Monday, October 13, 2003
Europe: Faith Fades Where It Once Burned Strong
Christianity has boomed in the developing world, competing successfully with Islam, deepening its influence and possibly finding its future there. But Europe already seems more and more like a series of tourist-trod monuments to Christianity's past. Hardly a month goes by when the pope does not publicly bemoan that fact, beseeching Europeans to rediscover the faith.
Their estrangement has deep implications, including the prospect of schisms in intercontinental churches and political frictions within and between countries.
The secularization of Europe, according to some political analysts, is one of the forces pushing it apart from the United States, where religion plays a potent role in politics and society, shaping many Americans' views of the world.
Americans are widely regarded as more comfortable with notions of good and evil, right and wrong, than Europeans, who often see such views as reckless.
In France, which is predominantly Catholic but emphatically secular, about one in 20 people attends a religious service every week, compared with about one in three in the United States.
"What's interesting isn't that there are fewer people in church," said the Rev. Jean François Bordarier of Lille, in northern France, "but that there are any at all."
The preamble of a new, unfinished constitution for the European Union omits any mention of Christianity or even God among the cultural forces that shaped Europe, although the pope and other Christian leaders raised vehement objections.
"My own view is that there is a form of secular intolerance in Europe that is every bit as strong as religious intolerance was in the past," said John Bruton, a former Irish prime minister who was involved in the drafting of the document. He lobbied for God's inclusion.
Mr. Bruton's vantage point is Western Europe, but many Eastern European countries — with a few exceptions, like the pope's native Poland — are no more demonstrably devout. Having gone through religious outbursts after their emergence from Communism, they too seem poised to pivot in a secular direction.
Christianity's greatest hope in Europe may in fact be immigrants from the developing world, who in many cases learned the religion from European missionaries, adapted it to their own needs and tastes, then toted it back to the Continent.
A recent report by Christian Research, a British group, determined that blacks and, to a lesser extent, Asians represent more than half the churchgoers in central London on a given Sunday, though they represent less than a quarter of the area's population.
By some estimates, more than 25 million people in England identify the Church of England as their denomination. Only 1.2 million actually go to one of the church's services every week.
"In Western Europe, we are hanging on by our fingernails," wrote the Rev. David Cornick, the general secretary of the United Reformed Church in Britain, in the June-July edition of Inside Out, a religious journal. "The fact is that Europe is no longer Christian."
"In terms of religion, Europe is very complicated," said the Rev. Andrew M. Greeley, the author of "Religion in Europe at the End of the Second Millennium," which was published this year.
Sizable majorities of people in most European countries believe in God, and sizable majorities believe as well that some kind of religious service is important when a person dies, according to the European Values Study, a sweeping survey conducted in 1999 and 2000 and published this summer.
But they are less familiar with, or tethered to, the specific rituals and roots of Christian worship. "If you ask the average European the basic credo or statements of the Christian church, most of them don't know," said Grace Davie, a sociologist at the University of Exeter and the author of several books about religious trends in Britain and Europe.
According to the European Values Study, only about 21 percent of all Europeans said religion was "very important" to them. Although the methodology was not precisely comparable, a Gallup Poll this year showed that 58 percent of Americans defined religion that way.
Even in Italy, where 33 percent of respondents described religion as "very important," the percentage of Italians who go to church every week is as low as 15 and no higher than 33, according to various polls.
Public schools throughout Western Europe have removed crosses from walls. Many congregations have been forced to close or combine operations, to make do with part-time ministers or to import pastors from the developing world.
There are many suggested reasons for Europe's drift, which happened gradually, over decades, as the continent grew wealthier and better educated.
One is a modern European cynicism about big institutions, grand ideologies and unfettered allegiances, manifest not only in partly empty churches but also in weakened support for labor unions and political parties.
"It's an overarching thing, a diminishing trust," said Rüdiger Noll, director of the Brussels-based Church and Society Commission of the Conference of European Churches, an interdenominational group.
The process of urbanization moved Europeans from quiet places where the church was at the center of life to chaotic bazaars where it got lost in the din.
The Rev. Enzo Bianchi, a Catholic theologian in Italy, said that in today's heterogeneous and often hedonistic European capitals, "there are more and more morals and ethics on the market."
"There's Buddhism, Hinduism, New Age spiritualism, consumerism," Father Bianchi said. "With all these competitors, it's harder for the church to sell."
But in the United States, to name one country, many of the same dynamics have not prompted a similarly pronounced estrangement. Some experts say that in Europe, suspicion of major denominations may run higher because religious leaders directly wielded political power in the past. Others say the unchallenged supremacy of state-blessed faiths in Europe — like the Lutherans in Scandinavia and Anglicans in Britain — perhaps turned out to be a curse.
"Monopolies damage religion," said Massimo Introvigne, the director of the Center for Studies on New Religions in Turin and a proponent of the relatively new theory of religious economy. "In a free market, people get more interested in the product. It is true for religion just as it is true for cars."
"I've been struck by the way in which religion now serves to underpin the divergence between Europe and the United States, and where I particularly saw that over the last year or two was in attitudes about the Middle East," said Philip Jenkins. Dr. Jenkins is a British scholar who teaches history and religious studies in the United States and wrote "The Next Christendom" (2002), about changing patterns of Christian worship around the world.
"Americans still take biblical and religious arguments very seriously, and therefore give a credence to the Zionist project that Europeans don't," Dr. Jenkins said.
He said that for many Americans, the frequency with which President Bush invoked morality and religion in talking about the fight against terrorism was neither striking nor discomfiting. "But in Europe," he added, "they think he must be a religious nut."
Some sociologists say new data suggest a possible reawakening of Christian interest in people under 30, and Christian movements throughout Europe are reaching out aggressively to them.
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