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 Mon Dec 13, 2004 12:34 am Secular Europe, Religious America: A Report |
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Brian C Anderson. Public Interest. Washington: Spring 2004., Iss. 155; pg. 143, 16 pgs
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Subjects: Secularism, Religion & politics, International relations-US, Social conditions & trends
Classification Codes 9190 United States, 9175 Western Europe, 1220 Social trends & culture
Locations: United States, US, Europe
Author(s): Brian C Anderson
Document types: Feature
Publication title: Public Interest. Washington: Spring 2004. , Iss. 155; pg. 143, 16 pgs
Source type: Periodical
ISSN/ISBN: 00333557
ProQuest document ID: 617975051
Text Word Count 4906
Document URL: http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?RQT=309&VInst=PROD&VName=PQD&VType=PQD&sid=6&index=7&SrchMode=1&Fmt=3&did=000000617975051&clientId=18395
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Abstract (Document Summary)
Part of a special issue on religion in the United States. The importance of the tensions between America and Europe within the democratic world should not be overstated but are nonetheless significant. America and the countries of "old" Western Europe have been increasingly at odds since the end of the cold war, and this is evident to even casual observers in the rampant anti-Americanism on the continent. There is a variety of explanations for the increasing rift, but one of the most significant sources of tension and lack of mutual understanding is America's religiosity and Europe's lack of it. In the coming years, the split between a religious America and a secular Europe is likely to widen, and this means unpredictable consequences for the democratic world as a whole. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]
Full Text (4906 words)
Copyright National Affairs, Inc. Spring 2004
AMERICA and Europe, or at least the nations of "old" western Europe, have been increasingly at odds since the end of the Cold War. Even a casual observer can see this in the rampant anti-Americanism on the continent. The hostility manifests itself with particular force among elites: The European Union deputy and French political scientist Olivier Duhamel, to take just one example, recently described the United States as a "degenerate" democracy-an irrational nation and a threat to global order. A recent poll ranked the American "hyperpower" second only to Israel as the greatest danger to world peace. Political relations between the United States and Europe have become so chilly that France and Germany openly worked to undercut their long-time ally in the run up to war in Iraq.
One should not overstate the importance of these tensions within the democratic world. Nobody is predicting that Belgium and the United States will be firing missiles at each other any time soon, or ever. But as Robert Kagan has observed, it sometimes seems nowadays as if Americans and Europeans live on different planets. There are a variety of explanations for the widening rift, among them the end of the Cold War, which has deprived the Western democracies of a powerful common enemy against which to unify; contrasting views of the roles of national sovereignty and of international institutions; use of the death penalty in the United States; and anger over the Bush administration's decision to use military force to prosecute the global struggle against Islamist terror. One of the most significant sources of tension and lack of mutual understanding between America and Europe, however, is religion-or better, America's religiosity and Europe's lack of it.
A post-Christian Europe
Europe is becoming a very secular place. As the general secretary of the United Reform Church in Britain put it, "In western Europe, we are hanging on by our fingernails." In truth, he says, "Europe is no longer Christian." When French political theorist Marcel Gauchet writes of recent European history as "characterized by the collapse of what remained of the religious pillars of heteronomy and the triumph of the metaphysical principle of human independence," he is not indulging in hyperbole.
Numbers drawn from the long-term European Values Study (EVS) and other research underscore the degree to which Europe has abandoned its Christian heritage. For one thing, the pews of Europe's churches are often empty. In France, only one in twenty people now attends a religious service every week, and the demographic skews to the aged. Only 15 percent of Italians attend weekly while roughly 30 percent of Germans still go to church at least once a month. Indifference is widespread. A mere 21 percent of Europeans hold religion to be "very important." In France, arguably the most secular of Europe's nations outside of the formerly Eutheran countries of northern Europe, the percentage is lower still, at slightly over 10 percent. As Cardinal Dionigi Tettamanzi, archbishop of Milan, lamented in the New York Times in October, "The parishes tell me that there are children who don't know how to make the sign of the cross." Only Europe's growing Muslim population seems to exhibit any religious fervor.
True, few Europeans proclaim outright atheism, and a majority still call themselves Christians. But how many are Christian in anything but a nominal sense? Not only do Europeans not go to church very often; only about 40 percent believe in heaven and only half that percentage in hell. The concept of sin is vanishing from the European mind. just 57 percent of Spaniards, 55 percent of Germans, 40 percent of French people, and approximately 30 percent of Swedes now believe in the existence of sin.
Post-Christian Europe has unsurprisingly sunken progressively deeper into moral relativism. Assessing the EVS's findings, Romir, a Russian public opinion and market research group, notes that in most European countries, "Many people believe that there are no absolutely unambiguous rules on what is good and evil that apply to everyone, irrespective of the circumstances." The EVS also shows that a more radical view-that good and evil depend entirely on cultural and historical circumstances-is ever more widespread across the continent, with only Poland and Malta resisting the trend. "Moral relativism would therefore appear to be predominant in Europe," Romir declares. This holds particularly true of sexual and bioethical concerns. Only when it comes to tax evasion and bribery do Europeans retain a relatively straightforward, "old-fashioned" sense of right and wrong.
Empty pews, aging believers, indifference-almost everything about western Europe's religious life conveys the sense of exhaustion and defeat. Almost all of the trend lines have moved in the direction that Gauchet suggests, away from any strong sense of religious identification and toward greater individualism and secularism. The European Union's recent refusal to include any reference to Europe's Christian heritage in its proposed constitution, despite the protests of the Vatican and various European Christian groups, is historically absurd, given Christianity's significant contribution to the development of the idea of human rights. That said, this decision hardly came as a surprise.
Religious America
Looking to the United States, a very different religious scene appears-one not of desiccation but of robust faith communities and great spiritual thirst. Upward of 60 percent of Americans (nearly thrice the European percentage) claim that "religion plays a very important role" in their lives. More than 80 percent of Americans (90 percent in some surveys) profess belief in God.
America boasts countless houses of worship. U.S. News & World Report recently noted that there are "more churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques per capita in the United States than in any other nation on Earth: one for about every 865 people." And those houses overflow with worshipers. A full 22 percent of America's 159 million Christians (three-fourths of the adult population) say they attend religious services more than once a week, and almost three quarters of Christians attend at least once or twice a month. "More people in the United States attend religious services on any given weekend than watch football-in all the stadiums, on high school football fields, college campuses, and all the television sets of the nation put together," says Catholic theologian Michael Novak.
