[BRIEF NOTE] Secularism's Durability

[rfmcdonald]

nhw pointed me towards this article by Timothy Garton Ash in The Guardian concerning the future of Roman Catholicism in Europe under Pope Benedict XVI.

Europe is now the most secular continent on earth. The phenomenon of the last pope masked the underlying trend. We saw the great crowds of enthusiastic young people on St Peter's Square, or at open-air masses on his many journeys, and half-forgot the plummeting figures for church attendance and the recruitment of priests. An American Baptist missionary website puts things in perspective. "Western Europe," it states, "is ... one of the world's most difficult mission fields. Most missiologists compare it to the Muslim-held Middle East when it comes to responsiveness to the gospel." Voltaire would be proud of us.

This reminds me of an essay I discovered back in November, recounting how missionaries in Prague were so dejected at being rejected by the Czechs that they took to trying to convert other visiting Americans.

For different reasons, American conservatives, Muslim fundamentalists, and old-line reactionaries say that Europeans' secular hedonistic social-democratic capitalism and its associated mindsets are inherently fragile. They say that as soon as Europeans are presented with a superior alternative--a renewed Roman Catholicism, an Americanized evangelican Protestantism, an imported Islam--they'll switch over with alacrity. Maybe, just maybe, Europeans actively like things the way that they are?