Decline of faith in Europe

Readers of this blog know of my ongoing interest in the phenomenon of secularization, which has decimated the churches and societies of Europe, Québec and elsewhere in the western world. Here is James M. Kushiner writing on Faith in Britain 50-50:

The fact is that many Europeans just gave up believing quite some time ago, even if they didn't completely discard the ritual of baptizing their children and getting married in the church. Why? Secularism, yes, but that's just a circular argument. I have wondered to what extent two World Wars on the continent of Europe, mostly involving "Christian" nations, have contributed to the decline of faith. No wonder drug usage in the British Isles is so high. I suppose it numbs the pain of living in a meaningless culture.

I too have wondered about the role of the world wars. For those who lived during the "bourgeois century" between 1815 and 1914, it would have seemed inconceivable that Europe, which had recovered surprisingly well from the Napoleonic debacle, could once again be plunged into another continental war, much less two such wars, in so short a time.

I recently reread Michael P. Fogarty's classic Christian Democracy in Western Europe: 1820-1953, which was published by the University of Notre Dame Press in 1957. Fogarty reported that, at the time he wrote, there was a belt of high religious observance extending from Flanders to Venice, which was bounded by relative spiritual wastelands on either side. (Even then the Scandinavian countries were devoutly secularist, it seems.) This European "bible belt" was the heartland of the christian democratic parties, over whose uncertain prospects Fogarty nevertheless managed to summon up some optimism.

Of course, half a century later we now know that France's Mouvement républicain populaire (MRP) did not survive the end of the Fourth Republic in 1958. The Netherlands' three christian democratic parties, including Abraham Kuyper's Anti-Revolutionary Party, would eventually merge in an effort to cut their losses. Even the once orthodox Gereformeerde Kerken in Nederland, the sister church of the CRCNA, would largely succumb to the same trends affecting the rest of Europe and disappear altogether into a generic protestant body. Italy's Democrazia Cristiana all but vanished slightly more than a decade ago, along with much of the post-war Italian political status quo.

Fogarty wrote only a decade after the Second World War. European Christendom was already pretty shaky, but it was holding its own, at least in certain regions. If the world wars were a major precipitating cause of its decline, then they didn't have this effect immediately. It took the turmoil of the 1960s to do that.

Yet, as I've observed before, when people cease to believe in the God who has revealed himself in Jesus Christ (or, in the case of Jews, in the Torah), they do not stop believing in general. Something inevitably comes in to fill the vaccuum. Will Europeans be able to maintain the richness of their civilization and the stability of their institutions on the basis of an unprecedented faith in a deracinated humanism? Probably not. It remains to be seen, then, what will come next.