from “observant” to “nominal” Christianity so quickly.
NRMs, OWRs, and
“Nones”
New Religious Movements might be expected to fill the “religion gap” for disaffected ex-Christians. NRMs have been darlings of sociologists since their widespread emergence in America in the late 1960s—Hare Krishna, Transcendental Meditation, Scientology, and the Unification Church perhaps being the most conspicuous, with Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses having a century’s head start. Yet for all the scholarly attention and media limelight they have enjoyed, the NRMs simply do not constitute much of a presence. As the French sociologist Yves Lambert concludes, “no new world religion or spirituality has spread on a wide scale.”
Likewise, other world religions have made few converts in the North-West. Since September 11, Americans have awakened to the presence of Islam in the world and at home, a matter until then largely ignored by most Americans except when Louis Farrakhan—the leader of the unorthodox Nation of Islam—made news. However, the opening up of immigration after World War II to many more non-Europeans, both in North America and in Western Europe (in the latter case an economic necessity because the Iron Curtain prevented access to the labor pool of Eastern Europe until the 1990s), certainly increased the numbers of adherents of the world’s other great religions residing in the North-West. Nonetheless, the number of Muslims in America was almost certainly overestimated in the wake of September 11 as some sought to show that Muslims “belonged” according to the traditional American criterion, market share. Even though the widely reported figure of six million is probably off by a factor of two (three to four million is much more likely), the more important point is that if one totals up the likely headcount of adherents of all non-Christian religions (including NRMs), it still amounts to only 6 percent of the American population, with a similar ratio in Canada.
In Europe the figures are surprisingly similar. Frankfurt, we are told, now counts more than a quarter of its population as foreigners. France supposedly is overrun with immigrants from its former North African colonies. Yet the best available statistics show that the total number of adherents of non-Christian religions in these countries remains relatively low: even the high-immigration countries (and post-imperial powers) still have rather small non-Christian contingents. In Britain and the Netherlands, the figure is 6 percent, in Germany it is 7 percent, and in France 9 percent.
The most important religious rival to Christianity in the North-West, in fact, is indifference to, or rejection of, any organized religion. The rise of the religiously unaffiliated, sometimes referred to by sociologists as religious “nones,” is perhaps the most telling story of the decline of Christianity and the rise of new forms of spirituality and worldview. The United States has perhaps the smallest proportion of such people, but that number is still 9 percent. Canada reports 11 percent. In some European countries, the figures are higher yet: in Britain 12 percent, France 16 percent, Germany 17 percent, Sweden 18 percent, and Russia 28 percent. In most other countries, however, the figures are lower than in North America.
Taken together, then, the statistics of religious affiliation and church attendance reveal a largely nominal, not particularly vital, Christianity in most of Europe and North America. These statistics have been confirmed by a large number of polls sounding out what North Americans and Europeans actually know about the faith: the levels of ignorance and heterodoxy are very high. In Western Europe, for example, approximately as many people—one third of the population—consider God to be a spirit or vital force as consider Him to be a personal God. And even among those reasonably knowledgeable and devout, there has been a clear rise in the acceptance of relativism and pluralism, the resistance to all claims of exclusive and universal truth.
What statistics cannot show, but what hundreds of social-scientific, historical, and literary studies confirm, is that Christianity has not for some time played a determinative role in North-Western public life. True, the disintegration of Yugoslavia took place according to ethnic identities that involved religious differences. And before that, churches served as rallying points in East Germany, Poland, Russia, and other Eastern Bloc countries as the Iron Curtain fell and Communism was overturned. Today, Northern Ireland continues to smolder as the last cinder of the early modern Wars of (Christian) Religion in Europe. Yet there are no major political parties with significant Christian content or style anywhere in the North-West, including the so-called Christian-Democratic parties of Europe. Substantial references to the Bible or Christian tradition almost never appear in the rhetoric of present-day public leaders in the region. The entertainment media on the two continents are notoriously inhospitable to traditional Christianity. Educational systems continue to involve religion in some places (England, for example, has mandatory religion classes in the public schools) and even draw on churches for assistance (nuns in habit teach in the public systems of Switzerland). Yet in not one country is the general tone of intellectual life set by explicitly Christian terms.
Some analysts see the reduction in the influence of Christian institutions as only the first wave of secularization, to be followed by the entire evacuation from public life of all explicitly Christian symbols and values. Such secularization has indeed proceeded apace throughout the North-West, however much Christian piety may still burn warmly in the private lives of many citizens of Warsaw, Lisbon, and Dallas.
This “secularization thesis,” however, has been widely discredited of late. The prediction—still proclaimed as gospel only a generation ago—that modernity would sweep aside all religion in the name of reason and especially of science, has proven to be simplistic. Religion has instead responded to modernity in four ways. Decline has indeed been one reaction, but the church has also responded through adaptation, conservative reaction, and individualization and fragmentation (in which individuals feel free to pick and choose among elements offered by various religions to construct a faith for themselves). Religion clearly hasn’t disappeared—perhaps especially in the most modern country on earth, the United States. Instead, it has taken new forms.
Keeping the Faith
In some respects, the news is even worse for traditional religious believers than it appears in the foregoing sketch. In some regions of the North-West, church attendance figures are significantly lower than the national average. Northern England, for example, reports church attendance figures closer to one in twenty than the national average of approximately one in ten. The Canadian province of Quebec, which only a generation ago was dominated by the Roman Catholic Church, has seen its weekly church attendance plummet from more than 80 percent to less than 10 percent since the “Quiet Revolution” (a sort of cultural French Revolution without violence) of the 1960s. And in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, church attendance is likewise in the single digits.
Furthermore, it appears that the reported American attendance might be almost double the actual rate of churchgoing. Beginning in the 1990s, a series of sociological studies has shown that many more Americans tell pollsters that they attend church regularly than can be found in church when teams actually count. (Ironically, some congregations in both the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church have been shown to undercount their attendance, in order to be liable for smaller financial obligations to their denominational headquarters.)
Perhaps the most ominous statistics regarding prospects for Christianity in the North-West are those that report a significant generation gap, or at least gradient, in religious observance. Young people in every country across Europe and in North America are significantly less interested in, and even aware of, traditional Christian beliefs and practices than their parents and grandparents.
Interestingly, Christian numbers have been bolstered in the North-West somewhat by the immigration that many thought would only add to the number of adherents of non-Christian faiths. Nonetheless, for all the current vitality of immigrant churches, it remains to be seen how well the next generation will be retained for the faith as the trauma of immigration fades and the lure of alternative North-Western lifestyles increases. Even the vaunted growth of Pentecostalism may well have peaked on the two continents. Recent studies suggest that Pentecostalism is no longer growing much in North America outside Latino populations, and the most recent figures for Britain show an actual decline in the last decade.