Many cable and satellite television and radio stations offer religious programming around the clock. Most bookstores feature well-stocked religion sections, and many of the books shelved there sell briskly, some even becoming best-sellers. Public figures from presidents to basketball stars openly thank God for granting them spiritual strength or success.
America also appears in some ways to be getting more religious, not less. The Pew Research Center found that the number of Americans who "agree strongly" with three fundamental tenets of faith-belief in God, in judgment Day, and in the importance of prayer-has risen by as much as ten points over the last four decades. Fifteen years ago, the Economist points out, two-fifths of American Protestants described themselves as "born again"-signaling a strong embrace of Christ as personal savior. The percentage has climbed to more than half. Born-again Christians now make up 39 percent of America's adult population. Further, four out of five Americans say they have "experienced God's presence or a spiritual force," and 46 percent maintain it happens to them often. "People are reaching out in all directions in their attempt to escape from the seen world to the unseen world," pollster George Gallup, Jr., tells U.S. News. "There is a deep desire for spiritual moorings-a hunger for God."
Of course, secularizing forces do exist in the United States. America's highly educated, often left-leaning elites are every bit as secular as the most disenchanted Europeans. As the sociologist Peter Berger says of this elite: "Its members are relatively thin on the ground," but they control "the institutions that provide the 'official' definitions of reality, notably the education system, the media of mass communication, and the higher reaches of the legal system." These elites have wrought secularizing changes in law and culture over the last several decades-using the courts to drive creche displays from public property and to end prayer or religious instruction of any kind in public schools, for example. However, they have yet to persuade the majority of Americans to embrace a secular worldview themselves.
Europe's point of departure
How are we to explain this divergence in religiosity within the liberal democratic universe? One thing that cannot help us is the "secularization theory" once popular among sociologists. It holds, in Berger's words, that "modernization necessarily leads to a decline of religion, both in society and in the minds of individuals." This theory now seems suspect, as Berger, a former proponent, acknowledges. If modernity inevitably brings secularism, a "disenchantment of the world," then how is it that the United States-the modern nation par excellence-is so religious? Nor is secularization increasing in modernizing areas of the world, from Latin America to the Middle East, Berger points out. Europe today seems more the exception than the rule when it comes to religious belief.
A more plausible explanation points to the very dissimilar histories of how democracy arrived in America and in Europe. The European democratic tradition, the model for which originated in the French Revolution, has been hostile to religion from its inception, and religion, especially the Catholic church, had until recently been hostile to it in return. In America, however, democracy and religion have mostly been friends. Alexis de Tocqueville understood this divergence clearly. "Among us," he wrote of the French in Democracy in America, "I had seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom almost always move in contrary directions." In America, by contrast, Tocqueville found the spirits of religion and democracy "united intimately with one another: they reigned together on the same soil."
Tocqueville believed religion would necessarily lose any battle with democracy if it sought to oppose it outright. The "providential" advance of the "equality of conditions" in the modern world, he argued, made some form of democracy a fate, not a choice. Yet such an accommodation with democracy would have been hard to justify or even imagine for the Catholic church and its supporters in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Before the French Revolution, one could find within the Catholic church's ranks advocates of social and democratic reform as well as adherents of the old regime. The gathering of the three estates that began the revolutionary process in France could not have taken place without the support of many clergy. But the French revolutionaries, influenced in particular by Rousseau's notion of the "general will," conceived of democracy in a way that imposed no limits on its power-putting man in God's place as sovereign and controller of existence. Throw off superstition and the old power structures, let Reason rule, and the perfectibility of man was possible-or so the revolutionaries believed. The idea of original sin was for them a myth, invented by the benighted and prudish church to darken minds and maintain social control.
The revolutionaries' Promethean ambitions meant they had to eradicate the spiritual and institutional power of the church, since it made rival claims for human allegiance. "These priests ... must die because they are out of place, interfere with the movement of things, and will stand in the way of the future," Georges Danton pronounced in a spirit typical of the revolutionaries.
In pursuing their radical ends, as scholars such as J.L. Talmon and Francois Furet have shown, France's revolutionaries became proto-totalitarians. As early as November 1789, the first year of upheaval, they nationalized church property and soon boarded up convents and monasteries. They mandated that all clerics would henceforth be state officials, subject to election by the laity-including nonbelievers. The violence escalated as the Revolution advanced: Churches were torched, altars desecrated, religious libraries wrecked, and priests and nuns forced to marry and have sex. The Jacobin Reign of Terror of 1793 and 1794 saw even greater abuses. The revolutionaries sent scores of priests (and many others) to the guillotine. In a sacrilegious gesture, they moved the remains of Voltaire from his estate at Ferney to the Church of Sainte-Genevieve, which they renamed the Pantheon. Notre Dame Cathedral was transformed into the Temple of Reason.
In response, the Catholic church set itself resolutely against "progress, liberalism, and modern civilization," in the words of Pope Pius IX's infamous 1864 "Syllabus of Errors." The church became the symbol of resistance to democracy-a resistance that, as Tocqueville predicted, was doomed to fail against the "providential" movement of history toward democracy. It was not until Vatican II, in the mid 1960s, that the church finally came to terms with democracy and began instead to claim historical responsibility for its emergence. (In fact, some within the church became so enthusiastic about modern democracy that they lost sight of the enduring truths of the church itself.)
Meanwhile, the French Revolution, despite its enormous abuses of power and its failure to establish a viable political order, won an honored reputation not just among the French but among generations of Europeans. It became the symbol of light-the vanguard of political freedom against all the agents of the old order, including religion. The anticlerical spirit of the Revolution, reinforced by school curricula and public traditions, has continued to typify European democracies. As is obvious, Europe's secularism is far less ferocious than in Robespierre's time. The philosopher Pierre Manent says European democracy no longer plans "to destroy the infamous thing," and it "consents to the presence in its bosom" of religious believers. But that is only because it was victorious in its struggle against them. For many Europeans, to be a modern democrat means necessarily that one is also secular.
America's point of departure
In America, relations between religion and democracy developed very differently, in ways that have encouraged the flourishing of faith visible around the nation today. On first blush, this might appear surprising. The dominant view among scholars, at least until quite recently, has been that the American Revolution, like the French, was an expression of the secular Enlightenment-finding its inspiration in the commonsensical natural rights philosophy of John Locke. According to this view, the U.S. Constitution privatized religion, downgrading its public status permanently. In political scientist Walter Berns's words,
The Constitution was ordained and established to secure liberty and its blessings, not to promote faith in God. Officially, religion was subordinate to liberty and it was to be fostered only with a view to securing liberty.
