Is religion dead in Europe?

Uh...welcome to the post-Modern era. The Enlightened emperor has no clothes and the large majority in the younger generations have awoken to that fact. Metaphysics and belief are no longer dirty words. It's not just Christianity that is seeing growth in Europe. Paganism (the real kind), all kinds of New Age beliefs, and Islam are all gaining converts as well.

please delete previous!

War is a terrible test of faith, but it cuts both ways. Some will lose faith, but others will gain it. Recall that C.S. Lewis and J.R.R.Tolkien (and their circle) were of the generation that fought World War I and sent sons to World War II. Complacency is a worse enemy than war, and I think prosperity is perhaps the worst enemy of religion. Not because good people don't deserve to be comfortable, but because comfortable people forget the Source of their prosperity.

Complacency is a worse enemy than war

I disagree. I have four beloved children, and a niece in the Navy. I would a WHOLE lot rather be pointing out to them that possibly they've grown too complacent than burying what remains of their bodies after they got blown up (God forbid) on some battlefield chosen for them by the same kind of insanity that made the British aristocracy believe that WWI would cleanse their souls. I also think it's a good deal easier to recover from a spell of excess prosperity than to recover from amputation, blindness, or brain damage sustained in battle. Not to mention the terrible damage to heart and soul incurred by doing and seeing things that should never happen. War is nobody's friend.

(And I wouldn't use Lewis and Tolkien as poster children for the religious value of war, either. If you look carefully at their lives and work, you'll see a couple of human beings who were seriously broken in some ways. Both had lifelong depression and problems with intimacy. This had multiple causes, no doubt, including the fact that both were orphans. But being thrown into the cauldron of the trenches, to witness the senseless deaths of most of their friends, can't have helped a lot.)

I honestly can't reconcile this:

"When you're talking about eternal truth, you can't compromise on it to meet what people want to believe."

with this:

"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."

As a Catholic, I believe that the living Christ is Himself the Eternal Truth. Who will meet our spiritual needs, if not Him? At whose table will we be fed, if not His?

I don't pretend to understand all of the complex and varied reasons why Europe lost the faith. But I rather suspect Europe began by musing, "Perhaps my salvation doesn't depend on being Catholic..." And then Europe in the person of Martin Luther went out and nailed the 95 Theses on the doors of the Church in Wittenberg...

It is hard to argue that religion is not a product when you spend an entire post indicating you treated it as exactly that.

You say of the evangelical movement;

"I personally don't respond to these movements"

So their product is not for you.

You write;

"They are meeting real needs"

Not that they are true or false.

And provide an example;

"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."

Of your friend changing religions based the "product's" utility not its truth.

Your description of your own conversion experience;

"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."

is less Paul than it is Consumer Reports.

On the whole the post supports Eva Hamberg's thesis. The Catholic product left you dissatisfied so you discarded it and found a product more suited to your needs.

I wish I could figure out how this new, improved comments display worked. One of you figures it out, tell me. Anyway, Erin writes:

I honestly can't reconcile this:

"When you're talking about eternal truth, you can't compromise on it to meet what people want to believe."

with this:

"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."

As a Catholic, I believe that the living Christ is Himself the Eternal Truth. Who will meet our spiritual needs, if not Him? At whose table will we be fed, if not His?

I don't pretend to understand all of the complex and varied reasons why Europe lost the faith. But I rather suspect Europe began by musing, "Perhaps my salvation doesn't depend on being Catholic..." And then Europe in the person of Martin Luther went out and nailed the 95 Theses on the doors of the Church in Wittenberg...

Your understanding would appear to preclude knowing Christ in a salvific way outside the ecclesial strictures of the Roman Catholic Church. Even the Catholic Church doesn't claim (anymore) that you cannot be saved as a non-Catholic Christian. What changed for me was the belief that Catholicism taught the complete truth, and that to leave the Catholic Church was to turn my back on Truth. I could be wrong, and from your point of view I am at best self-deceived. I respect your viewpoint, but I don't share it. To be a Christian is to be transformed by Christ, into being like Christ. For reasons all too well known, remaining in communion with the Catholic Church was, for me, destroying my faith. This is not the place to rehash that debate -- seriously -- but only to say that I, and my family, were desperate for Jesus, and for various reasons we had lost the ability to connect with Him within Catholicism. Had I stayed a Catholic and continued on the course I was on, I would have borne bitter, dessicated fruit, if any fruit at all.

I guess what I mean to say is that for Christians, living in truth does not ultimately mean assenting to doctrines (though that is profoundly important). It *ultimately* means establishing a transformative relationship with the person of Jesus Christ. Truth, then, is in the end a Person. I am aware of the problems of subjectivity that that introduces into the practice and understanding of faith. In my case, though, I had come to think of being a Roman Catholic as an end in itself, rather than the most effective means to the end of holiness. I certainly don't think Orthodoxy is an end either.

"To follow Christ is to confront a religious status quo that is more interested in maintaining tradition than allowing Him freedom to lead His sheep wherever He wills."

How, then, do you reconcile this with 2 Thess 2:15: "Hold fast to the traditions that you were taught", or Jude 3, which refers to "the faith once delivered"?

This is not to discount the new wine/old wineskins issue; it's very real. In Orthodoxy, you've got the problem of some "cradle" Orthodox perceiving Western converts as a stumbling block (and, to be fair, vice versa)--witness, for example, statements from some Russian bishops recently about how holding services in English represents an unacceptable deviation from Orthodox tradition and practice. On a smaller scale, some American converts view the adoption of the smallest ethnic practice (particularly with regard to music) as being unacceptable--"I'm in America, I want to hear American music" being something I hear often when somebody decides that Byzantine or Russian chant is too alien-sounding for them (even when sung in English).