There are also data to suggest that these trends are not as straightforward as they might appear. For instance, church attendance in Canada and the United States was significantly lower in the early nineteenth century than it is today. Both countries then underwent a significant increase of Christian fervor that influenced them for a century. England experienced a similar revival a century before, with the rise of Methodism. Therefore, there is no reason to assume that secularization is inexorable. Indeed, some preliminary studies show a small but perhaps significant increase of more conservative values, including traditional Christian ones, among the youth population of North America. Christians themselves, of course, believe in a God who transcends earthly limitations, including sociological ones. And even those prognosticators who don’t try to take the Holy Spirit into account can remember that although Europe and North America now look religiously weak, few cultural trends continue in a straight line indefinitely.
Given the rise of immigration from nations in which Christianity is in fact blooming, the North-West is receiving an infusion of fresh religious vigor that may well begin to revitalize the struggling Anglo churches that once sent armies of missionaries around the world. Pennsylvania State University professor Philip Jenkins reports that half of all churchgoers in London are black, with the largest church serving primarily black Christians filling an auditorium twice the capacity of Westminster Abbey or St. Paul’s Cathedral.
Outside the churches, spiritual interest remains evident in the North-West, even as it sometimes takes unusual forms such as the rise of New Age interests in alternative medicine, parascientific investigations of human potential, astrology, and the like. These interests have even taken root among many nominal Christians, so that, for example, a significant number now claim to believe simultaneously in reincarnation and resurrection. It may be that the traditional churches are offering something that fewer people want, no matter how attractively the churches package it, but few people doubt that there are better ways for most European and North American churches to offer what they do have to a spiritually interested population. (See sidebar, “Is Europe Irreligious?”.)
Meanwhile, religion continues to play a more important part in some sectors of public life than might be suspected in light of the statistics regarding affiliation and attendance. The list of recent European and North American political controversies fuelled in part by religious concerns is long: abortion, euthanasia, and other bioethical issues; the legal status of homosexual unions, child pornography, AIDS, and other matters of sexuality and family; the presence or absence of religious symbols in public institutions and ceremonies; the teaching of religion, science, and sexual values in the public schools; and tax support for religious groups, including churches and charities. These disputes are no less important for being familiar. Christians also are increasingly concerned about human rights around the globe, and particularly the persecution of their fellow believers after the worst century of Christian martyrdom in history. These concerns may well interfere, for example, with the plans of those who want to do business with oppressive regimes.
Religion might seem unimportant to many people, but there remain pockets of deep religious concern in North America and Europe that can still substantially assist or thwart the plans of public figures. Sociologists on both sides of the Atlantic, notably the American Robert Wuthnow and the Englishman Robin Gill, have shown that regular churchgoing correlates highly with civic involvement, charitable giving, volunteering, and other publicly crucial behaviors. The level of regular churchgoing is therefore a matter of civic, not merely ecclesiastical, concern.
New Age, New
Challenges
The events of September 11 have reminded us that religion can take aim at the fundamental values and institutions of North-West society. Politicians, pundits, and philosophers have been wrestling with the implications of immigration policies and the cultural orthodoxy of multiculturalism for a generation, and recent events have made those questions even more acute. Throughout the past century, European and North American societies found it impossible to absorb large influxes of people from heterogeneous cultures without either replacing the immigrants’ values with Euro-American ones or provoking a nativist backlash. Thus, it is likely that North-Western societies will also find it impossible, using the currently regnant multicultural model, to make room for more of these individuals and their varied communities in a way that promotes the common good.
This dilemma raises even more serious questions, such as whether religious tests should be part of immigration proceedings, to discern whether an applicant’s outlook includes inherent opposition to the Euro-American culture. It will also be necessary to figure out whether to welcome, in a spirit of pluralism, all communities, including even those that are opposed to the current Euro-American doctrine of multiculturalism. Even to raise such questions would have been wildly unacceptable in polite circles not long ago—just before September 11, in fact. But now it is impossible to ignore them.
Finally, it is obvious that religion is very important in the world outside Europe and America. Public leaders in the North-West who assume that everyone else thinks as they do will be ill-equipped to engage those who see political matters through religious lenses, whether in foreign policy or in domestic challenges, just as the CIA failed to anticipate the Iranian Revolution of the 1970s and the FBI failed to understand the Branch Davidians at Waco. The struggles ahead won’t be simply “Jihad vs. McWorld,” as author and University of Maryland professor Benjamin Barber puts it, but might well be “Jihad vs. McWorld vs. Crusade vs. Hinduism vs. Maoism vs. Shintoism” in a truly worldwide struggle between massive, strongly motivated blocs.
Religion doesn’t seem to matter most of the time in Europe and North America. Many in public life therefore understandably ignore it. But as these reflections suggest, religion does matter, not only privately, but publicly. It does matter—and it will.
Is Europe
Irreligious?
When Pope John Paul II arrived in Toronto in late July for the World Youth Day Congress, he was arriving in a continent that is still significantly religious—and leaving a continent that seems to have abandoned religion for agnosticism and material affluence.
It is almost one hundred years since Hilaire Belloc pronounced of Catholicism, “Europe is the Faith and the Faith is Europe.” It seems a great deal longer. In Belloc’s day, Europe was the center of the Christian world from which, in the previous three hundred years, missionaries had ventured forth to convert the heathen. Today the Christian world is increasingly the Third World where the new Christians tilt dramatically towards evangelical and traditional forms of belief.
Christian conversions from other religions, mainly Islam, are proceeding rapidly in Africa and southeast Asia. In Latin America evangelical conversions within Christianity are transforming bad Catholics into good Protestants. As a result Christian missionary traffic has gone into reverse gear. Catholic churches in Europe rely on priests from the Philippines and India, and African bishops attend Anglican convocations to reprove their Western counterparts for liberal theology and sexual libertinism. It was a sign of this new world that the traditionalist candidate for the Archbishopric of Canterbury, defeated recently by a saintly but liberal academic theologian, hailed from Pakistan.
Missionaries are certainly needed in Western Europe. Regular church attendance there has sunk to single digits—7 percent for most Christian denominations in Britain, even lower in France and Germany. By comparison with this gloomy picture, North America still looks moderately devout. About 40 percent of Americans and 20 percent of Canadians say they go to church regularly—and probably at least half of them are telling the truth.
If Europe is a post-Christian society, then North America is still a moderately observant one. But both exist in a world where Asia, Africa, and Latin America are passionately devout.
But things may not be what they seem. Europe may simply be further along the road of modernist “disenchantment” with religion than either the United States or Canada. From the 1930s to the 1950s, European churchgoing imperceptibly became a matter of social respectability rather than a desire to worship God. From the 1960s, when everyone suddenly realized that his neighbor would prefer to sleep in on Sunday as well, church attendance progressively collapsed. Over time society became increasingly secular in law, custom, social atmosphere—and eventually in religion too.
And this is producing a religious paradox worthy of G. K. Chesterton. Paul M. Zulehner, dean of the theology department at Vienna Catholic University, sees what is happening in Europe not as irreligion but as a frustrated religious impulse: “We are observing a boom in religious yearning and at the same time a shrinking process of the churches.” Why so? Because, says Zulehner, “the churches have secularized themselves.”
