Young adults today, Riley wrote, are “‘the least religious adults in the United States.’ Only about 20 percent attend religious services at least once a week.”102 And these young people are almost deaf to the call of community and common decency. “Any notion of the responsibilities of a common humanity, a transcendent call to protect the life and dignity of one’s neighbor or a moral responsibility to seek the common good, was almost entirely absent among the respondents.”103
Smith is describing a generation of moral barbarians—“trousered apes,” in the depiction of C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man.
CULTURE WAR WITHOUT END
A second consequence of the death of faith is a loss of social unity, an unraveling of the moral community, and culture wars without end. For all cultures originate in a religious faith, as social critic and historian Russell Kirk writes:
From what source did humankind’s many cultures arise? Why, from cults. A cult is a joining together for worship—that is, the attempt of people to commune with a transcendent power. It is from association in the cult, the body of worshipers, that human community grows.104
Christopher Dawson, too, warned that should the West lose its Christian faith, its culture would fragment and its civilization would disintegrate:
It is the religious impulse which supplies the cohesive force which unifies a culture and civilization. The great civilizations of the world do not produce the great religions as a kind of cultural by-product … the great religions are the foundations on which the great civilizations rest. A society which has lost its religion becomes sooner or later a society which has lost its culture.105
For centuries, Christianity offered the peoples of the West and the world common ground on which to stand. For this is a faith that accepts all men and women of all races, countries, and continents and all walks of life without regard to lineage, language, culture, color, or past conduct. Acting on their beliefs, Christians abolished human sacrifice in the Americas, ended the Atlantic slave trade, and halted the Indian practice of suttee: burning widows on the funeral pyres of dead husbands. The abolition of slavery and the promotion of civil rights were the causes of Christian pastors who demanded that their flocks live up to Christ’s teaching as enunciated in the Sermon on the Mount about how they ought to treat their fellow man. Christianity is a universal faith. Its death leaves a nation bereft of a unifying system of beliefs. In the absence of Christianity, individuals seek community in attachments like race, tribe, party, and ideology that must inevitably separate us.
With the rejection of Christianity and its moral code by hundreds of millions in the West and scores of millions in America, we have no common moral ground on which to stand. The matters on which we clash multiply. Now we fight not only over politics and economics but over abortion, embryonic stem cell research, homosexuality, assisted suicide, public displays of religious symbols, the teaching of evolution, and what children should and should not be taught about God and morality in public schools.
Culture wars are rooted in irreconcilable beliefs about what is right and wrong, moral and immoral. Among American atheists, agnostics, secularists, Reform and Conservative Jews, Buddhists, Unitarians, Episcopalians, New Age adherents, and the religiously unaffiliated, 70 to 80 percent and higher believe homosexuality is acceptable behavior. Only 12 percent of Jehovah’s Witnesses, 24 percent of Mormons, 26 percent of Evangelicals, and 27 percent of Muslims agree. Among atheists, agnostics, and the religiously unaffiliated, 70 percent believe abortion should be legal in most cases. Only 33 percent of Evangelicals agree.106
If we no longer agree on what is right and wrong, we can never be one people again. Traditionalists are already seceding from a culture they see as steeped in immorality in its movies, magazines, music, books, and television shows—retreating into cultural enclaves. Our poets and seers saw it coming. Eight years after Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species appeared, Matthew Arnold, in “Dover Beach,” saw the faith that had created Europe inexorably receding.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating …107
Writing on the eve of World War I, Spanish-born Harvard professor George Santayana expressed the seismic cultural shift this way:
The present age is a critical one and interesting to live in. The civilization characteristic of Christendom has not disappeared, yet another civilization has begun to take its place. We still understand the value of religious faith.… On the other hand, the shell of Christendom is broken. The unconquerable mind of the East, the pagan past, the industrial socialist future confront it with equal authority. Our whole life and mind is saturated with the slow upward filtration of a new spirit—that of an emancipated, atheistic, international democracy.108
Irish poet William Butler Yeats saw Christianity as a magnetic force that held our world together. But by 1920, he sensed the West had gone deaf to the call of its God, writing, in “The Second Coming”:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.109
Was not the falconer God? Was not the “centre” Christianity? Has not “anarchy” been “loosed upon the world”? Yeats ends his poem with a premonition: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
Is not the rough beast the new barbarism?
