End of Europe?

Benedict XVI’s first foreign excursion as pope has occasioned a massive electronic and pulp outpouring highlighting the secularized Europe he would confront on his visit to his homeland. Germany’s number one news magazine, Der Spiegel, greeted the pontiff with a five-part in depth series, backed by a massive public opinion poll, titled: “When the German Pope Returns Home, He’ll Find an Un-Christian Land.”

Joseph Ratzinger reportedly choose his papal name to honor St. Benedict, the founder of the monastic order bearing his name, which is often credited with preserving Christianity and Western civilization by reinvigorating the church in the wake of the fall of the Roman Empire of the West. Presumably, the pope saw comparable threats to religion and culture in modern times, similar to those raised by Der Spiegel.

Only 10 percent of Germans attend church weekly. Each year 60,000 more Catholics are buried than are baptized, the later totaling only 205,904 in 2003, 31 percent lower than in 1990. In the country of its founding, Protestantism is even more threatened: 180,000 left the church in 2003, the year of the latest data, and only 60,000 joined. East Germany boasted 15 million Christians when the communists took power but only 5.5 million after a half century of reeducation—with only 3.7 million left today. The Der Spiegel/TNS Infratest poll found only 32 percent of Germans having great or very great confidence in the church and even among the Christians, just two-thirds of Catholics and less than half of Protestants believed in its central tenant that there is a new life coming after death.

Germany is by no means alone. Like Britain, also with a 10 percent weekly church attendance, it is even somewhere in the middle regarding religious adherence. Poland and Northern Ireland have the highest weekly participation, with 50 percent at church weekly or more—even higher than the United States at 40 percent (steady since the Depression, when polls began). Italy and Portugal follow at about one-third attending per week--down to countries like Sweden, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic at five percent or less. Belief in life after death ranges broadly too but none is as high as the U.S. at 76 percent although Italy and Ireland are close behind. In most of the rest of Europe belief in an afterlife ranges between one-third and one half of the population, with Germany overall at 38 percent.

So, is Europe de-Christianized and secular? That is not so clear. When asked what they are, including choices of atheist, agnostic or “no religion,” 97% in Ireland say Christian, 93% in Portugal and Spain and even Norway, Finland and Denmark are as high, Switzerland is 88%, Britain is 83%, Italy is 82%, Germany 76%, France 71%, and even Sweden is 68%. Non-Christian religions range from only a 9 percent high in France down to 6 percent in Britain. Those with no religion represent 18% in Sweden, 17% in Germany, 16% in France, and 12% in Britain, compared to 9% in the U.S. When asked if they believe in God, only Sweden reports less than majority support (46%) for a supreme being, with most nations ranging around Germany at two-thirds support for the idea.

What seems strangest is how much Europeans say they pray. Most polls show that the overwhelming percentage of the population says it prays several times a day. Even the lowest estimates are that almost all say they pray at least once a month or more, with only the French and Scandinavians saying only several times a year. Why would secularists pray at all, or even two-thirds or more express belief in God and life after death after years of secularization? Der Spiegel even found two-thirds of young people saying it was cool to believe in something deeper than self. It found religious items like crosses and rosaries were “in.” With little church attendance or religious education (although some countries do teach it in public schools) or support for many traditional beliefs especially on sex and marriage, why would these attitudes and behaviors persist? Why would a million people, especially youngsters, go to see the orthodox teacher par excellence, Benedict, in Cologne? No rock star has attracted such a crowd.

Der Spiegel quoted the writer Florian Illies, author of what it called “the cult novel, Generation Golf,” as explaining that the young want a church that stops “sucking up” to people under forty. “The church has a unique selling point: the power of faith. But this power is only clear when it is expressed confidently and bravely—and when it doesn’t constantly hope for acceptance by today’s materialistic society.” The Kammerspiele Theater of Munich was surprised recently to attract a large audience with a series on religion and belief. The news magazine found a new interest in spirituality overall even if many beliefs were unconventional. While progressives have criticized him for it, Benedict appears to have been on to something by making nonconformity to secular materialism a major theme (see http://acuf.org/issues/issue35/050502news.asp).

The dominance of religious symbolism in the memorial services following 9/11 was impossible to ignore in the United States but even services held in Germany to express solidarity with it were also highly religious in tone. It has been widely noted in the U.S. that religion has become more important to politics, dramatically represented by the greater churchgoing in the heartland red states and the less attendance in the coastal blue states, especially on the West coast where numbers are almost as low as Germany’s. The Der Spiegel survey found religion was even more important in one area outside politics. Two-thirds of Germans said they believed in God and almost three-fourth of these said having children was a “particularly important” duty of individuals. Only 46 percent of non-believers thought having children was important.

The most noteworthy world demographic trend is the projected population decline in Europe resulting from a massive retreat from having children. Whereas it takes 2.1 children per childbearing aged woman to replace a population, not one European country is close to that level (the U.S. is at 2.0). The average European replacement rate is an anemic 1.4. Germany is at 1.3. Christianity is declining because population is declining across the world, except in Islam (http://acuf.org/issues/issue31/050305news), but secularists are declining most. Materialism gives no reason to accept the expense and bother of having children beyond the pleasure that can be satisfied by merely one. The surviving productive population will be smaller and less able to support the rest, and presumably will come from those who see child procreation as an important duty, which the poll suggests will be mostly religious people. Overall, Europe will have 200 million fewer people in 50 years than today and most of those remaining will be aged and severely draining fewer and fewer societal resources until the end.

Although Germans want to believe and do respect those who do believe—“the pope is right, that is how it should be,” most would say—Europeans finally find it impossible to believe, Der Spiegel concluded. Yet, it took note of a very interesting meeting the pope held while he was still Cardinal Ratzinger. On January 19, 2004, the future pope met with the leader of the prestigious Frankfurt School, which provided the intellectual underpinning for the New Left in the 1960s, Jurgen Habermas. Ratzinger argued that a transcendental religion was necessary to provide satisfactory meaning to sustain human life because secular materialism cannot do so. As an academic himself he also appealed to the professor by praising “the divine light of reason, which must be seen as a sort of checking mechanism, through which religion must clean and tidy itself.”

Habermas was more than accommodating in return. Modernization is “going off the rails,” he said, and the “theory that a religious structure with transcendental references is the only thing which can help a contrite modernism out of the dead-end it currently finds itself in, is becoming popular again. It is in the interests of the constitutional state to deal compassionately with all of the cultural sources which can be used to feed our citizens’ awareness of norms and solidarity.” Philosopher Rudiger Safranski added that there is a “yearning for moral transcendence because man himself does not trust himself to make his way on his own: What I have made up myself can’t be as valuable.”

When the Frankfurt School and Rome can come this close, can Europe really be at an end? While the general data trend has been for religious belief to decline, almost every European nation had lower levels of belief in the 1980-1990 years than today. Trends can change. The first Benedict led Europe over a deeper morass a millennia and a half ago and who can say that a sixteenth Benedict later could not help do so once again?

Donald Devine, Editor.

[The Der Spiegel series, authored by Mario Kaiser, Ansbert Kneip and Alexander Smoltczyk and translated by Christopher Sultan and Damien McGuiness, can be found at www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,370072,00.html. Also see, John Stackhouse, “Where Religion Matters,” www.americanoutlook.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=article_detail&id=2020 ; Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, “Religion and Politics in the U.S. and Western Europe,” (Boston: Harvard University Kennedy School of Government, 2004); and Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations Secretariat, World Population Prospects, 2002 revision. To get a sense of the sharpness of his thinking, see Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, “Truth and Tolerance” ( San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), especially chapter 1.]

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