How true is this? The shrinking of the secularized churches is obvious enough. In Western Europe it is often hard to distinguish the local church from a social service agency; Bishops reserve their prophetic fire to denounce cuts in public spending rather than private sins; and church buildings are turned into office blocks. But where is the boom in religious yearning?
My colleague, United Press International religion editor Uwe Siemon-Netto—a rare former foreign correspondent with two theology degrees—points to such events as the sale in France of over 100,000 copies of a new translation of the Bible within a month of publication, the packed theaters for performances by the Comedie Francaise of a new translation of the Psalms, the crowds in Germany attending consolatory religious services after September 11 of 2001, the rising numbers in opinion polls (since the 1960s) who describe themselves as religious believers, and the large congregations at non-mainstream evangelical services in churches often established by Third World immigrants.
It may be that Weberian “disenchantment” is merely a phase that the prosperous go through before arriving at a sense of religious awe at the mysteries of Creation. And not only the prosperous. Some Latin Americans left the Catholic Church because it had forgotten that the poor had souls as well as bodies and devoted too much of its teaching to their material concerns as part of its “preference for the poor.”
North America may be at the early “social respectability” point on this learning curve. The signs of a decay of belief are certainly there: religious attendance declines in those areas where no one knows his neighbor; polls show that a vulgar form of moral relativism is the orthodoxy of educated young people; and in the pedophilia scandal Catholic bishops plainly placed more trust in Freud than in God.
What may save North America from this looming agnosticism is the decentralized character of its religious institutions. The United States in particular has always had a free market in religion. So, as older mainstream churches fall to the secularizing temptation, the result may not be the anomie and despair of post-Christian Europe but the rise of charismatic, Pentecostal, evangelical, and other “spiritual” movements, even inside the Catholic Church. The “age of secularization” would then be a very brief one in North America compared to Europe’s thirty years.
Here the Pope may exert a vital personal influence. Even to many who dislike his theological conservatism, he appears above all else a man of deep and radiating spiritual goodness. That spiritual appeal has penetrated the hearts of the Third World poor in earlier tours. It has won over countless young people like those at Toronto. Will it now enlighten and uplift the dehydrated souls of post-Christian intellectuals and exhausted consumers in the post-Christian West? If so, it will be his strangest and perhaps deepest triumph.
— John O’Sullivan
John O’Sullivan is editor-in-chief of United Press International. This article first appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times and is reprinted with the author’s permission.
John G. Stackhouse Jr. is the Sangwoo Youtong Chee Professor of Theology and Culture at Regent College, Vancouver, Canada, and author of two new books: Humble Apologetics: Defending the Faith Today (Oxford University Press) and Evangelical Landscapes: Facing Critical Issues of the Day (Baker Academic).
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David Martin
Prologue
In this essay I shall be making certain assumptions unconnected with any personal views about further European integration. I assume that a question about how religion does or does not contribute to European integration is an empirical question, and if the answer is rather discouraging then that is what I have to report. No doubt the question itself is embedded in normative concerns, such as those now focussed on the European Constitution, and it might be possible to respond drawing on carefully selected religious norms relevant to those concerns, but that is not my main task.
I am concerned, then, with the varying states of religion between Galway and Salonika, not with that particular subset of religious norms, of which subsidiarity is a characteristic example, which are capable of being subsumed within the conceptual abstractions dominating the humanist agenda. That is a game worth playing but its rules are already set by that agenda.
Were I to pause briefly and play that game I would suggest that - classical sources apart - ideas like liberty, equality and fraternity are secular translations of Biblical texts, such as our oneness (irrespective of all adventitious characteristics) in Christ, the unity of humanity ‘under God’, and the way in which every human being is a king and a priest ‘unto God’. To this I would add ‘Glory to God’, ‘The Peace of God’, and ‘Christian liberty’ by God’s grace. Remove the references to Christ and to God and you arrive at comprehensive mottos of republican principle and virtue. Since Christian language can in this way be emptied out into ordinary secular currency the question is whether the specifically religious gold standard, held (literally) in vaults and crypts, is still required as reserve backing, or whether it has been finally converted into the secular. Repudiate that standard and a relativistic nihilism easily follows of the kind brilliantly delineated in John Gray’s Straw Dogs (2002).
I hold that the hidden gold standard provides permanent backing for secular enlightened usage, while resisting all attempts at a final conversion. Religious language is sui generis. In any case, its fundamental grammar of incarnation and redemption, transformation and deformation, acceptance and alienation, sacrifice and resurrection, cannot be incorporated into the public realm without damage and compromise on all sides. A Risorgimento in the secular realm echoes the Resurrection, but cannot be confused with it, any more than a secular Renaissance can be confused with a Second Birth.
Religious language is embedded in specific angles of vision, specific modes of human association, and in sacred places specifically shaped and informed by the gestures, images, and exclamations of worship. Such sacred places are scattered all over Europe and are part of its unity, and even if you dismiss Christianity as a lingering or malingering tenant, this deposit of faith remains a social presence and stays a social fact. The normative question can therefore be rephrased to ask how this presence and this fact may or may not be acknowledged in the public realm.
I referred above to the enlightened agenda as a kind of taken-for-granted, and one which, like a media interview, reserves the right to question without itself being questioned. From the protected vantage point of that agenda enlightened elites presuppose an established universalism which has somehow to cope with, and perhaps override, an awkward, fissiparous and archaic religious particularity. However, in a supposedly postmodern age one is permitted to think outside this protected vantage point. What we have in practice are rivalrous secular universalisms, such as are represented by France, Anglo-America and (till recently) Russia, each in complex encounter with rivalrous religious universalisms. In this encounter there are, for sure, shared wisdoms, complementary vocabularies and perennial common understandings, to be explored and exploited, such as peace with justice and human responsibility. But unless the protocols of human dignity are threatened or violated either by different religions or by different
Enlightenments, there needs to be respect for difference, and a sense of an unoccupied neutral space. Neither God nor truth can be pre-empted by the secular city. In any case, abstract rights are notoriously capable of being deployed in contrary directions: gays’ should not be discriminated against when it comes to employment and religious organisations should be able to employ those who share their ethos. Enlightenments then, are in conflict, and the French Enlightenment in particular, as allied to the omnicompetent and secularist state, is challenged by other less statist Enlightenments (English, Scottish, Dutch, German and American). These have had or, in the German case, have lately arrived at, a limited and federal view of the state, and they all present piety and reason in partial alliance. The main historical conflict was between the British and French versions, and that has now become a conflict between the American and French versions, with the British usually leaning westward once push comes to shove. The Anglo-Dutch genealogy of 1689 and the American genealogy of 1776 have long faced the genealogies of 1789 and 1917.
