Melanie Phillips expressed her view this week that re-Christianisation is vital for Europe if it is to defend its Western values against Islamisation, an opinion I happen to agree with (h/t Saint):
The crucial insight here is that only a strong indigenous faith has the capacity to resist Islamisation. That is why the collapse of Christianity in Britain and Europe and its steady replacement by secularisation is so catastrophic for the defence of the west. The useful idiots who believe that only a secular society can hold off the forces of irrational belief at the heart of the Islamic jihad have got this diametrically the wrong way round. Secularisation produces cultural enfeeblement, because the pursuit of personal happiness trumps absolutely everything else. The here and now is all that matters. Dying for a cause, however noble, becomes an absolute no-no. It’s better to be dhimmi than dead – the view that has now effectively prevailed in Britain and Europe.
[..] Although the US is the high temple of consumerism, it is still a country with a very strong sense of its Christian faith. That fact is key to its robust sense of national identity, confidence and pride; and because it has such a strong sense of itself as a nation, it is prepared to fight to defend itself – the one bit of the analysis that the Islamists got wrong (although there are now deeply disturbing signs that the west’s cultural enfeeblement is beginning to erode American resolve too, at least around the edges).
That is why the cultural cringe of the Church of England before the advance of both secularism and Islamism is such unmitigated disaster, and why the Pope’s recent intervention was so significant. That is why those who sneer at President Bush’s strong Christian faith are cultural lemmings. And that is why I, a British Jew, argue that it is vital that Britain and Europe re-Christianise if they are to have any chance of defending western values.
She has drawn sharp criticism for this statement firstly because she does not herself subscribe to the belief system she is laying her hopes on and secondly because a re-Christianised Europe seems like a wild fantasy to some considering its current state. Writes Norman Geras:
A more serious problem still is that the re-Christianization of Britain and Europe just isn’t, as things currently stand, a credible societal project. Christians have been doing their bit to spread the Christian word for a very long time now. What is suddenly going to make the difference and bring new adherents flooding in, or ‘activate’ hitherto passive or lapsed believers?
Well, I can list several factors, that may not mean much when taken alone, but in combination may do just that.
1. Hundreds of thousands of Catholic Polish migrants have moved West since the 2004 EU enlargement round - about 300,000 to Britain alone. In Poland over half the population attends mass weekly, compared to under 20% in France or Italy. Poland accounts for about a quarter of Europe’s seminarians and thousands are migrating westward. Said Father Jan-Marie Szewek: “We Franciscans want to join in the rechristianization of Europe”.
Call it the Polish pastor effect.
2.According to some estimates the world’s fastest growing religion is not Islam but Christianity. Its just that most of the growth is happening in the Third World now and it is the Pentecostal Churches that are gaining the numbers. The Catholic Church is also experiencing strong growth. And this revitalised Christianity is starting to spill over back into the West. Says a Kenyan pastor in one of the largest churches in London: “I am in this country, believing that God sent me here in Great Britain to make a voice on His behalf to let them know that they need to repent and come back to God.”
Sociologist of religion Philip Jenkins, in his book “The Next Christendom: The Rise of Global Christianity”, argues that “within the next 25 years the population of the world’s Christians is expected to grow to 2.6 billion (making Christianity by far the world’s largest faith)”. An increased percentage of Christian migrants to Europe is likely, as European politics continue to shift towards the anti-Islamic immigration right. And the Pentecostal Churches have been growing rapidly in Australia even without a significant contribution from migrants. It won’t be too big of a surprise if its takes off in Europe too. Even the presence of a large Muslim population itself may contribute to a resurgence of religiosity amongst the secular Europeans, finding themselves inspired to seek their own Christian roots, much like European secularism draws many Muslim migrants towards secularism and more liberal interpretations of Islam. By the way, according to Wikipedia (edit: which quotes bible.ca) Christianity gets 2,500,000 converts per year, compared to Islam’s 865,000. Majority Muslim nations have higher birth rates, but that advantage is dimishing - birth rates are falling in Muslim majority nations, while Christianity is gaining in other countries with high birth rates.
3. Melanie Phillips is far from being the only non-Christian in Europe who holds to the above view. Said Oriana about Pope Benedict XVI: “I am an atheist, and if an atheist and a pope think the same things, there must be something true. It’s that simple! There must be some human truth here that is beyond religion.” Upon her death Oriana left all her books and papers to Pope Benedict. She had a private audience with him last year and considered him “an ally in her campaign to rally Christians in Europe against what she saw as a Muslim crusade against the West.” This emerging alliance between the anti-Islamisation secularists and conservative Christians is as natural, even as it is as odd, as the alliance between the Islamists and the far Left. And even religion needs good publicity. Don’t also underestimate the ability of Pope Benedict himself to pump some life back into European Christianity. And by the way, why did he chose the name Benedict? Here’s why:
He was thinking of not one, but two previous Benedicts.