This view obviously captures important truths about the American polity: The Framers drew much insight from Locke and, more broadly, from the Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment, and they certainly wanted to avoid the religious strife that Europe had suffered. But it also neglects the degree to which a religious consciousness pervaded the Founding era. Recent books and essays by Daniel Dreisbach, James Hutson, Philip Hamburger, Michael Novak, and others have helpfully redressed this imbalance. "The leaders of the American Revolution were not, like the leaders of the French Revolution, secularists," Novak writes in his 2002 book On Two Wings. "They did not set out to erase religion."
On the contrary: The very first act of the First Continental Congress in 1774, Novak reminds us, was an official prayer-a Psalm read aloud to the congressmen by an Episcopal clergyman. The Declaration of Independence, he notes, takes the form of a traditional American prayer not all that different from the Mayflower Compact, speaking of God in four ways-Creator (the source of our "unalienable rights"), judge, Lawgiver, and Providence-that are, with the exception of Lawgiver, unambiguously biblical. Early American political debates made frequent use of biblical references and language. One scholar, Donald Lutz, surveyed 3,154 citations made by the Founders and discovered that more than one-third of them were to the Bible. (Montesquieu and Blackstone followed with 300 or so each, while Locke trailed far behind.)
As Tocqueville emphasized, religion and democracy "reigned together" in America long before 1776. The colonies, populated by deeply devout religious dissenters, had nourished vibrant republican traditions. More to the point, unlike in Europe, where religion took the side of the established authorities in opposition to democracy, America's Puritan pulpits helped to ignite the American Revolution itself. John Adams extolled the Philadelphia ministers who "thunder and lighten every Sabbath" against George Ill's tyranny. "To the Pulpit, the Puritan Pulpit, we owe the moral force which won our independence," said John Wingate Thornton.
For the Founders, religion did more than help the nation win independence. Successful self-government required moral virtues-self-control, self-reliance, and a disinterested concern for the commonweal-that only religion could provide, at least for the majority. (Some refined souls, with minds of "peculiar structure," President George Washington conceded, could be moral without this aid.) Washington's Farewell Address praised religion as the "indispensable" support of the "dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity." Benjamin Rush agreed:
The only foundation for a useful education in a republic is to be laid in religion. Without it there can be no virtue, and without virtue there can be no liberty, and liberty is the object and life of all republican governments.
Even Jefferson, the most secular of the men who signed the Declaration, was no Danton. The Virginian grasped the public importance of religion. "No nation," he pronounced, "has ever existed or been governed without religion. Nor can be." As president, he supported with public money the church services, including Christian communion, held in various public buildings in Washington, D.C., and he signed a treaty (ratified by the Senate) with the Kaskaskias Indians that mandated federal funds to maintain a Catholic church among them.
Inner tensions
Some scholars have argued that the "natural rights" theory of the American founding is ultimately antagonistic toward Jewish and Christian faith. By putting the individual and his free conscience at the heart of the social order, the argument runs, liberal society erodes the claims of duty made upon men and women by any transcendent order. Indifference toward religion, even a relativistic indifference to all human goods, say some, are the all-but-inevitable byproducts.
The Founders would not have agreed. In speaking the Lockean language of the "natural rights of mankind" in the same breath as professing fealty to God, as they so often did, they clearly saw no contradiction. Indeed, they held that natural rights, including the right to religious liberty, found their ultimate source in God.
Whether there may be a serious tension where the Founders mainly saw compatibility remains an open question, of course. Contemporary America may exhibit intense religious activity, but it also has its relativistic currents, its individualist tendencies, its prurient enthusiasms, its civility-eroding "rights talk." To blame these phenomena, which have grown powerful since the 1960s, solely on secular elites seems too easy, though those elites have surely played a major role in promoting them. It is far more likely that such phenomena represent permanent temptations for all modern democratic societies.
What can be said with more certainty is that the Founders sought not to diminish and degrade religion but to help it flourish. And on that score, they succeeded. George Washington once said that a nation's "first transactions" form the "leading traits in its character." With regard to the relations between religion and democracy, anyway, this dictum has held true both for America, a republic founded in deep religious convictions it still largely affirms, and for Europe, where democracy was forged against religion and citizens have become less and less pious.
A free market of religions
America's lack of an established state church and its religious pluralism together may point to another, related reason why America has diverged from Europe in matters of faith. It was not Tocqueville but his Scottish predecessor Adam Smith who first described the process at work.
In his classic treatise of political economy, The Wealth of Nations, Smith argued for the existence of what one could call a religious market. just as in the economic sphere, where monopoly breeds stagnation and decline while competition tends to encourage striving and generate wealth, Smith believed well-established churches would lose their appeal over time since their clergymen, having no real incentive to make their message compelling to the population, would grow complacent. Religions facing competitive pressure, however, would work harder and thrive.
Several contemporary sociologists have developed a theory of "religious economy" that builds on Smith's original insight. "Monopolies damage religion," emphasizes Massimo Introvigne, director of the Center for Studies on New Religions in Turin, Italy and a major proponent of the theory. "In a free market, people get more interested in the product. It is true for religion just as it is true for cars." With the "demand" for religion assumed to be conslant, Introvigne explains, the amount and intensity of religiosity a culture exhibits depend on "the quality and quantity of religion available."
On this view, the European tradition of established churches has contributed to the decrease in religiosity among Europeans. Religious pluralism, by contrast, has made America more religiously energetic. Contrast the shriveled spiritual life of Scandinavian countries that have established state churches (or of France, which has a culturally established church), with the thriving faith communities of the United States, where Christian denominations actively compete for believers. Sixteen percent of American adults say they have switched denominations, signaling an extraordinary religious striving not unlike the "creative destruction" that continuously roils the hyper-competitive U.S. economy.
In fact, observes Rodney Stark, the leading "religious economy" theorist, America has provided ample confirming evidence for the theory. Not only has church attendance progressively risen over the course of American history; American religion, he explains, also has been more vibrant in America's pluralistic cities than in its smaller towns or the countryside. It turns out that the "religious marketing" theory even holds for antiquity: State religions initially did well in the ancient world, but over time, protected from competition, they grew decadent and withered.
