Religion in Europe: Christianity on the defensive/Christianity under siege

Newscom: A stained-glass window in the Oude Kerk, a church surrounded by the red-light district of Amsterdam, the NetherlandsUntil recently, Amsterdam’s Oude Kerk, or “Old Church,” seemed the perfect symbol for Europe’s religious situation. Founded in the 13th century, when such massive cathedrals expressed the faith of an entire continent, the Oude Kerk is today surrounded by the Dutch city’s infamous red-light district.

In “Old Church Square” visitors can choose from among at least a half-dozen brothels or sit down for a perfectly legal smoke in a hash bar. A bronze statue just outside the main door portrays a scantily clad woman in a provocative pose and carries the inscription, “Respect sex workers around the world.”

Inside the cathedral, the atmosphere is hardly any more conducive to prayer. Today the church is a museum and tourist destination. Like kudzu swallowing up crops in the American South, secularism has all but enveloped the Oude Kerk -- and with it, or so a longtime consensus once held, religious faith and practice across much of the old continent.

That’s the way things seemed until 2004, when Amsterdam offered a shocking new metaphor for the collision between the sacred and the secular in today’s Europe: the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a Muslim radical named Mohammed Bouyeri, the son of Moroccan immigrants to Holland.

Though most Muslims insist that such violence cannot be justified by Islamic belief, the van Gogh murder, in tandem with bombings by Muslim radicals in Madrid in 2004 and London in 2005, has nonetheless generated a new look at secular European assumptions about the public irrelevance of religion. Launching a global interfaith project, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair recently asserted, “Religious faith will be of the same significance to the 21st century as political ideology was to the 20th.”

‘I’d buy Christianity’

No one knows exactly how many Muslims are in Europe today, in part because some are undocumented, and in part because several European nations don’t include religion on their national census. Drawing upon various sources, the U.S. National Intelligence Council estimates that the Muslim population rose from 5 million in 1985 to 15 million in 2005, representing 200 percent growth. By 2050, the council expects 40 million Muslims in Europe, which would represent 15 percent of a population of roughly 500 million. (That’s without factoring in the possible admission of Turkey to the European Union.)

At one level, the anxieties unleashed by this rising tide are basically cultural -- that the erstwhile cradle of Christendom could find itself transformed into part of the dar al-Islam, or the global “house of Islam.” More recently, worries have surfaced that a secular backlash against Muslim demands for special treatment could erode traditional privileges for established Christian churches across Europe.

For some, this all means that Christianity in Europe will increasingly find itself on the defensive. Others, however, see opportunity.

“If you are the type of person who buys stocks and bonds, I’d buy Christianity,” said Odon Vallet, a professor of religion at the Sorbonne in Paris. “The price now is very low, so I think it has to go up.”

Looking down the line at the implications of Europe’s growing Muslim presence, observers say at least three trajectories for Christianity seem plausible: Depending upon who’s doing the forecasting, the rapid rise of Islam in Europe could be the final nail in the coffin for institutional Christianity or the harbinger of a surprising Christian revival. Still others believe that an aroused Christianity and Islam could pool forces against the dominant secular milieu.

One of these three trajectories is outlined in the Feb. 14 issue of the U.K.-based newsmagazine The Economist: new ambivalence about religion across the board. As an example of things to come, the story pointed to a 2001 decision from the European Court of Human Rights refusing to sanction an annulment issued by a Catholic tribunal in Italy.

That’s a worrisome prospect for many Christian leaders, and it’s not hard to understand why. Despite centuries of secularization, their patchwork of prerogatives across Europe remains extensive.

Dean Pictures/Francis Dean: A muslim woman on a street in Copenhagen, DenmarkFor example, although just 8 percent of Germans now attend religious services on a weekly basis, the German government still collects a mandatory “church tax” that nets 8.5 billion euros each year, with the lion’s share going to Lutherans and Catholics. The Catholic church uses that income to fund massive worldwide charitable operations such as Misereor and Adveniat, works it would struggle to support if it had to rely on voluntary donations.

The long-held prerogatives aren’t just about money, but also political clout. The British House of Lords, for example, sets aside 26 seats for diocesan bishops from the established Church of England. That privilege reflects an assumption that Anglican clergy are the nation’s conscience -- a questionable proposition these days, some might say, given a 2004 poll finding that just 44 percent of Brits say they believe in God, and 55 percent say they never go to church.

Such forms of state support for religion have long been criticized by European secularists, who say they’re relics of a bygone age. Today, that objection is being amplified by alarm that such perks may set a precedent for Islamic radicals to demand the right to apply Shariah or to otherwise seek exemptions from civil law. Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams recently triggered fierce debate by suggesting that England may need to allow a limited application of Shariah to marital and financial matters, as Orthodox Jews are currently permitted to apply Jewish law to such questions.

Perhaps ironically, some European leftists are sounding alarms about an excess of tolerance, arguing that the values of the Enlightenment must be defended against religious “fanaticism.” In 2006, 12 left-leaning intellectuals, including Salman Rushdie, put out a manifesto suggesting that the real European fault line runs between “theocrats and democrats.” The thrust was to press for more thorough church/state separation. Although intended to curb Islamic extremism, such proposals could hit Christian churches the hardest, since they generally have the most to lose.

These conflicts won’t always put Christianity on the losing side. Observers point to a case in Italy, where an Islamic firebrand in 2003 demanded that crucifixes be removed from a local public school. Virtually the entire political class rallied to the school’s defense, and an appeals court in 2006 held that the crucifixes can stay as an expression of Italian national identity.