Not only are there characteristic and powerful alliances of Christianity and Enlightenments running east and west all across the northern tier from Harvard to Halle, but there are powerful and parallel lines of theological communication, mostly moving westward from German sources. Religiously, linguistically and historically, Britain looks west to North America as well as to Australasia and the global Anglosphere. This is where the sometime Protestant character of Britain retains some relevance in spite of the passionate love affairs pursued by the educated British middle classes with France, Italy and Greece, in search of places where sensuous relaxation can be briefly indulged under a southern sun. That apart, the post-Protestant north still preens itself on its capacity to internalise rules and laws, rather than to accept them in principle while venally evading them in practice. Whatever may be true of the old border of the magisterial Reformation, mutations of Protestant and Catholic attitudes still remain in force to cause cultural and political misunderstanding.
If there are such palpable if modest differences between north and south, there are more basic differences between west and east, especially northwest and southeast. In the north there is a socially critical religious leadership, including high calibre lay opinion on such matters as bioethics, whereas in the south the weight of a more traditional Catholicism supports the idea of the Church speaking as a collective voice. Media convenience and political convenience collude with this Catholic view. In the east, and especially the southeast, the accepted role of religious leaderships has been and remains to speak on behalf of nations, even though the concrete norms governing people’s lives are not at all subject to ecclesiastical control or guidance. Indeed, in the east churches damage their moral credibility by seeking power and status.
These comments outline certain basic contrasts in contemporary European religiosity. Perhaps I may summarise. There is a socially concerned ‘reformed’ Catholicism, particularly where Catholics are effectively a minority. There is an embedded folk Catholicism with its redoubts in the south, but with northern outliers. There is the ethnoreligion of eastern Europe, sometimes with recently renewed links to the state but energised by several different kinds of alien rule. Western Europe has also nurtured ethnoreligions, in particular in such niches as the Brittany peninsula and the island of Ireland.
Then there are the two Protestant types of religiosity found right across the northern tier. One is Anglo-Dutch and Anglo-American, based on religion as generating voluntary social capital, either as a passive service station under the shadow of establishment, in the English-style, or active, entrepreneurial and competitive, in the American style. The other is Scandinavian and German, with a strong Social Democratic mirror of Lutheran monopoly in Scandinavia, and in Germany a federal state working in partnership with churches to maintain a massive web of social assistance: Gotteshilfe, Selbshilfe, Staatshilfe, Brüderhilfe, to use a recent formulation by Klaus Tanner.
The remaining kinds of religion are the cases of successful secularist indoctrination by the state, in France, the Czech Republic, the former East Germany and Estonia. This is the obverse of religious nationalism, because the success of counter-indoctrination by an ideologically secularist state, whether radical liberal or Marxist, depends to a great extent on whether the Church has been aligned with or opposed to the mobilisation of national feeling and the nation-state. Religion and ethnicity either divide the sacred between them, or the sanctity of faith and nation are partially merged. So one needs to understand both how the sacred may occupy rival poles, and how it may partially migrate to occupy a new national sacred space. One also needs to be cautious about projections concerning the demise of sacred nationalism or the sacred nation-state. Its death could well be exaggerated. Sacred nationalism is palpably alive in Croatia, and the sacred nation-state in France.
Since parts of northern Europe are post-Protestant (in spite of the fact that even in secular Britain 72% identify themselves as Christian) one has also to notice the growth of largely unorganised subjective spiritualities, stressing human potential, sacralising the individual, and creating a kind of Puritanism based not on self-control, but on passionate judgements about pure air, racism, and green issues. If there is a unifying dimension connecting changes in the Church, charismatic movements, and the subjective ‘self-religions’, it is the world of the Spirit, Holy or otherwise. Joachim of Fiore would not have been surprised at the arrival of his Third Age of the Holy Spirit.
Some patterns of
religion in Europe
In what follows I sketch some patterns of religion in Europe which can be mentally superimposed like a set of transparencies. My aim is to suggest what these patterns mean with regard to the integration and fragmentation of Europe, and I should say that they rest upon two premises. The first is that Christianity embodies a dialectic of the religious and the secular which more easily generates secular mutations of faith than straightforward replacements and displacements. The second is that religion should not be regarded as a separate channel of culture but as a distinctive current mingling in the mainstream, sometimes with the flow, sometimes against. These two premises taken in tandem mean that religious forms and moulds are often reflected in secular analogues. The Scandinavian symbiosis of Lutheranism and Social Democracy is a pre-eminent case.
Part of the aim of this essay is to give additional depth to those standard accounts of religiosity which rely on comparative statistics about belief and practice. Counting matters but one needs some account of religion as a mode of social consciousness and identity rooted in history and geography, time and place. Christianity can be viewed as a flexible repertoire of images and gestures, and as a code simultaneously replicating itself and adjusting to social cues and circumstances.
It is better to proceed with concrete illustrations of the different patterns than continue setting out programmatic abstractions. One pattern of changing relations between the religious and the secular can be read at the centre of every European city, though most dramatically so in regional and national capitals. In the Byzantine tradition divine and human sovereignty are placed in intimate juxtaposition at the sacred heart of the city whereas in a western renaissance city like Florence we see the incipient separation of powers in the two distinct spaces of Cathedral and Signoria.
Rome and Paris are ancient cities where a relatively recent history of conflict between religious and secular has been realised in rival architectural emplacements. In Rome St. Peter’ s is faced off by the vast Victor Emmanuel Monument, though eventually the Via della Conciliazione had to be constructed to bring Vatican city and the national capital back into contact again. In Paris Notre Dame and the Sacré Coeur represent one kind of sacred centre, where France is the eldest daughter of the Church, while the Panthéon and the Place de la Bastille represent sacred centres where France is the eldest daughter of the revolution.
This paradigmatic urban ecology, with its rival versions of the sacred, signals two centuries of warfare between religion and progress, Church and state, faith and liberal nationalism, clericalism and anti-clericalism, Catholic universality and Enlightenment universality. It provided a model of conflict, and of the attempted supercession of one sacred by another, which was disseminated from Paris to the intelligentsias of Europe and Latin America. The governing concept, enshrined in Paris, and taken for granted in France, was and remains laicité.
However, quite different notions are enshrined (and just as much taken for granted) elsewhere. In Germany, Scandinavia, England and Scotland, piety and enlightenment lived to some extent in partnership, partly because the Church was subordinate to the state, and overlapped the middle and ruling classes. So, in Berlin and Helsinki the churches were integrated into a profile which included university, arts and administration within a classical format conveying the power of enlightened absolutism. In Helsinki, Oslo and Stockholm the old centres were later complemented by monuments to Social Democracy and civic consciousness. The modest enlightenment in England and Scotland integrated modest classical churches into civic squares and bequeathed a model of coexistence to North America which has become the main alternative to the model of warfare and supercession emanating from France.
