Christianity dying in Europe (NY Times)

[jsw_81]

This week Pope John Paul II is to celebrate his 25th anniversary as the head of the Roman Catholic Church, which is both Europe's and Christianity's largest denomination.

It has been a quarter century of enormous changes, and few have been more significant, for his church and mainstream Protestant denominations, than the withering of the Christian faith in Europe and the shift in its center of gravity to the Southern Hemisphere.

...

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."

Faith Fades Where It Once Burned Strong

[Clete]

1. Good for the Pope and the Church.

I hate religion but the Church provides a balance against the other ones like the Dalai Lamas Buddhists do. We need all of them so none of them become predominant.

[Terwilliger]

2. Interesting article...

GREAT sig line! :bounce:

[aquart]

3. No wonder they've been behaving so sensibly.

Faith massacred the Albigensians. And the Huguenots. And the Jews.

Great stuff, faith. A license to kill, in fact.

[BBradley]

4. What a great time to live in Europe.

I think it's because of the fact that religion is taken less seriously there, that Catholic Church has been more socially conscious. Because so many people in the States are so devout, it's easier to sell control to us.

[OldEurope]

5. That ´s what Susan Sontag said in her speach last Sunday:

One of the main differences between US and Europe is, that religious influence in Europe is getting smaller, but in the US it´s growing.

:shrug:

[onebigbadwulf]

6. Europe...

Europe didn't have to put up with two "great awakening"s.

Instead it was lucky and had the enlightenment.

And hey, maybe America is doomed to have religious fanatics forever. I mean look at us... we're nowhere closer to a secular society than palestine.

[Terwilliger]

7. kinda scary

Look what the religious influence did in Europe

[OldEurope]

8. Yes, we had to learn it the hard way!

After hundreds of years of religious wars, we learned the lesson. We now change to another sort of faith: Mammon is our god, and the rich are his prophets...


:nuke:

[Resistance Is Futile]

12. Influence of the religious reich

I can't remember where, but I came across a poll which said that the depth of religious conviction in America has more in common with Nigeria and Saudi Arabia (although of course of a different brand of god) than it does with most anywhere else on the planet.

This serves to explain why so many 'people' (term used in the physically descriptive sense only) are happy to see the GOP working to bring about armageddon.

[Paschall]

9. Your subject line is a bit provocative

And, while I usually enjoy Bruni's writing, this is an astounding understatement: "Some experts say that in Europe, suspicion of major denominations may run higher because religious leaders directly wielded political power in the past."

The Catholic Church was the power behind the divine right of European monarchs. Today its most fervent defenders include not only nostalgic monarchists who, in small numbers throughout even Western Europe, hope to restore the crowns and thrones, but also the extreme, neo-Nazi right. France's infamous Jean-Marie Le Pen is a big advocate of the Church (and he finds occassional support from the fundamentalist, anti-Vatican II clergy).

As for Bruni's remark about crosses being removed from public school classrooms in Western Europe, if we're talking about France, for example, he's only about 100 years behind the news.

Bruni also ignores the fact that--again in France, to cite perhaps the most secular Western European nation--religious figures like Abbé Pierre, who founded the Emmaus Community and who has led a life of poverty helping France's poor, disenfranchised, and forgotten, and Sister Emmanuel who tends to the poor living in Cairo's garbage dumps, are always cited by the French as the people they most admire. I believe Abbé Pierre even topped the Most Popular List for almost a decade running. He's 90, can no longer walk unaided and is almost totally deaf, but every political party courts him. When he gets on the media to talk, he doesn't mince words. And the public loves it.


Abbé Pierre, fighting for housing for the homeless in the 1950s
(kinda Che Gueverraish, huh?)

[Paschall]

11. An afterthought on religiosity and income and educational levels

Somebody once posted a very interesting study here that compared religious sentiment, income, and education. It showed that, worldwide, church affiliation drops as a country's income and education level rise. So the problem Bruni is describing is not a strictly European one.

In that same survey, however, the United States was the only country where religiosity rose with average national income and education levels. If I remember correctly, religious affiliation in the US compares with that of the much, much poorer and more poorly educated Indonesia.

[Lexingtonian]

14. interesting

But there are explanations for the American anomaly. For one thing, the U.S. is culturally very young, and there is no substituent for organized religion. In Europe, for example, a lot of people these days form common law marriages and never do the church ceremony part, and the culture consists of enough interlocking parts that dropping out of organized religion in no way entails dropping out of society.

The second is that there was a drastic exodus from American churches in the 1960s and 1970s. A lot of these people (late pre-Boomers/early Boomers, I think) ultimately drifted back into the churches in the 1980s and early 1990s when 'family' considerations demanded it. And in large parts of the country the churches are the central institutions of society there. The European exodus from the Churches was in the '20s, '30s, '40s, and '50s- also accompanying a resurgence of fascism, interestingly enough, and resurging itself at times during the the period. But no one sees any mass return to the churches in Europe during the forseeable future.

What I see when I occasionally go to the nearby megachurch is a real change over the past 10-15 years. It stopped growing and has started shrinking. The new parishioners are heavily immigrants and unpolitical, and the focus has changed from fervor and triumphalism as its official face to a lot of psychotherapeutically effective stuff. They went over from being Pat Robertson type Christians to Tony Robbins type, almost. The older parishioners are still 98% white people from rural areas of New England, ex-Catholics, and Midwestern migrees, and while they still have lots of Bush-Cheney bumperstickers their cars are half as grand as fifteen years ago.