However, I respectfully suggest that this is not a problem that can be solved outside of the Church or outside of the context of Tradition. In other words, one does not solve a problem with the Church by starting a new one, or by eliminating the concept of the Church. The "old wineskins" are people, not the institution itself--the Church cannot be an "old wineskin," because it is "the pillar and ground of the truth" (1 Tim 3:15) which has the Holy Spirit "which will lead you into all truth" (John 16:13). From that perspective, the idea of Evangelicals patting themselves on the back for "allowing much more new wine" and being "more flexible as new wineskins" comes across as misguided.

But talking about "meeting needs" and so forth also seems misguided to me. Christianity isn't a "religion service provider"; it's not a utility like the phone company. There is but one thing needful, and to start talking about individual "spiritual needs" is to go down a very subjective and slippery slope that inevitably winds up at the point of everything being a matter of taste and opinion.

To relate this back to Europe--well, this man certainly seems to be "new wine," in many respects.

Richard

I don't pretend to understand all of the complex and varied reasons why Europe lost the faith. But I rather suspect Europe began by musing, "Perhaps my salvation doesn't depend on being Catholic..." And then Europe in the person of Martin Luther went out and nailed the 95 Theses on the doors of the Church in Wittenberg...

I agree with this.

One does not need to be "Catholic" to have individual faith, but it does to maintain a growing Christian culture.

It took 1000 years to grow Catholic culture in Europe into the demographic powerhouse that sailed the world over. It has taken about 400 years to undo it. Luther indeed was the beginning of the end; today, African Chistians are preaching the gospel in Europe to an demographic sinkhole.

No other form of Christianity (or unbelief) has shown the time-tested strength of RC culture. So time is on the side of RC, and the enemy of all those who leave RC: they either splinter and retreat from the broader culture, or withdraw and then demographically impode over the long haul.

Rod, I don't think we have ever met, but I've come to know you over the last eight years or so through e-mails, your dead tree articles, a couple of telephone conversations with Mr. Modern Man (Tomaso :-)) and blogs. I've even defended you via letters to the editor.

But, when it comes to your explanations for switching from the RCC to Orthodoxy, I, too, don't know what the hell your talking about.

You said to Erin:
"Your understanding would appear to preclude knowing Christ in a salvific way outside the ecclesial strictures of the Roman Catholic Church." How could you believe she meant anything like that; you know what authentic Catholics believe.

"Even the Catholic Church doesn't claim (anymore) that you cannot be saved as a non-Catholic Christian." You also know the RCC NEVER held that position. That sounds like something a televangelist phoney would say, and we all know you're not one of those.
" What changed for me was the belief that Catholicism taught the complete truth...". I sure would like you to tell us what truth the RCC is not teaching.

" To be a Christian is to be transformed by Christ, into being like Christ. For reasons all too well known, remaining in communion with the Catholic Church was, for me, destroying my faith." Huh? You can't be like Christ in the RCC?
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Rod, it should be obvious to you by now that your reasons are not well known. Rod and Europe have lost the RC faith. Don't you think it's time to finally clear up the confusion on the part of your readers?

BTW, the WSJ's opinion that America never had an established church is de facto incorrect. Protestantism (any and all kinds, shallow or solid) was our state religion, and remains so in polite society. Even the Clintons were forced by convention to make a show of going to Sunday service, Bible in hand. An openly authentic Roman Catholic could not be elected president. Only a Catholic who promised not to act like one (JFK) could be elected.

First, the Catholic Church never did teach that non-Catholic Christians couldn't be saved.

Well, that’s an interesting statement. I’m sure the speaker thinks it’s true, and it may even be true--in some sense. That is, some theologians and Church documents somewhere were probably always able to be interpreted in a way that would make it true. But when we say “the Church teaches” x or y, we also have to take into account what the conventional public record had to say about it. If Father Frank and Sister Mary teach that all Protestants go to hell, and hundreds of Catholic school children are convinced that is what “the Church” says, doesn’t this become, for those children, the effective teaching of the Church? I think this happened with a lot of things that the currently more liberal Church now wishes to distance itself from.

I know that my little brother effectively lost his faith the day that Sister told him our mother would go to Hell because she was a Presbyterian. I certainly was convinced that you would go to Hell for being a Protestant. It made no sense to me, but that’s what I was told.

I guess it’s not the teaching of the Church that you will go to Hell for going to the movies in the archdiocese of Philadelphia--but Cardinal Dougherty proclaimed in 1934 that Catholics were forbidden to attend movies on pain of serious sin, and the ban has never officially been lifted.

I still remember the shock and awe I felt as a child when I saw the National Review cover title, “Mater, Si, Magistra, No.” NR was always right. But . . . but the Pope was always right, too! How could they possibly disagree, I wondered. Quite a few Catholics demanded an apology. But they didn’t get one.

My point is, it’s not so very easy to determine what the Church “has never” or “has always” taught. Chances are you’ll find some representative of the Church who has taught that very thing. So, if the essence of being a Catholic is never to make up your own mind, but always to accept exactly what you are taught, you are in a quandary. You have to decide for yourself whose teaching is valid. Once you begin making those decisions, you are already on the slippery slope to freedom.

It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery. . . .The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love.

I agree with what Erin and others have said about the potential damage done by treating faith in the “utilitarian” sort of way. I thought the Pope was committed to the idea of the “smaller but purer” church, and to the extent that Europeans are flocking to Christian rock and hip evangelicalism, they’re no better off.

My other thought was: Do we really need a large group of confused evangelicals in Europe who might be the next bunch of dupes for a Bush-like theology?