RELIGION AND EUROPE

I love this piece by Brian M. Carney in today's Wall Street Journal. It exactly reflects my previous posts on this issue.

Practicing Christianity in Europe today enjoys a status not dissimilar to smoking marijuana or engaging in unorthodox sexual activities--few people mind if you do so in private, but you are expected not to talk about it or ask others whether they do it too. Christianity is considered retrograde and atavistic in a "progressive" society devoted to the good life--long holidays, short work hours and generous government benefits.

Carney describes the thesis of a book by George Weigel called "The Cube and the Cathedral"...

The cathedral in his title is Notre Dame, now overshadowed in cultural importance by the Arc de la Defense, the ultramodernist "cube" that dominates an office complex outside Paris. "European man has convinced himself that in order to be modern and free, he must be radically secular," Mr. Weigel writes. "That conviction and its public consequences are at the root of Europe's contemporary crisis of civilizational morale."

Carney and, it seems, Weigel, share a vision of Europe in the future that I have posted about myself.

Mr. Weigel is on firmer ground when he analyzes Europe's present condition, with its low birth rates, heavy debts, Muslim immigration worries and tendency to carp from the sidelines when the fate of nations is at stake. In what is certainly the most attention-grabbing passage in an engagingly written book, Mr. Weigel sketches the worst-case scenario--the "bitter end"--for a Europe that is religiously bereft, demographically moribund and morally without a compass: "The muezzin summons the faithful to prayer from the central loggia of St. Peter's in Rome, while Notre-Dame has been transformed into Hagia Sophia on the Seine--a great Christian church become an Islamic museum."

Read the whole thing.