Nonetheless, some forms of Christian church belief can run up against an emerging European consensus on human rights.

In 2004, for example, a Pentecostal pastor was convicted in Sweden under laws against hate speech for declaring that homosexuality is “a deep, cancerous tumor on all of society.” The country’s Supreme Court later set aside the conviction under provisions in the European Convention on Human Rights concerning freedom of religion, but Swedish prosecutors have vowed to revisit the issue. In the same year in France, “anti-gay comments” were added to a class of prohibited speech, prompting Catholic leaders to express concern that the law might prevent bishops from opposing gay marriage. In 2007, the English government determined that any adoption agency that does not allow gay couples to adopt is in violation of English law.

From a juridical point of view, Christianity in Europe today thus finds itself between a rock and a hard place -- between concerns about coddling Islam, and an equally strong current of liberal secular opinion.

Vicarious religion

A second trajectory for European Christianity in this modern age, some observers believe, is that anxieties about religion in the public sphere could stimulate a Christian revival.

For one thing, experts say there’s still a vestigial identification with Christianity in Europe that flares up under pressure. British sociologist Grace Davie calls this “vicarious religion,” pointing to Sweden in 1994, when a ferry sank en route from Estonia to Stockholm, killing more than 800 Swedish passengers. As the news broke, ultrasecular Swedes flocked to local churches. In moments of crisis, Davie concludes, even secular people instinctively want churches to perform their traditional roles.

AP/PA Wire/Stefan Rousseau: An anti-Shariah protester interrupts Archbishop Rowan Williams' Easter sermon March 23 at Canterbury Cathedral in Kent, England.The more Europeans perceive Islam as a threat, some analysts say, the more likely they are to fall back on this vicarious Christianity.

There’s a growing contingent of what one might call “Christian atheists” in today’s Europe, meaning nonbelievers nevertheless committed to a strong defense of Christian culture. The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, for example, describes himself as a secular nonbeliever, yet in a 2004 essay he declared: “Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. ... Everything else is idle postmodern chatter.”

Hints of a revival also occasionally sprout up at the grass roots. In England, St. George’s Day is making a comeback. In Holland, books on Christian spirituality sold at record levels in 2007, and a prayer-in-the-workplace movement has been surprisingly popular. Crucifixes have been reintroduced to Catholic schools in the country. Also last year, Der Spiegel ran a story about a Christian revival in Germany headlined “Religion, Born Again.”

If Islam prods European Christianity into a more muscular posture, some experts say it could reap an “identity dividend.”

American sociologist Rodney Stark, for example, argues that globally it is religious movements with the clearest boundaries and the highest demands of members that flourish, a strategy he calls “high-tension” religion. Low-tension groups, he says, tend to be “dissolved into the cauldron of secularism.”

Christianity’s best friend

Over time, yet a third outcome seems possible: Muslims and Christians could come to see secularism, rather than each other, as the real enemy. Under that scenario, Islam would be transformed from a threat into Christianity’s best friend.

As counterintuitive as that might presently seem, there’s precedent for it. The Vatican and Islamic nations, for example, joined forces in opposing abortion during United Nations conferences on population and women in the mid-1990s -- efforts dubbed an “unholy alliance” by critics from the European Union. More broadly, the Catholic church and Islamic leaders in Europe may find themselves shoulder to shoulder in defending the right of religious communities to express themselves in public debates.

In politics, some analysts believe the natural home of a Muslim middle class will ultimately be center-right parties, many of Christian origin, that defend traditional morality and a strong role for religion in public life. To some extent the future is now in Germany, where a small but growing number of Muslims are becoming Christian Democrats, the party chaired by Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Whether Christians and Muslims in Europe learn to think of themselves as allies, experts say, depends on how things develop on both sides. Muslims need to rein in the radicals, but Christians also need to be “open-minded,” according to the Rev. Johan Candelin of Finland, a pastor in the Swedish Lutheran church and head of the Religious Liberty Commission for the World Evangelical Alliance, a body that represents 420 million evangelical Christians in 128 nations.

Candelin recently led a delegation of Christian leaders to Greece to promote the religious freedom of Muslim Turkish immigrants. He conceded, however, that the prospects for collaboration remain uncertain.

“Far from all Christians,” Candelin said, “are open-minded.”

Some things won’t change

These three trajectories are sometimes presented as either/or alternatives -- either partnership or conflict, either revival or demise. Reality, however, is usually more complicated. Most experts believe Europe will see some combination of all three scenarios.

Amid the uncertainty, it seems safe to bet that Christianity isn’t going to disappear. The 8 million pilgrims who flock each year to the shrine of Padre Pio at San Giovanni Rotondo in southern Italy, for example, or the 12,000 worshipers who show up each Sunday at the Pentecostal church of Kingsway in London, may represent a subculture, but hardly one that seems headed for extinction.

Another bet among many is that Islam will be an important presence in tomorrow’s Europe, but is unlikely to set the cultural tone. Ralph Peters, a former American military intelligence official and longtime observer of European trends, summed up the argument that the continent’s liberal secular traditions are simply too strong to be extinguished.

“There is zero chance of Europe becoming Eurabia, or of parts of Europe being governed formally by Shariah law,” Peters said. “The whole ‘Muslims-are-taking-over’ hysteria is nuts.

“Even if Swedes will no longer fight for Lutheranism,” he said, “by God, they’ll kill without remorse to keep their saunas.”

John L. Allen Jr. is NCR senior correspondent. His e-mail address is jallen@ncronline.org.

National Catholic Reporter June 13, 2008