Clearly, some of the different models of the religious and the secular can be read in the city, literally at a glance. On the one hand Europe is a unity by virtue of the universality of the basic distinction between religious and secular, and the deposit of sacred buildings from Syracuse to Trondheim and Dublin to Sofia, while on the other it is a diversity by virtue of the different ways the distinction is realised.
This mapping in terms of urban sacred ecology can be supplemented by thinking in terms of architectural styles in a way already hinted at in the references to the classicism of enlightened absolutism in parts of Europe (Charles III, Joseph II, Catherine the Great), and the more modest bourgeois classicism of the Anglo-American tradition. Europe could be looked at, again quite literally, in terms of zones of Counter-Reformation Baroque, the classicism of Enlightened absolutism, and the more modest, domestic and bourgeois tradition located in Amsterdam, London and Boston, New England. These three civic cultures, each rooted in Protestantism, between them pioneered a model of (relative) pluralism, tolerance, federalism and philosemitism. They reduced the height and scale of human and divine sovereignty and emptied out some of the potency of the sacred concentrated at the heart of the city. Perhaps that weakening of the sacred centre began when the sacred heart of Catholic Amsterdam was forcibly sequestered and turned over to the university. That has to be regarded as a major mutation because it shifted the locale of protected space to university (and eventually art gallery and concert hall) conceived as a new kind of Church. Whether or not that stands up in the academic history of sacred representation, it remains the case that the four cities of Amsterdam, Edinburgh, London and Boston have been historically linked since the later seventeenth century by shared forms of politics, economy and religion, as well as by naval power and global trading empires. They also represent one major linkage and continuity between Europe and North America, just as France represents another. In view of such examples it is not so easy to formulate principles that unequivocally distinguish Europe from the U.S.A. The U.S.A. is not distinguishable as ‘the Other’.
This mapping of the connection between the northwestern peripheries of Europe and the northeastern peripheries of America is really just an extension of the initial map based on such models as Rome and Paris, Byzantium and Florence, and it is one that would reach its term with the sacred field of Washington D.C. representing the final separation of church and state expressed in purely classical terms. But a second mapping or transparency can be devised, based on the way the historic religious moulds of European societies are mirrored in characteristic secular mutations and transpositions.
For example, the rigorous state monopoly exercised by the Catholic Church in France after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 was transposed into the monopoly eventually exercised during the Third Republic by the omnicompetent secular state. Just as for the Catholic Church error had no rights, so for the sacred Republic Catholic error had no right to acknowledgement in the public realm. The continuation of the French tradition of secular monopoly is perhaps illustrated in recent laws restricting the operation of sects and cults.
Another example of secular mutation is the way the inclusive scope of Lutheran monopoly in Scandinavia has been fused with and replicated by the inclusiveness of Social Democracy and the welfare state. Again, in Germany, Holland and Switzerland religious pluralism is mirrored in the federal character of the state. In England the attempt of the Reformed Anglican Church to accommodate and ‘comprehend’ an inclusive middle, and the eventual evolution of that into an accepted rivalry of church-state establishment with religious non-conformity, became mirrored in the flexibility of the political system and its concept of loyal opposition.
Here another American comparison is useful. England (and Scotland and Ulster) generated a style of evangelical Protestantism based on heartwork which in the U.S.A. became a universal devotion to individual sincerity. However, the retention of an Anglican religious establishment meant that England also acted as a hinge turning in one direction towards American inwardness, while in the opposite direction turning towards Scandinavian formality. If these distinctions seem rather marginal to European integration I hope to illustrate how such cultural characteristics belong among others which separate the Anglosphere from the European continent as well as linking England to the cautious attitude of Scandinavia towards European involvement. For a wide variety of cultural reasons the national traditions of Britain and Scandinavia understand each other while both regarding the mainland of Europe with suspicious caution.
Since the mapping so far has focussed to a considerable extent on peripheries and on secular translations, I need now to sketch two supplementary maps, the first identifying the historic European centre for which Britain and Scandinavia are peripheries, and the second tracing the heartlands of secularity and secularism; secularity I treat as a condition and secularism as an ideology.
The historic centre of the West is arguably in Charlemagne’s Middle Kingdom and in the bands of territory on either side of Aachen/Aix-la-chapelle. Looking back even further historically, this is the point where Latinity encountered the German tribes (as Trent was also much later!), and looking forward it gave birth to Schuman and Adenauer, who with Monnet became the architects of the Franco-German compact after the Second World War. With only a modest extension it takes in Frankfurt, the old imperial capital and the city which hosted the first assembly of liberal Germany and which is now a global financial capital. This heartland makes more sense than Rome, since Rome is really the Centre of the Mediterranean, north and south, and one which has lost its southern littoral to Islam.
This frontier area, broadly understood, is one of mixed religion and it contains the three key cities of Brussels, Strasbourg and Geneva. Each is symbolically close to the linguistic frontier which makes them appropriate sites for international co-ordination and co-operation. The capital of Germany is no longer situated in the frontier area at gemütlich Catholic Bonn but in post-Protestant Berlin. So the heartland of western Europe redivivus is neither in post-Protestant Berlin nor post-Catholic Paris but in between.
Berlin and Paris are the centres respectively of European secularity and European secularism. Increasingly the new Berlin looks like the capital of the whole northern plain, and of a secular landscape stretching from Birmingham to Tallinn. The epicentres of secularity lie in former East Germany and the Czech Republic, in spite of the extraordinary role played by the Lutheran churches of East Germany in the revolution of 1989. The examples of East Germany and Estonia, and to a lesser extent Latvia, suggest that Lutheranism is less able to resist secular persecution in the way Catholicism did in Lithuania and Poland. The crucial point to notice, however, is that a great deal hinges on whether Catholicism or Catholic political powers were hostile to the birth of a modern nation-state: in France and in Czech lands, Catholicism was perceived as hostile, in Poland, Lithuania, Croatia and Slovakia the situation was quite the reverse, while in Hungary the situation was mixed, given the strong connection between the birth of the nation and the Protestant east of the country around Debrecen.
The countries of east-central and eastern Europe are all, to this or that extent characterised by ethnoreligiosity, due to a long history of alien domination by Ottomans, or Austrians, or Russians - either Orthodox or communist. Some of the variations in religiosity are not entirely explicable, when one compares, for example, the remarkably vital Orthodoxy of Romania and the relatively secular condition of Bulgaria, unless the divisions in Bulgarian Orthodoxy and poor negotiation with the government after the war were serious factors. Certainly Romania, as a country constructing itself both in Latin and orthodox terms, has a very distinctive national identity nourished by the Orthodox Church.
Serbia is interesting because when at the centre of Yugoslavia under Tito it was highly secularised, yet as the federated state went into dissolution it recovered a strong sense of religious identity, particularly in relation to Kosovo. The recovery in Serbia parallels the religious recovery in Russia after the break-up of the Soviet empire, and in both cases the framework of Church-state partnership was renewed with perhaps only a minority of the population much engaged by active religion, and a mélange of magical ideas alive and well in the population at large. Revivals also occurred in those parts of the western Ukraine historically linked to Poland and Lithuania. However, the vitality of ethnoreligion throughout eastern Europe has brought about no nostalgia for the restoration of ecclesiastical influence over law and personal conduct. The Polish episcopate tried and failed.
