From the
New York Times:
Faith Fades Where It Once Burned Strong
By FRANK BRUNI
Published: October 13, 2003
ROME, Oct. 12 -- Like many Italians in decades and childhoods past, Giampaolo Servadio used to go to Roman Catholic Mass every week. He even served as an altar boy.
But last Sunday morning, as church bells tolled around this city of storied cathedrals, he followed a different ritual: he went running. It struck him as a more relevant use of time.
( Read more... )The United States is quite exceptional among developed societies. Japan, Australia and Canada, for instance, are almost as secular as Europe; Québécois are arguably just as secular. Argentina might come close to American levels, but not very.
I'm rather more skeptical about the potential for immigrants to revitalize European Christianity; about as skeptical, in fact, as of the potential for immigrants to make Europe Muslim. Past waves of immigrants to developed countries have shown a tendency to assimilate to the religious norms of their countries, after adaptation periods of varying length. Theodore Zeldin described, for instance, how Italian and Spanish immigrants in Third Republic France--coming from countries which were quite strongly Catholic, coming to an outstandingly secular country--tended to abandon religious belief quite quickly. (Much the same is apparently true among North African immigrants in modern France and Turkish immigrants in Germany, who tend not to be practising and who use Islam mainly as a cultural definition.) Barring massive uncontrolled population changes (and, I'm sorry, but Muslim populations simply are not going to grow quickly enough to change things), or mass ideological movements of some kind, Europe will remain secular.
I suspect European patterns of religiosity will tend to become the rule. The United States aside, it seems to be a fairly consistent rule that as a country develops socioeconomically--becoming a mass consumer society, becoming politically pluralistic, and so on--it tends to become increasingly secular. The desire of peopel to allow ideological pluralism encourages conscientious people to demand the separation of church and state. The church can resist, often to its detriment, but it can persist. Indeed, politicized Roman Catholicism persisted for quite some time--in France until the 1940s, in Québec until the 1960s, in southern Europe generally until the 1980s and 1990s--but it failed to endure as a dominant cultural force. The problems of sustaining religious belief in Iran, as the clerical dictatorship enforces religious belief as the central element of authoritarian politics, will also surprise (I hereby predict) many people who believe that a Muslim society can't secularize. Philip Jenkins' article
"The New Christianity" argued that Third World countries will tend to become quite religious, conservatively so; however, in a
subsequent interview he acknowledged that only the very poor (in Ethiopia, Peru, and so on) in the most marginal countries are likely to follow suit.
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