Christianity is the mother tongue of Europe, said Johann Wolfgang Goethe well over a century ago. In the closing lines of Europe and the Faith, published in 1920, the same year as Yeats’s “Second Coming,” Belloc wrote, “Europe will return to the Faith, or she will perish. The Faith is Europe. And Europe is the Faith.”110
Two decades later, Belloc concluded that Europe had lost the Faith and the West would begin to disintegrate.
Cultures spring from religions … the decay of a religion involves the decay of the culture corresponding to it—we see that most clearly in the breakdown of Christendom today. The bad work begun at the Reformation is bearing its final fruit in the dissolution of our ancient doctrines—the very structure of our society is dissolving.111
Before his arrest by the Gestapo in 1943, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran theologian and pastor later executed at Flossenbürg nine days before the Americans liberated the camp, echoed Belloc: “The unity of the West is not an idea but a historical reality, of which the sole foundation is Christ.”112
UNRAVELING OF A CIVILIZATION
While the Christian peoples of Old Europe often fought, they united when the faith was imperiled. Charles Martel, the “Hammer of the Franks,” who stopped the Muslim invasion at Tours in 732, was a hero to all of Christendom. When Pope Urban II preached the First Crusade in 1095 and called for an end to the persecution of Christian pilgrims by liberating Jerusalem and the Holy Land from Seljuk Turks, Christian knights from all over Europe enlisted and fought nine crusades until the fall of Acre in 1291. That Crusader defeat left the land where Jesus walked under the rule of Islam until British General Edmund Allenby strode into Jerusalem on December 11, 1917.
When Aragon and Castille united to expel the Moors in 1492, all of Europe rejoiced. When Suleiman laid siege to Vienna in 1529, Spanish and Austrian soldiers, aided by German mercenaries, halted Islam’s advance up the Danube into the heart of Christian Europe.
At Lepanto in 1571, a galley fleet of the Holy League—a coalition of Spain, which ruled Naples, Sicily and Sardinia; the republics of Venice and Genoa; the Papacy; the Duchy of Savoy; and the Knights Hospitaller, under Don Juan of Austria, the illegitimate son of Charles V—sailed out of Messina to crush the main fleet of Ottoman war galleys in one of the decisive battles of history. Rome was secured from Turkish invasion. And Christia
n power displaced Ottoman power in the Mediterranean.
In September 1683, with the Turks again besieging Vienna, it was Germans, Austrians, and Poles under King John Sobieski who saved the city. The Battle of Vienna marked the beginning of the long retreat of Islam from Central Europe and the Balkans.
When did the struggle between Christianity and secularism begin? Solzhenitsyn traced it to the Renaissance when man displaced God at the center of all things, and to an Enlightenment that saw the Church as the arch-enemy and oppressor of mankind, whom the new philosophers had come to liberate.
“Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest,” said Diderot.113 “Écrasez l’Infâme!” echoed Voltaire, “Crush the infamous thing!”—the Catholic Church.114 Neither Voltaire nor Diderot lived to see what they had wrought. But they would get their wish. Within a decade of Diderot’s death, Louis XVI had been guillotined and the September Massacres would begin with the priests.