Religion and conservatism
All this history and social theory can help us understand why America and Europe have taken such different paths concerning religion. But what are the political and cultural consequences of this divergence today?
The religious divide is unquestionably a major cause of the growing tension between Europe and the United States. "To Europeans, religion is the strangest and most disturbing feature of American exceptionalism," notes the Economist in a recent major survey of the United States. The article continues:
They worry that fundamentalists are hijacking the country. They find it extraordinary that three times as many Americans believe in the virgin birth as in evolution. They fear that America will go on a "crusade" (a term briefly used by Mr. Bush himself) in the Muslim world or cut aid to poor countries lest it be used for birth control.
In December, in New York City, the writer Ian Buruma moderated a public discussion between European and American intellectuals-including the British leftist Tariq AIi, French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy, and American journalist Jane Kramer-on the growing "gap" between Europe and the United States. "All the commentators agreed on one thing: the role of religion in U.S. politics was an affront to European secularism," said Buruma.
What such European disquiet is really about is the sizable presence in America of religious conservatism. Evangelical Protestants are the fastest growing religious demographic in America and now represent 30 percent of the adult population. The most religiously committed among them-those who attend church regularly and claim fidelity to biblical ideals-describe themselves as politically conservative (a higher percentage than among any other religious group), and they care deeply about social issues like abortion and homosexuality. Whether these conservative Christians derive their political and cultural views from their faith or embrace their religious orthodoxy because of their convictions is an open question. What is indisputable, though, is that their faith reinforces their conservatism.
These religious conservatives profoundly shape American society. From views on family life to charitable work-soup kitchens, prison and drug-rehabilitation programs, welfare-to-work initiatives, and innumerable other activities-to home schooling to new media, they are a transpolitical presence in almost every walk of American life. In this way, they continue indirectly to influence political society by helping to "regulate" national mores, even if not to the extent observed by Tocqueville 150 years ago.
But they are also politically active as Christians. First through Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority (founded in 1979) and then through the Christian Coalition (founded 10 years later), conservative Christians have become a formidable political force, central to the Republican party's national fortunes. Evangelicals gave George W. Bush roughly four out of every ten votes he received in the 2000 presidential election. White evangelicals today make up nearly a third of registered voters, up from just under 25 percent 15 years ago.
Given their political heft, religious conservatives have unsurprisingly become a major-probably the major-influence on the Republican party's approach to social policy. Mainstream media coverage both here and abroad of the "religious Right" tends to portray it as fanatical (Fox News is a major exception), but its primary mission has been defensive: "a reaction against the popular counterculture, against the doctrinaire secularism of the Supreme Court, and against a government that taxes them heavily while removing all traces of morality and religion from public education, for example, even as it subsidizes all sorts of activities and programs that are outrages against traditional morality," in Irving Kristol's summation. Opposition to abortion and stem-cell research, efforts to head off gay marriage, attempts to rein in the imperial judiciary-religious conservatives are major players in each of these causes. That the Republican party is much more conservative than "conservative" parties in Europe, which tend to combine economic statism with liberal stances on moral controversies, is almost entirely attributable to the sizable numbers of Christian fundamentalists in America.
Religious conservatives enjoy a particularly receptive welcome at the Bush White House, and not just on domestic policy issues. Shortly after Bush took office, the New York Times recently reported, Christian leaders met with presidential advisor Karl Rove to press for U.S. intervention in the interminable civil war in Sudan, a religious conflict between Muslims and Christians that has led to two million deaths over the last several decades and terrible repression of Christians. Previous administrations had largely ignored the conflict, but Rove promised action. As a result, the Bush administration has not only mediated peace talks in Sudan, it has also launched initiatives to combat AIDS and sex trafficking in the Third World, two other key human rights concerns of conservative Christians. President Bush went so far as to include extensive comments on sex trafficking in his U.N. speech last September.
Bush himself is a faithful evangelical Christian. He refers to God often in his speeches and has acknowledged, "I'd still be drinking if it weren't for what Christ did in my life." Bush's morally charged post-September 11 talk of bringing terrorist "evildoers" to "justice" arguably finds its primary source in the currents of religious fundamentalism. Vigorous religious and moral assertions of this kind, while they resonate with many Americans, appall secular, relativistic Europeans-indeed, they are a chief reason Europeans find Bush, and America as a whole, so unsettling these days.
The great divide
What does the future hold for America and Europe regarding religion and its cultural and political effects? A few possibilities come to mind.
Religion is becoming the major fault line in American politics. Secularists are sufficiently influential to have all but captured the Democratic party. If Americans never go to church, they pull the lever for Democrats by a two to one ratio; if they do attend regularly, they now vote Republican by a two to one majority. Religion is now "the most powerful predictor of party [identification] and partisan voting intention," Brookings Institution political scientist Thomas Mann has observed. The immense outpouring of early support for Howard Dean's bid for the Democratic presidential nomination demonstrates all too well how divided America is becoming on religious matters-considering that the former Vermont governor's most infamous brush with belief involved his quitting the Episcopal church over a disagreement with a parish about a bike path.
Yet if secularizing forces exist, they are not welcomed by most Americans. According to a recent poll, 58 percent of American adults think that if you do not believe in God you cannot be moral. Even the liberal New Republic recently devoted a cover article fretting about Dean's "religion problem." In addition, the secular Left's nearmonopoly over the institutions of information and opinion has begun to crack over the last half-decade or so, thanks to new media outlets in talk radio, cable television, the Internet, and publishing that have allowed religious and conservative viewpoints to get a much wider hearing in public debate. It is hard to imagine how this greater diversity of opinion will fail to reinforce America's religiosity (and make the country more conservative too).
As for Europe, it is possible to imagine a religious resurgence there, perhaps radiating outward from still-faithful and soon-to-be-powerful Poland. Nothing in history lasts forever. The Italian philosopher and papal advisor Rocco Buttiglione argues convincingly that European modernity, in its secular humanism, leaves men and women cut off from "an essential dimension of their being-the Absolute-and thus confronted with the worst diminution of their being." Such diminution is existentially unbearable for many human beings over the long haul.
At the same time, however, a revival does not seem imminent. The rift between a religious America and a secular Europe is thus likely to widen in the years ahead, with unpredictable consequences for the democratic world as a whole.