The story is really that the second generation, the children of the white parishioners of all ages, are mentally dropping out- they don't pay much real attention to the sermons, they come to see their friends, they talk the lingo and take the 'courses', they conform, they like the singing and ceremony. But they don't volunteer, they seem to stay away as much they can get away with, they don't contribute money beyond some minimum, they avoid politics when they can. In short, they're perilously close to becoming the sort of people who fill the 'liberal' churches their parents refused to.

So I suspect we're fifteen or twenty years from a serious falloff in the conservative churches in this country. The fervent put a hugh amount of money and effort into "reversing" the calamity of the Sixties, and a lot of people had nowhere else to go in the culture in the Eighties than back to ideologically and technologically revamped conservative churches. They're in it for good, but their kids are voting with and their pocketbook and day planner and their grandchildren will see it as even more of an optional exercise. The therapeutic bent is interesting; the triumphalism and political hubris of the mid/late Eighties in these places was horrible. I suspect in more Republican areas and far from the coasts it will still be more so.

[lancemurdoch]

19. europe vs america

Michael Harrington said in "The Politics at God's Funeral" that he thought, for those who would want to see religion disappear and make way for secular humanism like himself, that the rise of fundamentalism in the US was a good thing, because it was a sign of defeat, and ultimately would drive people away from religion.

There have been many thoughts of why the US (and Canada) are so religious compared to Europe. One reason is that in Europe the state was always closely allied with religion, while in the US there is freedom of religion in the US constitution. So the separation of church and state that the fundamentalists are always whining about actually made the churches a lot stronger, because people didn't get disgusted with the churches when they got disgusted with the government.

[RainDog]

17. about those figures

did they do a breakdown of what sort of "higher education" was included in the American stats?

I wonder because people who get an MBA, for instance, don't really have to take classes which are typically considered the mark of an intellectual, at least the ones I've known.

They don't have to study a foreign language, though some choose to do so for the purpose of a job. They don't have to take courses in liberal arts as undergrads beyond a certain level of proficiency which is, from what I've seen, covered at the high school level in a lot of European school systems.

Also, people who become engineers of various types are considered a part of higher education, but again, they typically do not have to have an extensive grounding in liberal arts.

I know these things from my own family and my brother and brother-in-law who both have masters in engineering but have little or no concept of major issues in western civilization, not to mention any others.

When I lived in Belgium, something which really was noticeable to me was that people with a high school degree were often better educated than Americans with a higher degree when that degree was business or engineering or, for that matter, other subjects.

When I was in high school, the school had to pander to the religious right all the time, and it no doubt had repercussions on the quality of education.

Not to mention all the "christian" schools across the south who, at least if my niece is an example, do not have to teach the truth if it conflicts with their ideology.

A liberal education doesn't make you wealthy in America. Even if you get a PhD and teach, you can earn far more money in industry, which, again, doesn't care a thing about a life of the mind, but rather values the bottom line.

[spooky3]

20. MBAs take those courses as undergraduates.

Most MBAs do not have undergraduate degrees in business, and most have at least a few years of life experience outside of undergraduate school.

Undergraduate business degrees generally require at least 50% of their courses to be taken in the liberal arts for accreditation, though this standard is more flexible than in the past.

[Dover]

10. I think the Christian Right might have actually turned Americans

OFF to the Christian religion here in the U.S...with all the blatant hypocrisy and abuse of it's power to persuade.

And then there is the growing numbers of Americans who are seeking a more......experiential...relationship with their God (Goddess), that the male, heirarchical structure of organized religions do not seem to understand.

I'll bet the real stats show a very eclectic assortment of religious activity going on. Participation in organized Christian sects only shows a small part of the picture, imo.

I do think that Church goers do benefit from the sense of community it gives them. Particularly when that has become so hard to come by in this country.

[BonjourUSA]

13. "...about one in 20 people attends a religious service every week..."

It is certain that this figure is too much high and that much less Frenchs attend a religious service (in any religion. Even, less than 7% of muslims practice their religion).

For example around me, I only know two persons but they attend three of four catho service per year.

[arwalden]

15. Yet It Still Flourishes Here. Sad.

I guess because the religious reich has managed to link fundamentalism with patriotism. And they manage to link hatred and fear with their religion.

When last I was in Mexico City, it was MADDENING as anything to see how much money is spent on their church ornaments... that could have been used to feed a whole family for a year.

-- Allen

[RainDog]

16. time to send American missionaries to Europe!

geez.

my former relatives all had their children christened, all would consider themselves nominally Catholic, but all, at the same time, were educated enough to realize that the fundamentalist view of a literal Bible (and denying evolution, etc.) was just plain stupid.

I concur.

funny that the countries which are moving away from christianity are also the ones who will not allow the death penalty, unlike killer George, the Texas mass murdering gov.

If America is an example of a christian nation, that's a sad commentary, when we allow children to go without health care or insurance, when we kill innocent people via the death penalty, when we advocate wars at the whim of an unelected leader, when we tax the poorer and let the rich amass more and more at the expense, again, of the poorest of the poor.

If this is an example of a Christian nation, I would imagine Jesus has a little smiting to do when he gets around to judging this place.

[CWebster]

18. It doesn't really flourish here either-

the Church is in decline in the West.

When I was a child everyone went to Mass without question. Now many Catholics are secular but still retain their identity for cultural and other reasons--like secular Jews.