Solzhenitsyn as well as Dostoevsky believed that every true “revolution” since 1789 had sought the extirpation of Christianity as essential to lasting victory:
“It was Dostoevsky … who drew from the French Revolution and its seeming hatred of the Church the lesson that, ‘revolution must necessarily begin with atheism.’ That is absolutely true.”115 Solzhenitsyn saw a hatred of God as the dynamo powering the ideology that had seized his country by the throat:
[T]he world had never before known a godlessness as organized, militarized and tenaciously malevolent as that practiced by Marxism. Within the philosophical system of Marx and Lenin, and at the heart of their psychology, hatred of God is the principal driving force, more fundamental than all their political and economic pretensions. Militant atheism is not merely incidental or marginal to Communist policy; it is not a side effect, but the central pivot.116
In his Templeton Prize lecture Solzhenitsyn reflected on the century and agreed with Yeats: “Men have forgotten God; and that is why all this has happened.”117 He saw World War I as the cataclysmic blow “when Europe, bursting with health and abundance, fell into a rage of self-mutilation which could not but sap its strength for a century or more, and perhaps forever.”118
What had caused the cataclysm? Solzhenitsyn offers this answer:
The only possible explanation … is a mental eclipse among the leaders of Europe due to their lost awareness of a Supreme Power above them. Only a godless embitterment could have moved ostensibly Christian states to employ poison gas, a weapon so obviously beyond the limits of humanity.119
Only rulers in whose hearts Christianity had died, Solzhenitzyn felt, could commit such atrocities against fellow Christians, which exceeded by many times the magnitude the horrors of the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the Napoleonic Wars. The Spanish Civil War (1936–39), in which Stalinists and Trotskyists sought to create a Leninist state on the Iberian peninsula, would feature the massacre of priests, the rape of nuns, the desecration of cathedrals, and the destruction of churches.
The West, said Solzhenitsyn, “is experiencing a drying up of religious consciousness. It, too, has witnessed racking schisms, bloody religious wars, and rancor, to say nothing of the tide of secularism that, from the late Middle Ages, has progressively inundated the West.”120
While the struggle between militant secularism and Christianity remains nonviolent, the fate of the West hangs upon its outcome.
In its millennium edition, the Economist declared the struggle over, publishing an obituary of God, observing that “the Almighty recently passed into history.”121 But while Christianity is indeed dying in Europe, Christianity’s passing is not yet a fait accompli in America. British journalist Geoffrey Wheatcroft sees the Atlantic divide over religion and its value as a primary cause of “one of the great political developments—and great challenges—of the past generation, the growing gulf between the United States and Western Europe.”122
Mitt Romney was quite right when … he spoke of Europe’s empty cathedrals. This is an extraordinary story.… [R]eligious observance in Europe has collapsed, Lutheran Sweden and Calvinist Holland followed by Roman Catholic Spain and Ireland. England has a national church “by law established,” whose Supreme Governor, the Queen, is crowned by the Archbishop of Canterbury; and services of this Church of England are now attended regularly by less than 2 percent of the English population. France is the land of Joan of Arc and Bishop Bossuet, once a Catholic heartland ruled by the Most Christian Kings; today barely one French citizen of ten goes to church even once a year. The conversion of Europe from paganism to Christianity … was a seminal historical event; a book needs to be written on the re-paganization of Europe since the nineteenth century.123
This “re-paganization of Europe” raises a profound issue. If Europe is becoming non-Christian or anti-Christian, what are we defending? Why should America commit in perpetuity to fight and die for a re-paganized Europe that has become antireligious and even Christophobic?
Comes the reply: Europe is democratic and we are the defenders of democracy. But India is a democracy. Should we fight for India? Comes the reply: Europeans are the people from whence we come. But that will cease to be true when a majority of Americans trace their ancestry to Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Moreover, unlike democratic solidarity, ethnic solidarity is regarded as illegitimate if not irrational in today’s West. Is that not why we abandoned Ian Smith’s Rhodesia and Botha’s South Africa?
