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Secular Europe, religious America.

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AMERICA and Europe, or at least the nations of "old" western Europe, have been increasingly at odds since the end of the Cold War. Even a casual observer can see this in the rampant anti-Americanism on the continent. The hostility manifests itself with particular force among elites: The European Union deputy and French political scientist Olivier Duhamel, to take just one example, recently described the United States as a "degenerate" democracy--an irrational nation and a threat to global order. A recent poll ranked the American "hyperpower" second only to Israel as the greatest danger to world peace. Political relations between the United States and Europe have become so chilly that France and Germany openly worked to undercut their long-time ally in the run up to war in Iraq.

One should not overstate the importance of these tensions within the democratic world. Nobody is predicting that Belgium and the United States will be firing missiles at each other any time soon, or ever. But as Robert Kagan has observed, it sometimes seems nowadays as if Americans and Europeans live on different planets. There are a variety of explanations for the widening rift, among them the end of the Cold War, which has deprived the Western democracies of a powerful common enemy against which to unify; contrasting views of the roles of national sovereignty and of international institutions; use of the death penalty in the United States; and anger over the Bush administration's decision to use military force to prosecute the global struggle against Islamist terror. One of the most significant sources of tension and lack of mutual understanding between America and Europe, however, is religion--or better, America's religiosity and Europe's lack of it.

A post-Christian Europe

Europe is becoming a very secular place. As the general secretary of the United Reform Church in Britain put it, "In western Europe, we are hanging on by our fingernails." In truth, he says, "Europe is no longer Christian." When French political theorist Marcel Gauchet writes of recent European history as "characterized by the collapse of what remained of the religious pillars of heteronomy and the triumph of the metaphysical principle of human independence," he is not indulging in hyperbole.

Numbers 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.

True, few Europeans proclaim outright atheism, and a majority still call themselves Christians. But how many are Christian in anything but a nominal sense? Not only do Europeans not go to church very often; only about 40 percent believe in heaven and only half that percentage in hell. The concept of sin is vanishing from the European mind. Just 57 percent of Spaniards, 55 percent of Germans, 40 percent of French people, and approximately 30 percent of Swedes now believe in the existence of sin.

Post-Christian Europe has unsurprisingly sunken progressively deeper into moral relativism. Assessing the EVS's findings, Romir, a Russian public opinion and market research group, notes that in most European countries, "Many people believe that there are no absolutely unambiguous rules on what is good and evil that apply to everyone, irrespective of the circumstances." The EVS also shows that a more radical view--that good and evil depend entirely on cultural and historical circumstances--is ever more widespread across the continent, with only Poland and Malta resisting the trend. "Moral relativism would therefore appear to be predominant in Europe," Romir declares. This holds particularly true of sexual and bioethical concerns. Only when it comes to tax evasion and bribery do Europeans retain a relatively straightforward, "old-fashioned" sense of right and wrong.

Empty pews,...

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