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| Wed Dec 15, 2004 9:02 am Re: Secular Europe, Religious America: A Report |
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| Republican_Man wrote: | This is not my report, but that of another, but it is great and gives great views.
| Quote: | Secular Europe, religious America
Brian C Anderson. Public Interest. Washington: Spring 2004., Iss. 155; pg. 143, 16 pgs
� Jump to full text
Subjects: Secularism, Religion & politics, International relations-US, Social conditions & trends
Classification Codes 9190 United States, 9175 Western Europe, 1220 Social trends & culture
Locations: United States, US, Europe
Author(s): Brian C Anderson
Document types: Feature
Publication title: Public Interest. Washington: Spring 2004. , Iss. 155; pg. 143, 16 pgs
Source type: Periodical
ISSN/ISBN: 00333557
ProQuest document ID: 617975051
Text Word Count 4906
Document URL: http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?RQT=309&VInst=PROD&VName=PQD&VType=PQD&sid=6&index=7&SrchMode=1&Fmt=3&did=000000617975051&clientId=18395
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Abstract (Document Summary)
Part of a special issue on religion in the United States. The importance of the tensions between America and Europe within the democratic world should not be overstated but are nonetheless significant. America and the countries of "old" Western Europe have been increasingly at odds since the end of the cold war, and this is evident to even casual observers in the rampant anti-Americanism on the continent. There is a variety of explanations for the increasing rift, but one of the most significant sources of tension and lack of mutual understanding is America's religiosity and Europe's lack of it. In the coming years, the split between a religious America and a secular Europe is likely to widen, and this means unpredictable consequences for the democratic world as a whole. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]
Full Text (4906 words)
Copyright National Affairs, Inc. Spring 2004
AMERICA and Europe, or at least the nations of "old" western Europe, have been increasingly at odds since the end of the Cold War. Even a casual observer can see this in the rampant anti-Americanism on the continent. The hostility manifests itself with particular force among elites: The European Union deputy and French political scientist Olivier Duhamel, to take just one example, recently described the United States as a "degenerate" democracy-an irrational nation and a threat to global order. A recent poll ranked the American "hyperpower" second only to Israel as the greatest danger to world peace. Political relations between the United States and Europe have become so chilly that France and Germany openly worked to undercut their long-time ally in the run up to war in Iraq. |
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That one line shows how left they have become.
| RM wrote: | One should not overstate the importance of these tensions within the democratic world. Nobody is predicting that Belgium and the United States will be firing missiles at each other any time soon, or ever. But as Robert Kagan has observed, it sometimes seems nowadays as if Americans and Europeans live on different planets. There are a variety of explanations for the widening rift, among them the end of the Cold War, which has deprived the Western democracies of a powerful common enemy against which to unify; contrasting views of the roles of national sovereignty and of international institutions; use of the death penalty in the United States; and anger over the Bush administration's decision to use military force to prosecute the global struggle against Islamist terror. One of the most significant sources of tension and lack of mutual understanding between America and Europe, however, is religion-or better, America's religiosity and Europe's lack of it.
A post-Christian Europe
Europe is becoming a very secular place. As the general secretary of the United Reform Church in Britain put it, "In western Europe, we are hanging on by our fingernails." In truth, he says, "Europe is no longer Christian." When French political theorist Marcel Gauchet writes of recent European history as "characterized by the collapse of what remained of the religious pillars of heteronomy and the triumph of the metaphysical principle of human independence," he is not indulging in hyperbole.
Numbers drawn from the long-term European Values Study (EVS) and other research underscore the degree to which Europe has abandoned its Christian heritage. For one thing, the pews of Europe's churches are often empty. In France, only one in twenty people now attends a religious service every week, and the demographic skews to the aged. Only 15 percent of Italians attend weekly while roughly 30 percent of Germans still go to church at least once a month. Indifference is widespread. A mere 21 percent of Europeans hold religion to be "very important." In France, arguably the most secular of Europe's nations outside of the formerly Eutheran countries of northern Europe, the percentage is lower still, at slightly over 10 percent. As Cardinal Dionigi Tettamanzi, archbishop of Milan, lamented in the New York Times in October, "The parishes tell me that there are children who don't know how to make the sign of the cross." Only Europe's growing Muslim population seems to exhibit any religious fervor.
True, few Europeans proclaim outright atheism, and a majority still call themselves Christians. But how many are Christian in anything but a nominal sense? Not only do Europeans not go to church very often; only about 40 percent believe in heaven and only half that percentage in hell. The concept of sin is vanishing from the European mind. just 57 percent of Spaniards, 55 percent of Germans, 40 percent of French people, and approximately 30 percent of Swedes now believe in the existence of sin.
Post-Christian Europe has unsurprisingly sunken progressively deeper into moral relativism. Assessing the EVS's findings, Romir, a Russian public opinion and market research group, notes that in most European countries, "Many people believe that there are no absolutely unambiguous rules on what is good and evil that apply to everyone, irrespective of the circumstances." The EVS also shows that a more radical view-that good and evil depend entirely on cultural and historical circumstances-is ever more widespread across the continent, with only Poland and Malta resisting the trend. "Moral relativism would therefore appear to be predominant in Europe," Romir declares. This holds particularly true of sexual and bioethical concerns. Only when it comes to tax evasion and bribery do Europeans retain a relatively straightforward, "old-fashioned" sense of right and wrong.
Empty pews, aging believers, indifference-almost everything about western Europe's religious life conveys the sense of exhaustion and defeat. Almost all of the trend lines have moved in the direction that Gauchet suggests, away from any strong sense of religious identification and toward greater individualism and secularism. The European Union's recent refusal to include any reference to Europe's Christian heritage in its proposed constitution, despite the protests of the Vatican and various European Christian groups, is historically absurd, given Christianity's significant contribution to the development of the idea of human rights. That said, this decision hardly came as a surprise.
Religious America
Looking to the United States, a very different religious scene appears-one not of desiccation but of robust faith communities and great spiritual thirst. Upward of 60 percent of Americans (nearly thrice the European percentage) claim that "religion plays a very important role" in their lives. More than 80 percent of Americans (90 percent in some surveys) profess belief in God.
America boasts countless houses of worship. U.S. News & World Report recently noted that there are "more churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques per capita in the United States than in any other nation on Earth: one for about every 865 people." And those houses overflow with worshipers. A full 22 percent of America's 159 million Christians (three-fourths of the adult population) say they attend religious services more than once a week, and almost three quarters of Christians attend at least once or twice a month. "More people in the United States attend religious services on any given weekend than watch football-in all the stadiums, on high school football fields, college campuses, and all the television sets of the nation put together," says Catholic theologian Michael Novak.
