Public Interest, Spring, 2004 by Brian C. AndersonNumbers drawn from the long-term European Values Study (EVS) and other research underscore the degree to which
Europe has abandoned its Christian heritage. For one thing, the pews of Europe's churches are often empty.
In France, only one in twenty people now attends a religious service every week, and the demographic skews to the aged. Only 15 percent of Italians attend weekly while roughly 30 percent of Germans still go to church at least once a month. Indifference is widespread. A mere 21 percent of Europeans hold religion to be "very important."
In France, arguably the most secular of Europe's nations outside of the formerly Lutheran countries of northern Europe, the percentage is lower still, at slightly over 10 percent. As Cardinal Dionigi Tettamanzi, archbishop of Milan, lamented in the New York Times in October, "The parishes tell me that there are children who don't know how to make the sign of the cross."
Only Europe's growing Muslim population seems to exhibit any religious fervor...
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Empty pews, aging believers, indifference--almost everything about western Europe's religious life conveys the sense of exhaustion and defeat. Almost all of the trend lines have moved in the direction that Gauchet suggests, away from any strong sense of religious identification and toward greater individualism and secularism. The European Union's recent refusal to include any reference to Europe's Christian heritage in its proposed constitution, despite the protests of the Vatican and various European Christian groups, is historically absurd, given Christianity's significant contribution to the development of the idea of human rights. That said, this decision hardly came as a surprise.
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Looking to the United States, a very different religious scene appears--one not of desiccation but of robust faith communities and great spiritual thirst. Upward of
60 percent of Americans (nearly thrice the European percentage) claim that "religion plays a very important role" in their lives. More than
80 percent of Americans (90 percent in some surveys) profess belief in God.
America boasts countless houses of worship. U.S. News & World Report recently noted that there are "more churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques per capita in the United States than in any other nation on Earth: one for about every 865 people."
And those houses overflow with worshipers. A full
22 percent of America's 159 million Christians (three-fourths of the adult population) say they attend religious services more than once a week, and almost three quarters of Christians attend at least once or twice a month. "
More people in the United States attend religious services on any given weekend than watch football--in all the stadiums, on high school football fields, college campuses, and all the television sets of the nation put together," says Catholic theologian Michael Novak.
Many cable and satellite television and radio stations offer religious programming around the clock. Most bookstores feature well-stocked religion sections, and many of the books shelved there sell briskly, some even becoming best-sellers. Public figures from presidents to basketball stars openly thank God for granting them spiritual strength or success.
America also appears in some ways to be getting more religious, not less. The Pew Research Center found that
the number of Americans who "agree strongly" with three fundamental tenets of faith--belief in God, in Judgment Day, and in the importance of prayer--
has risen by as much as ten points over the last four decades. Fifteen years ago, the Economist points out, two-fifths of American Protestants described themselves as "born again"--signaling
a strong embrace of Christ as personal savior. The percentage has climbed to more than half. Born-again Christians now make up 39 percent of America's adult population. Further, four out of five Americans say they have "experienced God's presence or a spiritual force," and 46 percent maintain it happens to them often. "People are reaching out in all directions in their attempt to escape from the seen world to the unseen world," pollster George Gallup, Jr., tells U.S. News. "There is a deep desire for spiritual moorings--a hunger for God."...
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How are we to explain this divergence in religiosity within the liberal democratic universe? One thing that cannot help us is the "secularization theory" once popular among sociologists. It holds, in Berger's words, that "
modernization necessarily leads to a decline of religion, both in society and in the minds of individuals." This theory now seems suspect, as Berger, a former proponent, acknowledges. If modernity inevitably brings secularism, a "disenchantment of the world," then how is it that the United States--the modern nation par excellence--is so religious? Nor is secularization increasing in modernizing areas of the world, from Latin America to the Middle East, Berger points out. Europe today seems more the exception than the rule when it comes to religious belief.
A more plausible explanation points to the very dissimilar histories of how democracy arrived in America and in Europe. The European democratic tradition, the model for which originated in the French Revolution, has been hostile to religion from its inception, and religion, especially the Catholic church, had until recently been hostile to it in return.
In America, however, democracy and religion have mostly been friends. Alexis de Tocqueville understood this divergence clearly. "Among us," he wrote of the French in Democracy in America, "I had seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom almost always move in contrary directions." In America, by contrast, Tocqueville found the spirits of religion and democracy "united intimately with one another: they reigned together on the same soil."...
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