Is religion dead in Europe?

Not really, reports the Wall Street Journal. Excerpt:

After decades of secularization, religion in Europe has slowed its slide toward what had seemed inevitable oblivion. There are even nascent signs of a modest comeback. Most church pews are still empty. But belief in heaven, hell and concepts such as the soul has risen in parts of Europe, especially among the young, according to surveys. Religion, once a dead issue, now figures prominently in public discourse.

God's tentative return to Europe has scholars and theologians debating a hot question: Why? Part of the reason, pretty much everyone agrees, is an influx of devout immigrants. Christian and Muslim newcomers have revived questions relating to faith that Europe thought it had banished with the 18th-century Enlightenment. At the same time, anxiety over immigration, globalization and cutbacks to social-welfare systems has eroded people's contentment in the here-and-now, prodding some to seek firmer ground in the spiritual.

Some scholars and Christian activists, however, are pushing a more controversial explanation: the laws of economics. As centuries-old churches long favored by the state lose their monopoly grip, Europe's highly regulated market for religion is opening up to leaner, more-aggressive religious "firms." The result, they say, is a supply-side stimulus to faith.

"Monopoly churches get lazy," says Eva Hamberg, a professor at Lund University's Centre for Theology and Religious Studies and co-author of academic articles that, based on Swedish data, suggest a correlation between an increase in religious competition and a rise in church-going. Europeans are deserting established churches, she says, "but this does not mean they are not religious."

First things first: this is good news, however tentative. In 19th-century Copenhagen, Soren Kierkegaard famously railed against state religion, saying that they killed real Christianity by institutionalizing and bourgeoisifying it. When everyone is a Christian, SK said, Christianity therefore ceases to exist. His point is that when being a Christian is considered commensurate with being a citizen, the radical existential choices that true Christianity requires of the individual are a lot harder to make. If to be a Christian requires character transformation, as SK believed it did, then to be given to understand that your character doesn't need changing because you have already arrived by virtue of being a member of the institutional church is to be in serious, serious spiritual trouble -- without realizing it.

Anyway, the gist of this Journal story is the contention that religion in Europe has suffered a brush with death because of its long history of being part of the state, or at least the ruling class. The established church -- and by that I mean also the Catholic Church in Catholic countries -- held a monopoly on religion, which quashed competition (goes the theory). Because America never had an established church, and an established-church mentality never took hold, religion could be more responsive to market demands. Which is why it thrives here and not there.

There are, unsurprisingly, skeptics of this view. From the Journal:

The notion that Adam Smith's invisible hand reaches into the spiritual realm has many detractors. Steve Bruce, a professor of sociology at Aberdeen University in Scotland, says market theory "works for cars and soap powder but it does not work for religion." Christianity in Europe, he says, has reached the point of no return, like a dying language doomed because too few people transmit its vocabulary to their children.

The Church of Sweden is also skeptical of the supply-side view. "We don't sell a product," says archbishop Anders Wejryd. With 1,800 congregations, he says, his church must cater to a spectrum of views. He says the Church of Sweden's more dynamic parishes, some of which mimic evangelicals' methods, are thriving.

I've got mixed opinions about this. For a traditionalist like me, it makes little sense to talk about religion in terms of marketing. The (dying) Church of Sweden archbishop is right: religion is not a product. When you're talking about eternal truth, you can't compromise on it to meet what people want to believe.

On the other hand, the complacency of established churches is inexcusable. There's a reason mainline Protestant churches have long been hemorrhaging members to the more dynamic Evangelical and Pentecostal movements. There's a reason why these Evangelical and Pentecostal movements are taking Latin America -- and Latin American Catholics -- by storm. I personally don't respond to these movements, but if we trad types dismiss these movements, we are fools. They are meeting real needs -- needs that aren't being met by the established churches. A good friend of mine left the Greek Orthodox Church for Evangelicalism because, in his accounting, his parish atmosphere was funereal, and suffused with the certainty that nobody would ever leave.

My Orthodox parish is different, fortunately. We've got a couple of very conservative Catholics considering conversion. They're both examining theological differences, but what brought them there initially was very similar to one of the main reasons I and my family ended up there: spiritual desperation, because our real and legitimate spiritual needs were not being met in Catholicism. I used to dismiss Catholics who complained that their needs weren't being met as weak-minded. And then I found myself in a position of being lonely and alienated as a Catholic, and trapped by my theological convictions. Eventually I lost my Catholic faith in part because I could no longer believe that my salvation depended on being Catholic, but that it did depend on being transformed by and in the image of the living Christ.

The point is not to rehash an old argument here. What I do want to say is that we traditionalists cannot afford to forget that we have to constantly make the old truths relevant to new generations. That doesn't mean compromising on the things we can't compromise on, either theologically or liturgically. But it does mean figuring out a way to make the message live.

As for Europe, I don't buy the market theory as a sufficient explanation. I don't know enough about European religious history to venture an informed opinion, but having spent the last month reading about World War I, I find it easy to see how the experience of the trenches -- as well as the experience of World War II -- made the prospect of faith in Christianity psychologically and emotionally untenable. Understand, I'm not saying that those civilization-destroying calamities disproved God's existence; I am saying that it is plausible that they damaged the European spirit such that belief in the old verities seemed absurd to quite a large number of people.

There's a reason why we Christians pray "lead us not into temptation." None of us can say for sure how well we would come through a time of testing.