Many cable and satellite television and radio stations offer religious programming around the clock. Most bookstores feature well-stocked religion sections, and many of the books shelved there sell briskly, some even becoming best-sellers. Public figures from presidents to basketball stars openly thank God for granting them spiritual strength or success.
America also appears in some ways to be getting more religious, not less. The Pew Research Center found that the number of Americans who "agree strongly" with three fundamental tenets of faith-belief in God, in judgment Day, and in the importance of prayer-has risen by as much as ten points over the last four decades. Fifteen years ago, the Economist points out, two-fifths of American Protestants described themselves as "born again"-signaling a strong embrace of Christ as personal savior. The percentage has climbed to more than half. Born-again Christians now make up 39 percent of America's adult population. Further, four out of five Americans say they have "experienced God's presence or a spiritual force," and 46 percent maintain it happens to them often. "People are reaching out in all directions in their attempt to escape from the seen world to the unseen world," pollster George Gallup, Jr., tells U.S. News. "There is a deep desire for spiritual moorings-a hunger for God."
Of course, secularizing forces do exist in the United States. America's highly educated, often left-leaning elites are every bit as secular as the most disenchanted Europeans. As the sociologist Peter Berger says of this elite: "Its members are relatively thin on the ground," but they control "the institutions that provide the 'official' definitions of reality, notably the education system, the media of mass communication, and the higher reaches of the legal system." These elites have wrought secularizing changes in law and culture over the last several decades-using the courts to drive creche displays from public property and to end prayer or religious instruction of any kind in public schools, for example. However, they have yet to persuade the majority of Americans to embrace a secular worldview themselves.
Europe's point of departure
How are we to explain this divergence in religiosity within the liberal democratic universe? One thing that cannot help us is the "secularization theory" once popular among sociologists. It holds, in Berger's words, that "modernization necessarily leads to a decline of religion, both in society and in the minds of individuals." This theory now seems suspect, as Berger, a former proponent, acknowledges. If modernity inevitably brings secularism, a "disenchantment of the world," then how is it that the United States-the modern nation par excellence-is so religious? Nor is secularization increasing in modernizing areas of the world, from Latin America to the Middle East, Berger points out. Europe today seems more the exception than the rule when it comes to religious belief.
A more plausible explanation points to the very dissimilar histories of how democracy arrived in America and in Europe. The European democratic tradition, the model for which originated in the French Revolution, has been hostile to religion from its inception, and religion, especially the Catholic church, had until recently been hostile to it in return. In America, however, democracy and religion have mostly been friends. Alexis de Tocqueville understood this divergence clearly. "Among us," he wrote of the French in Democracy in America, "I had seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom almost always move in contrary directions." In America, by contrast, Tocqueville found the spirits of religion and democracy "united intimately with one another: they reigned together on the same soil."
Tocqueville believed religion would necessarily lose any battle with democracy if it sought to oppose it outright. The "providential" advance of the "equality of conditions" in the modern world, he argued, made some form of democracy a fate, not a choice. Yet such an accommodation with democracy would have been hard to justify or even imagine for the Catholic church and its supporters in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Before the French Revolution, one could find within the Catholic church's ranks advocates of social and democratic reform as well as adherents of the old regime. The gathering of the three estates that began the revolutionary process in France could not have taken place without the support of many clergy. But the French revolutionaries, influenced in particular by Rousseau's notion of the "general will," conceived of democracy in a way that imposed no limits on its power-putting man in God's place as sovereign and controller of existence. Throw off superstition and the old power structures, let Reason rule, and the perfectibility of man was possible-or so the revolutionaries believed. The idea of original sin was for them a myth, invented by the benighted and prudish church to darken minds and maintain social control.
The revolutionaries' Promethean ambitions meant they had to eradicate the spiritual and institutional power of the church, since it made rival claims for human allegiance. "These priests ... must die because they are out of place, interfere with the movement of things, and will stand in the way of the future," Georges Danton pronounced in a spirit typical of the revolutionaries.
In pursuing their radical ends, as scholars such as J.L. Talmon and Francois Furet have shown, France's revolutionaries became proto-totalitarians. As early as November 1789, the first year of upheaval, they nationalized church property and soon boarded up convents and monasteries. They mandated that all clerics would henceforth be state officials, subject to election by the laity-including nonbelievers. The violence escalated as the Revolution advanced: Churches were torched, altars desecrated, religious libraries wrecked, and priests and nuns forced to marry and have sex. The Jacobin Reign of Terror of 1793 and 1794 saw even greater abuses. The revolutionaries sent scores of priests (and many others) to the guillotine. In a sacrilegious gesture, they moved the remains of Voltaire from his estate at Ferney to the Church of Sainte-Genevieve, which they renamed the Pantheon. Notre Dame Cathedral was transformed into the Temple of Reason.
In response, the Catholic church set itself resolutely against "progress, liberalism, and modern civilization," in the words of Pope Pius IX's infamous 1864 "Syllabus of Errors." The church became the symbol of resistance to democracy-a resistance that, as Tocqueville predicted, was doomed to fail against the "providential" movement of history toward democracy. It was not until Vatican II, in the mid 1960s, that the church finally came to terms with democracy and began instead to claim historical responsibility for its emergence. (In fact, some within the church became so enthusiastic about modern democracy that they lost sight of the enduring truths of the church itself.)
Meanwhile, the French Revolution, despite its enormous abuses of power and its failure to establish a viable political order, won an honored reputation not just among the French but among generations of Europeans. It became the symbol of light-the vanguard of political freedom against all the agents of the old order, including religion. The anticlerical spirit of the Revolution, reinforced by school curricula and public traditions, has continued to typify European democracies. As is obvious, Europe's secularism is far less ferocious than in Robespierre's time. The philosopher Pierre Manent says European democracy no longer plans "to destroy the infamous thing," and it "consents to the presence in its bosom" of religious believers. But that is only because it was victorious in its struggle against them. For many Europeans, to be a modern democrat means necessarily that one is also secular.
