That’s part of the reason why you don’t have as rich a set of religious institutions and faith life in Europe. Part of that has to do with the fact that, traditionally, it was an extension of the state. ~Barack Obama
As I said last month, most European churches had been disestablished by the 1920s, and many had been disestablished long before then, and there are numerous other, far more significant factors that explain the secularisation of Europe. These were my main points then:
Here is a list, by no means exhaustive, of some of what were significant causes of the process of secularisation in Europe: scientific advances, materialist philosophies, the uprooting and deracinating effects of industrialisation and urbanisation, the introduction of ideological politics and mass political mobilisation, the material and moral ravages of the two wars, followed by the effects of two essentially materialist worldviews that claimed to “deliver the goods” more effectively or justly than the other. Where the experience of Europe clearly differs from our own, and one of the reasons why Europe has gone further in its secularisation, is in their experience of the wars. I have to wonder whether Americans would have been church-going and believing in the numbers that we are today if we had experienced the full horror of these conflicts and had endured the same losses. There is a basic problem with the thesis that “faith thrives in a free market,” which is that there are now “free markets” all across Europe where there are no established churches or, where there are technically established churches they have no real authority over all citizens of that country who are not members, and yet faith isn’t exactly thriving and has been largely going into decline in the free, western European part since the war. There has been some religious revival since the Cold War, but it is sporadic. If “faith thrives in a free market,” Spain should not have undergone the rapid secularisation that it has experienced since the end of the Franco regime. Italy disestablished the Catholic Church in 1984, which must be why religions of all kinds have been flourishing in Italy. The Republic of Ireland hasn’t ever had an established church, yet it is experiencing the same secularisation that overtook Spain before it. It has been the last twenty years of economic and social changes that have sapped the strength of religion in Ireland. Clearly there is something much more complicated going on that cannot be explained with easy reference to establishment/disestablishment of religion.
What strikes me about Obama’s comments is that they are perfectly conventional and could have come from the most anti-European neoconservative. If Obama casts this in terms of the separation of church and state rather than describing religious pluralism in terms of “market forces,” he is nonetheless coming to the same liberal consensus answer that most Americans maddeningly endorse without thinking about whether there is any truth to it. If our civilisation were devastated in two gigantic conflagrations and much of our territory subjected to the depredations of totalitarian governments for decades on end, we might find our religious life rather less “rich” as well.
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January 23rd, 2008 at 8:25 am
chrisgbr
Here’s an attempt at defending the neo-con position…
The fundamental problem with European national churches (even once disestablished) is that they are expected to cater for everyone**. This essentially meant adopting the lowest common denominator theology — which, over time, meant the least offensive practices, and ultimately those which were thinnest in their substance and weakest in their appeal.
At the same time, it has been difficult to set up rival, competing, Christian denominations, since the national church had that ground covered. Note also that in Europe to grow as a faith (to build a church, perform outreach on TV, get funds, etc…), you need government permission and assent in a way that you don’t in the US.
If you’re at the heart of an ethnic community with an existent community of adherents to pressure politicians, it is fairly easy to get this approval. If you’re a start-up church for a new denomination, it’s much much harder.
** Prince Charles as future head of the Church of England wants to be “Defender of All Faiths”, not just “Defender of The Faith”. Whether other faiths are happy to be defended by him is far less certain.
January 23rd, 2008 at 8:48 am
Grumpy Old Man
There are persistent (and very likely false) rumors that Charles is considering converting to Orthodoxy, apparently the faith of some of his ancestors.
January 23rd, 2008 at 12:41 pm
Magnus
GOM: Charles visits Mount Athos every year, and Orthodoxy was the faith of his father. I imagine he wouldn’t be able to inherit the throne if he converted though.
I agree to some extent with chrisbr; in my home country of Norway, the conservative elements of the church has been on the losing side of every theological battle since the 1950s, almost always due to the power of the government to appoint liberal bishops. The State Lutheran Church of Norway now functions as little more than a pressure group for all kinds of left-wing issues - for more (ironically non-Christian) immigration, for withdrawing Norwegian forces from Afghanistan, for increasing foreign aid, etc. This is very likely to have turned off a lot of people from being active church-members. I think this is more an effect of secularization rather than a cause, however. As Daniel has pointed out, secularization has been a universal phenomenon in Western Europe, regardless of differing policies in each state.
January 23rd, 2008 at 1:09 pm
Grumpy Old Man
Kierkegaard had some choice things to say about the state church in 19th C Denmark.
Entrepreneurship in religion, such as we have here, has some strange decay products. I drove by the garish and ostentatious TBN HQ yesterday. Simon Magus lives.
January 23rd, 2008 at 2:05 pm
smmclaug
Hmm. It seems to me that the problem here is with Obama’s use of the word “traditionally.” In point of fact, prior to the Thirty Years’ War it was not at all traditional for European churches to exist as “arms of the state” anywhere except Russia. The problem Magnus describes is one which would only obtain under conditions where the state has gathered absolutely all public authority to itself–which, in other contexts, liberals like Obama will defend as a necessary precondition for any true separation of church and state.
January 24th, 2008 at 1:36 am
Alexei
This comes straight out of a neoconservative catechism, indeed. As most neocon arguments, this one is both shallow and factually wrong. I have to agree with Daniel that Americans did not go through the horrors of 20th century wars (nor, earlier, those of Reformation wars, including the Thirty Years’ War), which horrors begged questions about God’s goodness and mercy. For the survivors, Candide’s travails no longer seemed a grotesque exaggeration. The closest America came to such suffering was in the Civil War, when cities were burned down and civilians raped and murdered. In the eyes of Europeans, and certainly Russians, most Americans are still a bit naive and oddly optimistic about human nature, in seeming contradiction to the gloomy Calvinist anthropology many of them are supposed to espouse. (Seeming, not essential: this optimism only applies to the good guys (a secularized version of the saved) — those with a soul, to paraphrase Hillary Clinton — while the bad guys are beyond redemption and should be destroyed.)
smmclaug, no doubt “traditionally” was misused, unless in Obama’s world, all history before the Mayflower is irrelevant. But I must add that even in Russia, the church did not exist as an arm of the state in the 17th century. It came close under Ivan IV, and Peter I put it under state control in the early 18th century, but in the 17th century, relationships between the church and the state fluctuated from coalition (under tsar Mikhail and his father, the Patriarch) to rivalry (under Alexei I and the Patriarch Nikon).
January 24th, 2008 at 3:47 pm
jon kennedy
I agree generally with Daniel’s points, but I’ve seen other arguments that the quick decline of Catholic piety in Ireland after joining the EU (which may be more coincidence than cause/effect) is as much a reaction to clergy abuse there as anything else.