Greece requires some separate comment because it is at the opposite end of the spectrum from the secularism of France and yet remains the historic icon of western democracy and rationality. Just how far the Church is a powerful presence in the public realm, and Orthodoxy co-extensive with citizenship and Greek identity, is illustrated by the fierce controversy over whether the bearer’s religion should be noted on the Greek passport. The Greek case also illustrates the vigorous and firm profile of religion brought about by being at a border with Islam in Turkey, by the ethnic cleansings on both sides of the Islamic-Christian border, and by a global diaspora on a scale similar to the diaspora of the Armenians and the Irish.
The map of ethnoreligion in eastern Europe overlaps the map of embedded folk religion throughout the littoral of the northern Mediterranean, which is not necessarily marked by conscientious religious practice of a formal kind, but by customs, pilgrimages and festivals. As in much of eastern Europe and Russia a confused mixture of magic and paganism, and of ancient and modern notions, lies quite close to the surface.
This kind of religion is rather different from the conscious and socially aware Catholicism that exists further north, especially in countries where practising Catholics are a minority, or where Catholicism itself is only locally the dominant religion. Catholicism in Sicily or south of Ancona is not like Catholicism in either France or Holland. On the other hand, what I have called embedded religion is not only found on the Mediterranean littoral, but in the Alps and various extensions like the Veneto, and in the mountains of the Massif Centrale, of northern Portugal, Catalonia and north eastern Spain. There is a further extension here related to various micro-nationalisms that may or may not be shaped by geographical niches like mountains or peninsulas. Galicia, Aragon, the Basque country, parts of Catalonia, parts of the Pyrenees, are often regions of quasi-uniformity with respect to Catholic consciousness in spite of the steep decline of church-going in the Iberian peninsula as a whole. Britanny and Bavaria have been similar areas of intense Catholic consciousness further to the north even though they have also experienced a marked decline in official practice, and Catholic Ireland may well belong in ‘the south’ rather than in the northwest. A similar folk Protestantism exists in niches in northern Europe: the Western Isles in Scotland, and in Jutland, and parts of Norway.
Speculating a little on these regional Catholicisms (often but not always in geographical niches such as highlands, peninsulas and islands) they probably express a resistance to ‘the centre’, whether the centre is in Madrid or in Paris, though in the case of Italy there are various centres with Rome virtually in the south and Milan looking northward across the Alps. That fragmentation is part of the “problem” of Italy: it is nearly all elongated peninsula.
A combination of embedded Catholicism and resistance to “the centre” gives rise to a distinctive political colouring (southern Italy, Bavaria) and is associated with great pilgrimage centres; Fatima, Santiago, Zaragoza, Montserrat, Rocamadour, Lourdes, Lisieux, the Vierzehnheiligen, Einsiedeln and Medjugorje. Where the Virgin chooses to appear, and when, is not entirely accidental.
The mapping offered so far has covered embedded religion or ethno-religion or some combination, “conscientious” minority Catholicism and conscientious minority Protestantism, the great centres of northern secularity and French secularism, and it has sketched some special characteristics of the semi-detached northern and northeastern peripheries. What remains now is to fill in some borderlands, enquiring whether the borders are quiet and quiescent or lively and dangerous. Broadly it is all quiet along the old border of the Reformation, except in Ulster: Armagh with its two cathedrals still marks a dangerous transition. As has already been noted, Strasbourg and Alsace have been converted from borderlands into centres of co-operation.
However, the old West-East border, at least as you go south and east is still alive with dangerous tensions. Thus although Breslau/Wrocław and Pressburg/Bratislava/Poszony are seemingly settled borders, Timisoara, and even more so Sarajevo and Skopje, are not. This is precisely the region of the most intense ethnoreligiosity, characterised by dangerous mixtures of majorities and minorities, with consequent danger of ethnic cleansing, for example, the fate of the historic “seven cities”, of German settlement in Romania, and the creation of ghettos such as now exist in Sarajevo and Mostar. The Hungarians of Transylvania and of areas more isolated and deeper into Romania, feel under pressure, whether they are Catholic or Protestant, and it is significant that the Romanian revolution of December 1989 was sparked off by a Hungarian Protestant pastor in Timisoara. In the whole of this area church leaders may also be political leaders, as Stepinac, Tiso and Makarios were in the mid-twentieth century. Indeed, their representative role needs to be contrasted with the role of church leaders in “the West”. These western leaders have mostly ceased to speak for ethnic constituencies and are rather the spokesmen of a liberal middle class within a more conservative active Church constituency.
However, it is worth suggesting where other distinctive constituencies may lie even if not on the strictly political map and not even overtly present on the ecclesiastical map. Communities can, after all, form around seas, like the Lutheran Baltic and the Celtic Irish Sea. The rise of Celticism around and far beyond the Irish sea, in new spiritualities (or old spirits in Irish pubs) is phenomenal. It has affinities with other ‘constructed’ revivals, not only of earlier Christianities, but of pagan roots. In the case of the Irish Sea it is surrounded by highlands, islands and peninsulas with sacred associations, such as Iona, St. Patrick’ s Mountain and St. Davids, and these harbour both an ancient Christianity and enclaves for modern spiritual travellers of many kinds. There are links here with folklore and mythological revivals all over the continent, and associated musics.
This area of spirituality is difficult to chart not only because it is so varied, but because it insists on fragmentation and resists institutions as such. However, I would like to sketch in a mutation of Protestant and post-Protestant spirituality which does to some extent still respect the old border of the Reformation. Its origins lie in the Protestant pursuit of inwardness and in the Protestant desire to internalise the rules, with the result that rules are taken seriously and to heart. In its most developed form this leads to the secular religion of sincerity or authenticity, in particular in the USA. However, sincerity and inner seriousness about rules leads to an inability to cope with the necessary negotiated compromises, and perhaps the understood corruptions of politics, and so to an apolitical cynicism about government. What was once a classically Protestant objection to a Catholic theoretical acceptance of rules combined with an understood evasion of them in practice, has become an alienation from society as such with strongly religious resonances. Of course, this classically (and stereotypically) Protestant objection is still present in Anglo-Saxon attitudes towards the EU, and to French, Belgian and Italian politics.
One version of a looser, more spontaneous spirituality retains links with disciplined life-styles within a vigorous charismatic Christianity, but the multitudinous non-institutional forms defy mapping, except perhaps through the proliferation of holistic therapies and green politics. Concerns over pollution and demands for pure air and pure food and political correctness are a version of Puritanism that has relaxed personal responsibility, hard work and self-discipline in favour of complaints about spoliation, war, desecration, and the depredations of global capitalism and misapplied science.