America's point of departure
In America, relations between religion and democracy developed very differently, in ways that have encouraged the flourishing of faith visible around the nation today. On first blush, this might appear surprising. The dominant view among scholars, at least until quite recently, has been that the American Revolution, like the French, was an expression of the secular Enlightenment-finding its inspiration in the commonsensical natural rights philosophy of John Locke. According to this view, the U.S. Constitution privatized religion, downgrading its public status permanently. In political scientist Walter Berns's words,
The Constitution was ordained and established to secure liberty and its blessings, not to promote faith in God. Officially, religion was subordinate to liberty and it was to be fostered only with a view to securing liberty.
This view obviously captures important truths about the American polity: The Framers drew much insight from Locke and, more broadly, from the Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment, and they certainly wanted to avoid the religious strife that Europe had suffered. But it also neglects the degree to which a religious consciousness pervaded the Founding era. Recent books and essays by Daniel Dreisbach, James Hutson, Philip Hamburger, Michael Novak, and others have helpfully redressed this imbalance. "The leaders of the American Revolution were not, like the leaders of the French Revolution, secularists," Novak writes in his 2002 book On Two Wings. "They did not set out to erase religion."
On the contrary: The very first act of the First Continental Congress in 1774, Novak reminds us, was an official prayer-a Psalm read aloud to the congressmen by an Episcopal clergyman. The Declaration of Independence, he notes, takes the form of a traditional American prayer not all that different from the Mayflower Compact, speaking of God in four ways-Creator (the source of our "unalienable rights"), judge, Lawgiver, and Providence-that are, with the exception of Lawgiver, unambiguously biblical. Early American political debates made frequent use of biblical references and language. One scholar, Donald Lutz, surveyed 3,154 citations made by the Founders and discovered that more than one-third of them were to the Bible. (Montesquieu and Blackstone followed with 300 or so each, while Locke trailed far behind.)
As Tocqueville emphasized, religion and democracy "reigned together" in America long before 1776. The colonies, populated by deeply devout religious dissenters, had nourished vibrant republican traditions. More to the point, unlike in Europe, where religion took the side of the established authorities in opposition to democracy, America's Puritan pulpits helped to ignite the American Revolution itself. John Adams extolled the Philadelphia ministers who "thunder and lighten every Sabbath" against George Ill's tyranny. "To the Pulpit, the Puritan Pulpit, we owe the moral force which won our independence," said John Wingate Thornton.
For the Founders, religion did more than help the nation win independence. Successful self-government required moral virtues-self-control, self-reliance, and a disinterested concern for the commonweal-that only religion could provide, at least for the majority. (Some refined souls, with minds of "peculiar structure," President George Washington conceded, could be moral without this aid.) Washington's Farewell Address praised religion as the "indispensable" support of the "dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity." Benjamin Rush agreed:
The only foundation for a useful education in a republic is to be laid in religion. Without it there can be no virtue, and without virtue there can be no liberty, and liberty is the object and life of all republican governments.
Even Jefferson, the most secular of the men who signed the Declaration, was no Danton. The Virginian grasped the public importance of religion. "No nation," he pronounced, "has ever existed or been governed without religion. Nor can be." As president, he supported with public money the church services, including Christian communion, held in various public buildings in Washington, D.C., and he signed a treaty (ratified by the Senate) with the Kaskaskias Indians that mandated federal funds to maintain a Catholic church among them.
Inner tensions
Some scholars have argued that the "natural rights" theory of the American founding is ultimately antagonistic toward Jewish and Christian faith. By putting the individual and his free conscience at the heart of the social order, the argument runs, liberal society erodes the claims of duty made upon men and women by any transcendent order. Indifference toward religion, even a relativistic indifference to all human goods, say some, are the all-but-inevitable byproducts.
The Founders would not have agreed. In speaking the Lockean language of the "natural rights of mankind" in the same breath as professing fealty to God, as they so often did, they clearly saw no contradiction. Indeed, they held that natural rights, including the right to religious liberty, found their ultimate source in God.
Whether there may be a serious tension where the Founders mainly saw compatibility remains an open question, of course. Contemporary America may exhibit intense religious activity, but it also has its relativistic currents, its individualist tendencies, its prurient enthusiasms, its civility-eroding "rights talk." To blame these phenomena, which have grown powerful since the 1960s, solely on secular elites seems too easy, though those elites have surely played a major role in promoting them. It is far more likely that such phenomena represent permanent temptations for all modern democratic societies.
What can be said with more certainty is that the Founders sought not to diminish and degrade religion but to help it flourish. And on that score, they succeeded. George Washington once said that a nation's "first transactions" form the "leading traits in its character." With regard to the relations between religion and democracy, anyway, this dictum has held true both for America, a republic founded in deep religious convictions it still largely affirms, and for Europe, where democracy was forged against religion and citizens have become less and less pious.
A free market of religions
America's lack of an established state church and its religious pluralism together may point to another, related reason why America has diverged from Europe in matters of faith. It was not Tocqueville but his Scottish predecessor Adam Smith who first described the process at work.
In his classic treatise of political economy, The Wealth of Nations, Smith argued for the existence of what one could call a religious market. just as in the economic sphere, where monopoly breeds stagnation and decline while competition tends to encourage striving and generate wealth, Smith believed well-established churches would lose their appeal over time since their clergymen, having no real incentive to make their message compelling to the population, would grow complacent. Religions facing competitive pressure, however, would work harder and thrive.
Several contemporary sociologists have developed a theory of "religious economy" that builds on Smith's original insight. "Monopolies damage religion," emphasizes Massimo Introvigne, director of the Center for Studies on New Religions in Turin, Italy and a major proponent of the theory. "In a free market, people get more interested in the product. It is true for religion just as it is true for cars." With the "demand" for religion assumed to be conslant, Introvigne explains, the amount and intensity of religiosity a culture exhibits depend on "the quality and quantity of religion available."
On this view, the European tradition of established churches has contributed to the decrease in religiosity among Europeans. Religious pluralism, by contrast, has made America more religiously energetic. Contrast the shriveled spiritual life of Scandinavian countries that have established state churches (or of France, which has a culturally established church), with the thriving faith communities of the United States, where Christian denominations actively compete for believers. Sixteen percent of American adults say they have switched denominations, signaling an extraordinary religious striving not unlike the "creative destruction" that continuously roils the hyper-competitive U.S. economy.
In fact, observes Rodney Stark, the leading "religious economy" theorist, America has provided ample confirming evidence for the theory. Not only has church attendance progressively risen over the course of American history; American religion, he explains, also has been more vibrant in America's pluralistic cities than in its smaller towns or the countryside. It turns out that the "religious marketing" theory even holds for antiquity: State religions initially did well in the ancient world, but over time, protected from competition, they grew decadent and withered.