Saint Benedict, Benedict XVIThe first was not even a Pope. In fact, he was just a simple monk who desired nothing more than to live a quiet life of prayer and work and lead others to do the same. This Benedict, born in the 5th century in Nursia, an area of Italy, fled the decadent urban life of Rome to seek a life of solitude in the country. Monastic life was chaotic and unregulated at that time, and so this young man gathered a band of monks around him and formed a community, writing a rule of life that was so practical that it became the pattern for thousands of monks and monasteries all over the world. These monks who followed this rule ultimately were the ones who evangelized and educated Europe during the “dark ages” and are still doing the work of evangelization and education today.
It is clear that Pope Benedict XVI is dedicated to gathering around himself a band of disciples who, through prayer and hard work, will lead to the re-Christianization of Europe and to the carrying of the gospel to lands that have not yet heard it.
4. In times of trouble and hardship people turn back to religion. It is as simple as that. As conditions in Europe worsen, with the aging of the population, faultering economies and problems that have come with over-immigration, and the going gets tough, the tough, and especially the weak, will get going to church.
5. Its the demographics, stupid. From the cover story of Prospect magazine, “God returns to Europe”, by Eric Kaufmann:
Europe—especially western Europe—is seen as the world leader in secular modernisation, and is used as the model by Norris and Inglehart for their theory of secularisation. But if western Europe really is the trend-setter for secularism, there is a problem: secularisation appears to be losing force in its own backyard. Western Europe can broadly be divided in two. On the one hand are Catholic countries like Spain or Ireland, where religiosity is still high—around 60 per cent of the Irish population regularly attend church—and secularisation arrived only in the second half of the 20th century. On the other are the largely Protestant nations (including Britain) and Catholic France, which secularised earlier. But survey data from 1981-2004 show that in these latter nations, on average, postwar generations are no longer becoming more secular. It seems as though western Europe, with the possible exception of Italy, will converge towards a church attendance rate of little more than 5 per cent. However this will mask a much larger proportion—around half—who continue to describe themselves as religious and affiliate with a religious denomination.
These people, described by Grace Davie as “believing without belonging,” are seen by some as carriers of a flimsy faith which will soon disappear, and which doesn’t affect behaviour or attitudes. But if this is the case, how do we explain the fact that the fertility of these non-attending believers is much closer to church attenders than to non-believers? The non-attending religious are also significantly more likely than non-believers to identify themselves as ideologically conservative, even when controlling for education, wealth, age and generation. And the religious population has two demographic advantages over its non-believing counterpart. First, it maintains a 15-20 per cent fertility lead over the non-religious. Second, religious people in the childbearing 18-45 age range are disproportionately female. Offset against this is the much younger age structure of secularists.
The pivotal question is where the balance lies between religious fertility and religious abandonment in the secular cutting-edge societies of France and Protestant Europe. The population balance in these countries stands at roughly 53 per cent non-religious to 47 per cent religious. My projections, based on demographic differences between the populations and current patterns of religious abandonment, suggest that the secular population will continue to grow at a decelerating rate for three or four more decades, to peak at around 55 per cent. The proportion of secular people will then begin to decline between 2035 and 2045. The momentum behind secularisation in the most secular countries is a reflection of the religious abandonment of the pre-1945 generations, which overwhelmed the fertility advantage of the faithful. The end of apostasy in more recent generations means a population more religious at the end of the 21st century than at its beginning. As in the case of the Mormons or early Christians, demography rather than mass conversion will be the main agent of change.
He then adds the compounding significance of immigration to the equation:
This slow shift against secularisation would have only a gradual impact on the spirit of European society were it not for immigration. Immigration from Latin America has enabled American Catholics to grow despite losing far more believers to other denominations than they get in return. In Europe, immigration will similarly drive the rise of the religious population, especially its Islamic part.
However, due to factors I have already mentioned above, Islam’s immigration advantage is likely to diminish while that of Christianity is likely to grow.
So lets not write off European Christianity just yet.
UPDATE: Michael Burleigh with a couple more possibilities in the Telegraph, Nov 7:
What he [Nick Spencer of the Theos think tank in Britain] describes as a new, diffuse concern with “wellbeing” will inevitably make religion more important to politics, in that politicians will have to address an essentially religious agenda, based on values and ultimate meanings, of the sort with which Senator McCain electrified the Conservatives when he addressed their party conference.
It is also probable that infantile Islamic enragement, and the sillier provocations of “diversity” officers in local government, will sooner rather than later trigger a much broader revival of cultural Christianity, as people balk at the insensitive disregard of this country’s two-millennia-old religious traditions, which are far from defunct in the moral imaginations of many.