The fundamental shift, present both in the new spiritualities and the shifting psychological landscape within the churches, is (as a very insightful study of Kendal, Cumbria shows) toward subjectivisation. Put dramatically, Protestantism destroys its capacity to reproduce and to retain its vital memory, not because of some problem with the scientific world-view or rationalisation, but by going completely inward, personal and inarticulate. The churches have mostly incorporated this in the USA whereas in Europe they mostly have not. Subjectivity militates against obedience, group discipline and personal obligation, as well as rejecting authority, in particular patriarchy, religious or otherwise. It therefore overflows into a feminine or feminist sense of “participation” in the rhythms of the natural world. Nature, human or physical, is good, but sin and evil, sacrifice and redemption difficult to comprehend even though evil is readily identified as malignantly present in the institutional and official social order. If one were to identify this complex of spiritualities negatively it would be as part of the religious hedonism and search for “goods” of all kinds which has always underlain the more ascetic and indeed Puritanical expressions of both Catholic and Protestant faith. Protestantism has no monopoly of Puritanism, as versions of Irish and Spanish spirituality indicate.
The migration of mostly non-Christian populations is not a focus of this essay except to underline the gulf that separates the Muslim faith in particular from the subjective spiritualities just outlined. In parenthesis Britain is unusual here, partly because some of the migration into Britain comes from the Christian Caribbean and Christian sub-Saharan Africa, but because migration also comes from global populations not adjacent south and east of the European continent.
The characteristics of Muslim migrant population are antithetical to the “advanced” religiosity of much of Europe to the point where assimilation is perceived as death. Muslim communities hare learnt how to use a rhetoric of freedom, rights, inclusivity and multiculturalism, while for the most part – whatever their internal fragmentation - remaining integral, organic, monocultural and patriarchal, as well as stirred to some extent by global radical lslam. The relative lack of the religious/secular distinction within Islam has serious consequences. Whether or not there is accelerating tension along this particular internal border depends on various factors, such as the size, location and the ethnic and class character of the migrant community. Of course, in this context Turkey as a nation-state seeks a space for neutral civility, rather than the religiosity of which it has more than enough at home.
That sheer numbers should play a crucial role is obviously a major anxiety with respect to inter-religious tensions and social harmony in general. The official leaderships of the churches mostly express the inclusive sentiments often characteristic of the educated middle classes, while being caught on the classic liberal dilemma as to how far one should include the exclusive. It remains to be seen whether Muslim assimilation will follow the path of Jewish assimilation (bracketing for a moment the horrors of the holocaust) but there are reasons to doubt it. Nor can one assume the tolerance of even the most multicultural of European societies, as the recent Dutch experience indicates. Even Holland finds it contains a border.
Summary and
Reflection
In this essay so far I have not gone through the standard procedure of recounting figures of variations in belief, practice and religious self-identification, or assessed such indices with regard to secularisation. The object has been rather to look at kinds of religiosity and kinds of secularity, or of principled secularism, in the historic French and Russian style, as these might bear on the integration or fragmentation of Europe.
So far as the figures go what one needs to know is as follows. First that perhaps between one fifth and one third of the population has some active engagement with religious practice, depending on the criteria employed, within a range between the former East Germany, low on both belief and practice, and countries like Ireland, Poland, Greece, Romania and Malta, high on all counts. That list in itself reminds us that Catholicism accounts for a much higher proportion of active, church-related religion than would be consistent with the size of “Catholic” populations.
However, there is an undeniable secularising process affecting the capacity of churches to reproduce themselves and their historical memory in the younger generations. This process includes pre-emptive strikes by personnel in the key educational and welfare agencies under religious aegis in favour of secular criteria, as well as the effects of the media. Throughout western Europe the secularising process has accelerated since the sixties, following a post-war plateau, and that has been evident above all in the mainstream churches. The usual caveats have to be made, of course: the acceptance of Christian identity, of God, of prayer, of Christian moral maxims, and of “spirituality”. Protestant Scandinavia ranks low on practice but high with respect to confirmation and, in many areas, it nurtures what is known as “personal” religion. Britain resembles Scandinavia in terms of indices of practice, yet (in Grace Davie’s formulation) Britons believe without belonging while Scandinavians belong without believing. Nearly three out of four Britons describe themselves in a census as Christian, and three out of a hundred as Muslim, even though religious practice in Birmingham is probably more Muslim than anything else, with Catholicism maybe ranking second.
The varied profiles could be amplified but it is only the broad profile that matters. Clearly, western Europe has undergone a different experience from eastern Europe, but secularising tendencies exist even in Poland and Greece. Equally clearly the decline in church-related religious practice is paralleled by a decline in large-scale voluntary activity as such, including political activity, which is sometimes described as a deterioration in social capital, even though partly offset, as the Kendal study suggests, by an increase in the activity of small, intimate groups for self-help, spiritual and otherwise (e.g. Families Anonymous) and mutual support.
How does all the background sketched in so far bear on questions relating to European integration and fragmentation, cultural similarity and cultural variety? To begin with, questions about the role of the religious sphere with respect to European integration are problematic, since one would not put the question in the same way regarding the role of politics, because we all understand that politics is inherently about negotiated differences as well as about solidarities. The question is also slightly paradoxical in that one would not pose it were there an implicit consensus. The question suggests there is a problem, and a serious one.
One way of stating the problem is to draw attention to the difference between French laicité and its principled secularism, as contrasted with Anglo-Germanic secularity, and the ethno-religiosity of much of eastern Europe where churches or religions may be surrogates for nations. There are parallel differences between an actively chosen personal religion on the Protestant model, and embedded religion on the older and traditional Orthodox and Catholic model. Again, the religiosity of activist and socially concerned Christianity represented by many church leaderships in western Europe, particularly northwestern Europe, differs greatly from religion as cultural resistance and from the leadership that goes with it. An Anglican Archbishop is not remotely like such figures as Archbishops Makarios or Stepinac, or Tiso in Slovakia, or the leadership of the Hungarian minority in Romania - or Ghamsakurdia in Georgia! In terms of spirituality and ‘sobornost’ Christians in the West reach out to the Catholic and Orthodox world but in terms of ethno-religiosity, exclusive claims, and the ethno-politics of religion they abhor it. (Interestingly, it is that eastern world, and especially perhaps Poland, now seeking integration in Europe, which most rejects the secularist ideology of France and Russia, and identifies its liberation with the U.S.A. and the Anglosphere. After all, there are perhaps nearly as many Poles and Greeks in Chicago, as there are in Warsaw and Athens.)
Perhaps this is the point at which to bring out some characteristics of Christian leaderships in western Europe with regard to European integration. Although such leaderships retain some representative role with respect to religion and nation, more particular where religion relates to a micro-nationalism, they are likely to be culturally quite close to the secular middle class in modes of expression, attitudes and agenda. That means they are more liberal, ecumenical and European than the rank and file active Christian constituency, let alone the average dormant Christian identity in the population at large. The point was aptly put in the United Sates by whoever it was joked that the divide between Republican and Democrat in the American Episcopal Church ran along the altar rail.