At the August 1941 Atlantic Conference at Placentia Bay, off the coast of Newfoundland, Churchill and FDR sang “Onward Christian Soldiers” with British and American sailors to show their countrymen that the war Britain was fighting and America would soon enter was God’s cause in which Christians must enlist. On the evening of D-day, June 6, 1944, FDR said that our men had crossed the Channel in “a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion and our civilization.”
Anti-interventionist Catholics of the 1930s, who had sought to keep America out of Europe’s war, enlisted in the Cold War because they saw Bolshevism as mortal enemy. For wherever Communism had advanced—in Russia, Mexico, Spain, Poland, and China—priests went to the wall, nuns were raped, churches and cathedrals desecrated, and the faithful massacred, as were hundreds of thousands of Catholics in the Vendée during the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror.
Liberals snickered at denunciations of “godless Communism” and “atheistic Communism.” But it was this aspect—that Communists hated God and martyred Christians—that made Christians militant cold warriors. For Catholics, loyal to a hierarchical church ruled by an infallible Pope, the Cold War was never about democracy and free markets. It was about resisting a satanic ideology that had seized Russia by the throat and was hell-bent on the eradication of our church and faith as well as our country.
But if Christianity is dead in Europe and the continent has embraced what Pope John Paul II called the “culture of death,” and has become what Pope Benedict XVI described as a “desert of godlessness,” what is America defending in Europe?124 Why should American Christians be forever committed to fight for godless socialism or godless capitalism on the other side of the Atlantic? Why should American Catholics fight again for a Britain that Financial Times columnist Chris Caldwell calls “the anti-Catholic country par excellence” that gave Pope Benedict the “most hostile [reception] he has received in his half decade of papal travel?”125 British intellectuals, some of whom demanded the Pope’s arrest, cast “Catholic opinions and doctrines, many of them widely shared by non-Catholics—as crimes.”126
The sundering of the West is another consequence of our dying faith.
THE GODS OF MODERNITY
“When we cease to worship God, we do not then worship nothing, we worship anything” is an insight attributed to British author G. K. Chesterton.127
A third consequence when Christianity dies in the soul is that people seek a new god to worship, a new explanation for life, a new reason for living,
a new cause to believe in, live for, die for. When faith dies, something else will come to occupy the empty place in the heart. As nature abhors a vacuum, so, too, does the heart of man.
“All men need the gods,” said the ancient Greek poet Homer.128 And if the God of Sinai and God of Calvary is dead, men will find new gods, or create them, as Hebrews wandering in the desert created a golden calf and fell down to worship it. We saw the results of that search in the last century. “If you will not have God (and he is a jealous God),” wrote T. S. Eliot, “you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin.”129 Tens of millions did.
Whittaker Chambers, the American Communist who spied for the Soviet Union, and then recanted and converted to Christianity, explained in his 1952 book Witness Marxism’s appeal to the educated young of the Depression. It was the appeal of the “second oldest faith”:
Its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: “Ye shall be as gods.” It is the great alternative faith of mankind. Like all great faiths, its force derives from a simple vision.… The Communist Vision is the vision of Man without God.130
Writing of Chambers’s insight about the “second oldest faith,” author Wayne Allensworth lists other gods that have captured souls in our time:
Chambers captured the spiritual roots of what was made manifest in one form as communism, in others as the hydra of radicalism that has haunted mankind since the expulsion from Eden, whether as the sexual obsession of the libertines, feminists, and militant homosexuals, the growing power of Leviathan and bureaucracy, or the ruthlessness of global capitalism and self-absorbed consumerism.131
Ideology came first to capture the souls in which Christianity had died. As Europe lost the old faith, new faiths arose: Communism, and Nazism to combat it. In Britain, the religion to counter Nazism was nationalism, the religion of patriotism. But while nationalism unites countrymen, it divides countries. And the wars these secular religions produced proved more terrible than the Christian wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These were the false Gods that failed an apostate Europe when she lost the faith that had given her birth, and it was when we learned the truth of Psalm 96: “[A]ll the gods of the Gentiles are devils.”132
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