Religion and conservatism
All this history and social theory can help us understand why America and Europe have taken such different paths concerning religion. But what are the political and cultural consequences of this divergence today?
The religious divide is unquestionably a major cause of the growing tension between Europe and the United States. "To Europeans, religion is the strangest and most disturbing feature of American exceptionalism," notes the Economist in a recent major survey of the United States. The article continues:
They worry that fundamentalists are hijacking the country. They find it extraordinary that three times as many Americans believe in the virgin birth as in evolution. They fear that America will go on a "crusade" (a term briefly used by Mr. Bush himself) in the Muslim world or cut aid to poor countries lest it be used for birth control.
In December, in New York City, the writer Ian Buruma moderated a public discussion between European and American intellectuals-including the British leftist Tariq AIi, French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy, and American journalist Jane Kramer-on the growing "gap" between Europe and the United States. "All the commentators agreed on one thing: the role of religion in U.S. politics was an affront to European secularism," said Buruma.
What such European disquiet is really about is the sizable presence in America of religious conservatism. Evangelical Protestants are the fastest growing religious demographic in America and now represent 30 percent of the adult population. The most religiously committed among them-those who attend church regularly and claim fidelity to biblical ideals-describe themselves as politically conservative (a higher percentage than among any other religious group), and they care deeply about social issues like abortion and homosexuality. Whether these conservative Christians derive their political and cultural views from their faith or embrace their religious orthodoxy because of their convictions is an open question. What is indisputable, though, is that their faith reinforces their conservatism.
These religious conservatives profoundly shape American society. From views on family life to charitable work-soup kitchens, prison and drug-rehabilitation programs, welfare-to-work initiatives, and innumerable other activities-to home schooling to new media, they are a transpolitical presence in almost every walk of American life. In this way, they continue indirectly to influence political society by helping to "regulate" national mores, even if not to the extent observed by Tocqueville 150 years ago.
But they are also politically active as Christians. First through Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority (founded in 1979) and then through the Christian Coalition (founded 10 years later), conservative Christians have become a formidable political force, central to the Republican party's national fortunes. Evangelicals gave George W. Bush roughly four out of every ten votes he received in the 2000 presidential election. White evangelicals today make up nearly a third of registered voters, up from just under 25 percent 15 years ago.
Given their political heft, religious conservatives have unsurprisingly become a major-probably the major-influence on the Republican party's approach to social policy. Mainstream media coverage both here and abroad of the "religious Right" tends to portray it as fanatical (Fox News is a major exception), but its primary mission has been defensive: "a reaction against the popular counterculture, against the doctrinaire secularism of the Supreme Court, and against a government that taxes them heavily while removing all traces of morality and religion from public education, for example, even as it subsidizes all sorts of activities and programs that are outrages against traditional morality," in Irving Kristol's summation. Opposition to abortion and stem-cell research, efforts to head off gay marriage, attempts to rein in the imperial judiciary-religious conservatives are major players in each of these causes. That the Republican party is much more conservative than "conservative" parties in Europe, which tend to combine economic statism with liberal stances on moral controversies, is almost entirely attributable to the sizable numbers of Christian fundamentalists in America.
Religious conservatives enjoy a particularly receptive welcome at the Bush White House, and not just on domestic policy issues. Shortly after Bush took office, the New York Times recently reported, Christian leaders met with presidential advisor Karl Rove to press for U.S. intervention in the interminable civil war in Sudan, a religious conflict between Muslims and Christians that has led to two million deaths over the last several decades and terrible repression of Christians. Previous administrations had largely ignored the conflict, but Rove promised action. As a result, the Bush administration has not only mediated peace talks in Sudan, it has also launched initiatives to combat AIDS and sex trafficking in the Third World, two other key human rights concerns of conservative Christians. President Bush went so far as to include extensive comments on sex trafficking in his U.N. speech last September.
Bush himself is a faithful evangelical Christian. He refers to God often in his speeches and has acknowledged, "I'd still be drinking if it weren't for what Christ did in my life." Bush's morally charged post-September 11 talk of bringing terrorist "evildoers" to "justice" arguably finds its primary source in the currents of religious fundamentalism. Vigorous religious and moral assertions of this kind, while they resonate with many Americans, appall secular, relativistic Europeans-indeed, they are a chief reason Europeans find Bush, and America as a whole, so unsettling these days.
The great divide
What does the future hold for America and Europe regarding religion and its cultural and political effects? A few possibilities come to mind.
Religion is becoming the major fault line in American politics. Secularists are sufficiently influential to have all but captured the Democratic party. If Americans never go to church, they pull the lever for Democrats by a two to one ratio; if they do attend regularly, they now vote Republican by a two to one majority. Religion is now "the most powerful predictor of party [identification] and partisan voting intention," Brookings Institution political scientist Thomas Mann has observed. The immense outpouring of early support for Howard Dean's bid for the Democratic presidential nomination demonstrates all too well how divided America is becoming on religious matters-considering that the former Vermont governor's most infamous brush with belief involved his quitting the Episcopal church over a disagreement with a parish about a bike path.
Yet if secularizing forces exist, they are not welcomed by most Americans. According to a recent poll, 58 percent of American adults think that if you do not believe in God you cannot be moral. Even the liberal New Republic recently devoted a cover article fretting about Dean's "religion problem." In addition, the secular Left's nearmonopoly over the institutions of information and opinion has begun to crack over the last half-decade or so, thanks to new media outlets in talk radio, cable television, the Internet, and publishing that have allowed religious and conservative viewpoints to get a much wider hearing in public debate. It is hard to imagine how this greater diversity of opinion will fail to reinforce America's religiosity (and make the country more conservative too).
As for Europe, it is possible to imagine a religious resurgence there, perhaps radiating outward from still-faithful and soon-to-be-powerful Poland. Nothing in history lasts forever. The Italian philosopher and papal advisor Rocco Buttiglione argues convincingly that European modernity, in its secular humanism, leaves men and women cut off from "an essential dimension of their being-the Absolute-and thus confronted with the worst diminution of their being." Such diminution is existentially unbearable for many human beings over the long haul.
At the same time, however, a revival does not seem imminent. The rift between a religious America and a secular Europe is thus likely to widen in the years ahead, with unpredictable consequences for the democratic world as a whole.
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I would generally agree with that. I read a lot of it, but not all and what I read I agree with.
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