Who Lost Europe? -- Sightings

At least since the time of Constantine, there has been, in the "West" a mixture of religion and culture, one that has both affected the development of Christianity and the development of European society (and those regions in which Europe has had an overwhelming influence).  We know that Europe has become largely secularized, though there are thriving religious communities among immigrants, especially Hindu and Muslim.  So what's the cause of all of this loss of confidence in European culture?  Could it be rooted in Christianity?  Perhaps in Jesus himself?  Take a read of Martin Marty's engagement with the question!

*********************************

Sightings  6/6/2011
Who Lost Europe?
-- Martin E. Marty
  “Who lost China?” was a taunting and accusatory question aimed at United States  leaders by their political critics in the 1950s. We’ll leave that question unaddressed and unanswered. Now: “Who lost Europe?” Those who ask it claim to have answers, whether they be mournful and thoughtful like Pope Benedict XVI, or Christianity-minded cultural pessimists, or secular anti-multiculturalists. Not all of their mutually contradictory answers can be right, and it is not likely that all of them are completely wrong. A text to study is in the Wall Street Journal. There, Frits Bolkestein, a “retired center-right Dutch politician,” tells of “How Europe Lost Faith in Its Own Civilization.”
 He is forthright about bringing up classic Christian theology and its waning as part of his response to the question he refined: How did it become “controversial for a Western leader to affirm a preference for his own culture? In short, how did Europe lose confidence in its own civilization?” He sees that Western leaders “displayed the effects of Christian guilt and European self-hatred.” The “current masochism” of the West derives first from Jesus and the Bible. He cites Matthew 23:12: “Whoeover shall exalt himself shall be abased, and he that shall humble himself shall be exalted.” He sees there two bad ideas which lead to a loss of pride plus gain in self-hatred. Muslim culture, which is on the rise in Europe, “is a shame culture,” but Christianity, alas, is a “guilt culture.”
 From the Bible Bolkestein turns to culture. Blame the “Passion According to Saint Matthew,” and Bach’s voice of the believer: “I shall be punished for what you [Christ] have suffered.” Soon the West saw that the “mote in our eye was heavier than the beam abroad.” In Bolkestein’s good old days, at least “Catholicism and Lutheranism provided for the atonement of guilt,” but these faiths are not credible today. “This also goes for Calvinism, which in its purest form knows no remission of guilt in this life.”
 So western guilt culture invented the United Nations, “in part to weaken its own hegemony.” Soon the U.N. majority was “bent on castigating the West and Israel.” The columnist then does appropriately adduce some egregiously virulent anti-western expressions by some U.N. agencies and persons. Grant him a point there. But he lauds the Europeans who want to teach people to reverse the bad cultural strands by “taking pride” in their own classical values. For him, they target Muslims, Hindus, and other peoples and their cultures who mess up Christian values.
 Still, in times of cultural crisis, one may learn from some ugly expressions and phenomena, so it will pay to listen. But what Bolkestein fails to deal with is this: the answer to “Who lost Europe?” could be, simply, Europe, whose citizens nowadays tend to desert the chapels and cathedrals and abandon the beliefs long associated with these. Many an honest analyst would say in contentions which can be tested: masses in Europe stopped believing in God, in the stories which animated European life, in the symbols that made them vivid, in the community that embodied them.
 There are some counter-signs, signals of new Christian vitalities. But before accusing the U.N., the Muslims, the agents who produce masochism, it might make more sense to analyze the losses in Europe’s faith. Muslims, Hindus, and others in the Netherlands and the British Isles crowd their sanctuaries and are zealous in prayer. The majority of Christians attend to something similar, no matter what that hated United Nations people think. But, please, leave the Passion and the Sermon on the Mount alone. They might still awaken faith.
References

 Martin E. Marty's biography, publications, and contact information can be found at www.memarty.com.

----------
 
Can American Muslims be both loyal to their tradition and full participants in American civil society? In this month’s Religion & Culture Web Forum, Vincent J. Cornell argues that an embrace of the tenets of Shari‘a fundamentalism has led even would-be moderate Muslim leaders to reject the principles of American constitutional democracy. Consequently, they advocate (often unintentionally) a retreat from full participation in American civil society into sectarianism and “millet multiculturalism.” Against this tend, says Cornell, it is necessary for Muslim thinkers to find an “overlapping consensus” between Shari‘a and constitutionalism—one that gives warrant for the exercise of “unsupervised reason.”


----------



Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

Comments

John said…
I don't think the demise of European cultural pride is a consequence of Christianity, though I will agree that Christian principles have been commandeered to accentuate the collapse.

While the demise is rooted in a complex of causes and agents, I think the tap root is WW's I and II and the Holocaust, the Marshall Plan, and the emergence of the Soviet communist empire. Each phenomenon in it's own way contributed to a loss of cultural/national confidence and pride, and to a growing sense of a chasm between the human and the divine. It is the manifestation of "post-modernism" in Europe.

Chistianity was a victim in this sea change, not a co-conspirator. It too was unable to defend itself from the effects of these larger socio-political movements.

Popular Posts