Tuesday 6 June 2006

"Christian" America and "Secular" Europe?

I have yet to read George Weigel's The Cube and The Cathedral, but the review of it in the latest edition of FAITH does not bode well, since it suggests a heavy and uncritical dependence on the theory that America is more "Christian" than "secular" Europe.
While church attendance figures are much higher in the US than in Western Europe, what does that prove? In itself, nothing at all. What is being inculcated, celebrated and even worshipped is very often a collection of economic, social, cultural and political prejudices that the participants have simply declared to be Christianity (or any specific form of Christianity, including Catholicism), despite their fanatically and even hysterically anti-Christian (and especially anti-Catholic) origins and content, which former is very often denied outright.
Those participants have made themselves the "Useful Idiots" of the old Shachtmanites who have come to run the Republican Party, and who remain Marxist in their dialectical materialism, Leninist in their vanguard elitism, Trotskyist in their entryism and in their belief in the permanent revolution, and yet also Stalinist in their belief that the dictatorship of the victorious class must be created in a superstate in order to be exported (including by force of arms) throughout the world while vanguard elites everywhere owe their allegiance to that superstate rather than to their own countries. The only difference is that the victorious class is the bourgeoisie rather than the proletariat; but that is really just a detail.
It is also notable that this unpleasant and expansionist idea of America is powerfully attractive to embittered cranks from elsewhere, especially (though not exclusively) in the rest of the English-speaking world, just as an unpleasant and expansionist idea of Germany was (and sometimes still is) powerfully attractive to embittered cranks from elsewhere, especially (though not exclusively) in the rest of German-speaking Europe.
Churches complicit in all of this might pack them in, but they are ultimately not very different from, for example, the "Catholic" Patriotic Association in China. Lest this seem an overstatement, look at the level of American churchgoing support for the Iraq War. And why? To what end? The reversal of Roe v Wade? Believe in that when you see it, and not before.
In Western Europe, by contrast, no country has on paper, and few have in practice, the American system of abortion on demand at every stage of pregnancy (for that, one has to look to America's new best friends in Eastern Europe). There are 10 sacral monarchies (11 if one includes the Vatican), monarchy being an institution for which no purely secular argument can ever be constructed. National events are routinely conducted in the form and course of church services. Church schools, maintained at public expense, are normal in many European countries, while at least broadly Christian Religious Education and (although this law is widely flouted) a daily collective act of Chrsitian worship are compulsary in all British schools.
In Germany, the churches are actually the largest employers after the several tiers of government, with hardly anyone opting out of the church tax system, with the churches routinely providing numerous services of the kind that provoke uproar when suggested in the US under the rubric of "compassionate conservatism", and with three tiers of government funding an annual Kirchentag (Catholic and Protestant in alternate years) from which no major political figure from Left to Right would dare be absent. Anglican bishops sit as of right in the British Parliament (where they recently played a key role in blocking physician-assisted suicide); and while the House of Lords might one day be abolished entirely, no one seriously suggests that it might ever remain with only the bishops removed. And since when was contraception any less available, or any less widely used, in the US than in Europe?
So one could go on.
None of which is to suggest that there is not a great deal of re-evangelisation to be done in Western Europe. However, the last possible way of going about this would be to emulate a country in which the absolute exclusion of religion from public life is written into the founding documents as a first principle (however long it might have taken the courts to come round to enforcing this properly), with those documents then elevated to the status of Holy Writ, and their rationalist and Deist authors to that of Prophets and Apostles, in the national folk-religion. So complete, uncritical and even unthinking is the American identification of that folk-religion with Christianity that the US, alas, pretty much needs to be evangelised from scratch.

3 comments:

  1. That is a load of rubbish. Europe is alot more secular than america. Church attendence in alot of these countries is below 15 percent compared to 30 to 40 percent in america. There are alot more evangelical christians is america between 50 to 70 million and most church goers in europe are not even christian. What you are saying is totally wrong and misleading.

    ReplyDelete
  2. While church attendance figures are much higher in the US than in Western Europe, what does that prove? In itself, nothing at all.

    What is being inculcated, celebrated and even worshipped is very often a collection of economic, social, cultural and political prejudices that the participants have simply declared to be Christianity, despite their fanatically and even hysterically anti-Christian (and especially anti-Catholic) origins and content, which former is very often denied outright.

    In Western Europe, by contrast, no country has on paper, and few have in practice, the American system of abortion on demand at every stage of pregnancy (for that, one has to look to America's new best friends in Eastern Europe).

    There are 10 sacral monarchies (11 if one includes the Vatican), monarchy being an institution for which no purely secular argument can ever be constructed. National events are routinely conducted in the form and course of church services.

    Church schools, maintained at public expense, are normal in many European countries, while at least broadly Christian Religious Education and (although this law is widely flouted) a daily collective act of Christian worship are compulsory in all British schools.

    In Germany, the churches are actually the largest employers after the several tiers of government, with hardly anyone opting out of the church tax system, with the churches routinely providing numerous services of the kind that provoke uproar when suggested in the US under the rubric of "compassionate conservatism", and with three tiers of government funding an annual Kirchentag (Catholic and Protestant in alternate years) from which no major political figure from Left to Right would dare be absent.

    Anglican bishops sit as of right in the British Parliament, and while the House of Lords might one day be abolished entirely, no one seriously suggests that it might ever remain with only the bishops removed.

    So one could go on.

    ReplyDelete
  3. See http://davidaslindsay.blogspot.com/2009/06/more-european-america-is-more-christian.html

    ReplyDelete