There is a wider issue lurking here brought about by important ethical issues, typically as raised by the advances in the life sciences. In such matters the views of bishops, treated by media as the views of “the Church” according to traditional Catholic conceptions, are not the same as educated lay views . There is a Church view articulated by “churchmen” and there are any number of informed lay viewpoints held by Christians. So the question is not simply what “the Church” says or what the Pope pronounces. lndeed, all the evidence suggests that for Catholic identity the Pope is a charismatic totem rather than a source of authority on life-styles, or someone who can prescribe what is appropriate for family organisation and sexual behaviour. In the west Church leaderships as such have this totemic quality without exercising what might be called moral jurisdiction, which is an area where they tend to limp painfully behind what lay Christians already have decided to do in practice. The low birth-rate of Italy is the most dramatic index of that, and even in Poland and Ireland strong Catholic identity does not imply recognition of ecclesiastical authority or a desire for its embodiment in secular law. Identity is not obedience. Religious identity may and does seek recognition in the public realm with respect to belief in God and broadly Christian behaviour, but it is decreasingly “patriarchal” in its attitude to ecclesiastical moral authority, and it looks less than was once the case to exemplary figures and models. Some turn to the Bible or the Church for secure guidance, but most do not. Religious conservatism and secularity therefore increase together.
That in turn is linked to a more general point about Christian morality and secular morality. Christianity is most widely understood as care for neighbour, as reverence for life and as charitable attitudes and endeavours, and in that respect overlaps ordinary secular precepts. However, Christian language concerning moral obligation is expressed in terms of story and image and so has greater existential impact than abstract civic principles. There is a further divide here which relates to what the John Paul the Second has describes as a “culture of narcissism” and it has something to do with the subjective spiritualities (or “self-religions”) already touched on. It relates also to the shift from ethical attitudes expressed in terms of duty and obligation to criteria of happiness, utility, freedom and self-fulfilment. In its extreme form freedom expresses itself as limitless permission to transgress and shock. However, this limitless permission is in no way the final advent of human autonomy but rather the replacement of older exemplars of endeavour and responsibility by peer-group pressure and the often damaging examples provided by the life-styles of ‘celebrities’.
What is sometimes referred to as consumer hedonism lies behind the American idea of religious preference and to that extent religion itself is chosen rather than inherited. Once again the difference between Protestant Europe and Islam is maximal. One is talking about different kinds of society, let alone about different varieties of religion.
Such realities pose particular problems for the dominant liberalism of western societies, more particularly for the dominant liberal elites, Christian or secular, since it is they who hold most firmly that one should respect “the other” (and indeed feel nostalgia for Catholic, Orthodox, and even Islamic communal integrity), and yet most firmly condemn the authoritative deployment of scripture or tradition to inhibit freedom, to limit choice and to maintain patriarchal authority and images of God. The issue could be summarised by asking whether agreement that all the “children of Abraham” believe in one God is the same as agreeing that all believe in the same God. No doubt the polite and politic fiction “Judaeo-Christianity” serves its purpose in observing serious differences in angle of vision, however closely affiliated Christianity may be to Judaism. But just how far such ecumenical concepts can be extended to Islam is a moot point, more especially because of the difficulty Islam has in recognising the autonomy of the secular in relation to the religious when it comes to law and the boundaries of social belonging. Conscientious choice in religious matters is inadequately developed. This is an area where contemporary liberals are no more inclined to grant rights to egregious error than Catholics were to concede such rights in the past.
GAP
At this point one comes to issues that trespass awkwardly beyond the remit of sociology. Such issues turn around the specificity and particularity of religious forms of association and language. They are brought out most clearly with respect to the role churches often play, locally and nationally, as foci of communal grief and rejoicing, as for example at the death of Princess Diana and the sinking of the Estonia. Here religious solidarity, the commonalities of sacred space, and the depth and range of religious language, take over where secular talk and utilitarian venues have little or nothing to offer.
Religious association has traditionally been expressed through communities of obedience, discipline (internal and external) and sacrifice, based on cumulative reference to deposits of tradition and/or canonical scripture. That is still a crucial aspect of the specific difference exemplified in most forms of contemporary European religion. Religious language also exemplifies difference through being rooted in narratives bearing images of transformation and deformation, transcendence and immanence. It points “beyond” in a vertical as well as a horizontal direction: it aspires, and its grammatical tense is not only the past but the perfect in the future. It conveys solidarity in hope rather than facilitating negotiation over rival interests, as political language does. Of course, it may be that religious hope and aspiration loses some degree of purchase as the consumer society offers an interim satiation of human wants, except that satiation is not satisfaction.
“European” principles, such as the dignity of the individual, human rights, equality, solidarity, the primordiality of reason, and the rule of law, function at a different level of abstraction from that of religious language, and to an important extent cover a different spectrum of concerns. There are, indeed, mediating concepts, like subsidiarity or the autonomy of the secular, which can be fed into secular discourse; and governing concepts like liberty, equality and fraternity can be viewed as translations of St. Paul respecting the unity and equality of humankind in Christ. But religious language is embedded differently and in a different range of concerns. That human beings are made in the image of God can be translated into such terms as “All men are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights”. But the priority of faith, hope and love, above all love, cannot be translated in civic and constitutional terms. Such priorities are laid on human beings by religious commitment in a manner which cannot be articulated as constitutive of the state or as a matter of policy in the public realm. No more can incarnation and redemption be reduced to secular discourse, or churches converted into art galleries and concert halls or into civic spaces, without remainder. Such space is there not for particular social functions but for the specifically human, and for griefs and joys unmet and unconsidered by other kinds of meeting place. How you treat that specificity and acknowledge it as a presence in the public realm is partly a matter of whether you view religion as archaic survival condemned by social evolution to continuous erosion, or as a constitutive language as primordial in its way as reason, and with its own coherence and continuing relevance. Beyond that basically philosophical divide, the question is how far and in what manner you do or do not explicitly acknowledge the religious presence. Empirically it is there: but is it a private or a public fact? Historically, after all, without the prior existence of Christianity, in successive mutations of Reform, Humanism and Enlightenment, the „West” and Europe are little more than geographical expressions, or congeries of economic convenience.
NB
The above is a think-piece not needing academic reference except in its citation of the Kendal, Cumbria, study by Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead with Benjamin Seel, Bronislaw Szersynski and Karin Tusting, entitled Bringing the Sacred to Life, Oxford: Blackwell 2004. I have also drawn on Grace Davie Religion in Britain since 1945: Believing without Belonging, Oxford: Blackwell, 1994, Religion in Modern Europe: a memory Mutates, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000 and Europe: the Exceptional Case, London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2002. There is further empirical detail in Andrew Greeley Religion in Modern Europe at the End of the Second Millennium London: Transaction 2003.
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