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<\/a><\/p>\nIn my new book Post-Christian:\u00a0 A Guide to Contemporary Thought and Culture<\/a>, I explore the phenomenon of \u201csecularism,\u201d the attempt to do without religion and the prospects of bringing it back.\u00a0 Among many other things, I look at what has been happening in Europe, for most of its history the heart of Christendom, but not any longer.<\/p>\n The French political scientist Olivier Roy has written a book on the subject entitled Is Europe Christian?<\/a>\u00a0It\u2019s a more complicated question than it sounds. Judging from a review<\/a> in the Wall Street Journal <\/em>and reading the \u201cLook Inside\u201d feature on Amazon,\u00a0his findings seem to support my own, though I am more optimistic than he is about the possibility of Christianity\u2013if not political \u201cChristendom\u201d\u2013making a comeback.<\/p>\n Prof. Roy makes the point that \u201csecularization. . .does not necessarily mean dechristianization.\u201d\u00a0 And, unlike so many other scholars, he emphasizes the difference between Lutheranism (which, with its doctrine of the Two Kingdoms and vocation is \u201cself-secularizing,\u201d giving religious significance to the secular realm) and Calvinism (which tends to seek Christian rule of the secular order).\u00a0 He also notes the difference between both of these traditions and American Protestantism.<\/p>\n The reviewer, Walter Russell Mead<\/a>, notes that American Christians, being individualists, approach such questions as the title of this book in terms of the number of Europeans who believe the Christian message.\u00a0 Europeans, though, approach religion more collectively, \u201cas a public, political, and legal force.\u201d<\/p>\n Indeed, many religions\u2013Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism<\/a>, Shintoism, etc.\u2013are matters of cultural identity, rather than, or at least in addition to, an adherent\u2019s personal beliefs.\u00a0 Christianity, in contrast, is for people \u201cfrom\u00a0every\u00a0nation, from all\u00a0tribes and peoples and languages\u201d (Revelation 7:9) and has to do with a person\u2019s faith in Christ.\u00a0 And yet, sometimes Christianity too is reduced to a matter of\u00a0what group you belong to rather than what you believe.\u00a0 Thus, Catholic politicians can support abortion, though it violates essential teachings of their church, and still insist they are \u201cgood Catholics\u201d because their church membership goes back in their family for generations.\u00a0 Often this belonging rather than believing mentality is connected to ethnicity\u2013with Irish, Italian, and Hispanic Catholics; Russian, Serbian, or Middle Eastern Orthodox; and, yes, German or Scandinavian Lutherans.<\/p>\n So Prof. Roy focuses not upon beliefs or church attendance (a measure favored by social scientists since it is so quantifiable), but on Christian identity and Christian culture.\u00a0 These are still very much evident in Europe.\u00a0 I make the point that although they are not saving faith, but they are not nothing,\u00a0<\/em>and they constitute an infrastructure that could bring true Christianity back, especially with the influence of immigration from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East\u2013the rest of the world that is emphatically not<\/em> secularized and where Christianity is booming\u2013and the extraordinary phenomenon of Muslims in Europe converting to Christianity.<\/p>\n Prof. Roy, though, thinks even Christian culture, while significant, is fading away now.\u00a0 In a compelling and widely applicable analysis,\u00a0 he says that Christianity is being replaced by \u201cthe religion of desire.\u201d<\/p>\n From Walter Russell Mead,\u00a0\u2018Is Europe Christian?\u2019 Review: Good Faith Estimate:\u00a0 As European churches vanish, the struggle continues between Christian republican virtue and the new religion of desire<\/a>, in The Wall Street Journal<\/em> [subscription required]:<\/p>\n In Mr. Roy\u2019s account, the real break came in the 1960s and \u201970s. Up until that time, Christians and non-Christians in Europe largely shared a moral code. On issues such as homosexuality, abortion and the place of women in society, Europe\u2019s communists and socialists found themselves in broad agreement with traditional Christian ideas. In most European countries, secular law tracked classical Christian moral codes pretty closely. The number of Christian believers was gradually and even inexorably declining, but the Christian foundations of public morality and public law remained strong.<\/p>\n Then, in the 1960s, Europeans (and Americans) began to leave traditional morals behind. Mr. Roy understands the shift as the emergence of an ethic based on the \u201cdesiring subject\u201d as the source of all value in morals and of all legitimacy in politics. What humans desire to do, they have an inalienable right and even a duty to do\u2014on the condition that they refrain from injuring others. This was a genuine revolution in civilization, one whose profound effects, Mr. Roy argues, we have yet to fully understand.<\/p>\n This was more than a change in sentiment, Mr. Roy says. Slowly at first and then with increasing force, laws and institutions were transformed by the religion of desire. The legal and cultural revolution continues today; ideas like gender fluidity represent the progress of a new understanding of humanity\u2019s place in the world.<\/p>\n Nothing could be further from both traditional Christian ideas and the rival European tradition of civic republican virtue than the cult of the desiring subject, but so strong was the appeal of the idea that neither religious nor secular practices could stand long against it. Under the force of the transformative youth revolution of the 1960s and \u201970s, old taboos against cohabitation before marriage, homosexuality, abortion and much else lost their hold on the public mind. . . .<\/p>\n In a somber conclusion, Mr. Roy speaks of a global cultural crisis. It is not possible, he believes, to build a sustainable social order around a collection of desiring subjects\u2014yet the strength of the ideologies of the 1960s is too great to permit an alternative to emerge. For Europe, beset by a globalization that threatens its coherence and independence from the world\u2019s superpowers, the only answer is to return to its roots. For Mr. Roy, those roots are Europe\u2019s Christian heritage and the tradition of pre-1960s liberalism grounded in the enlightenment and classical ideas of civic and republican virtue. Europe is not, he concludes, very Christian today, and that bodes ill for Europe\u2019s future.<\/p>\n This accords with my book\u2019s contention that objective thinking has been replaced by the exaltation of the will,<\/em> which, in turn, has meant the unbounded release of the appetite.<\/em>\u00a0 What Shakespeare calls the \u201cuniversal wolf\u201d that devours everything, until it devours itself.<\/a><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n