Secular Europe: It's past or future
On the Pope’s recent visit to the UK, Benedict XVI launched a blistering attack on “aggressive secularism” which seeks to exclude “God, religion and virtue from public life”. Despite a rocky start, the media generally applauded his comments and a diverse range of Christians found that he was saying things that they instinctively feel.
British missiologist, Andrew Kirk, has consistently argued over several decades that the most urgent dialogue in which Christians should engage is not inter-religious dialogue (important though that is) but a dialogue with secular ideology about the hidden and unexamined assumptions it makes about the way that societies go about their daily routines. More recently the think-tank Ekklesia ran a feature listing the many ways in which one British political party was consulting regularly with the Christian community. Its author, Jonathan Bartley, controversially suggested that ‘some in the churches, and indeed the Pope, are on another planet when they complain about the banishment of religion from public life in the UK.’
‘Religious’ and ‘secular’ were originally terms used to distinguish monks from priests. Their modern usage is slightly different. We now understand ‘secular’ to refer to a radical philosophical and practical alternative to a life lived with reference to God, gods, or other spiritual realities. Two other terms are dependent on it: secularisation and secularism.
Secularisation describes the gradual withdrawal or rejection of religious participation and values in the public realms of politics, the arts, media, and education. In Europe the most rigorous example of this is the French case of laïcité, the radical separation of church and state. Secularism, on the other hand, is the committed philosophy that seeks to explain all of life without any reference to God, gods, or the divine. Many of the most ardent critics of contemporary faith are committed secularists, with the atheist Richard Dawkins amongst them. The eradication of religious attitudes and practices from public spaces and workplaces often focuses on certain symbols, religious headdresses and crucifixes, for example.
What recent trends can we highlight?
Ron Inglehart, using data from the European and World Values surveys gathered over several decades, has linked secularisation with a country’s shift from being a ‘culture of survival’ to a ‘culture of self-expression’. Economic prosperity and modernisation result in secular and rational values usurping religious and traditional values. His work is especially important for the empirical data he uses to support a variant for of secularisation theory which broadly argues that secular views replace religious views as a country modernises.
However, other sociologists have disavowed or drastically revised their previous positions. Peter Berger is one, and his work with Grace Davie suggests that European secularisation is an exception to many other societies that are both modern and religious. In fact, modernised European countries show significant variations of religious attitudes.
“A 2007 Eurostat survey found that 53% regarded religion as an important element of their lives”
A 2007 Eurostat survey of 27,000 individuals found that 53% regarded religion as an important element of their lives with almost 75% claiming allegiance to a religious community. In 2009, Gallup sampled 34 European countries and an average of 54.6% adults agreed that ‘religion was an important part of my daily life’. Whilst only 27% of the UK population views religion as important, 40% of Germany’s equally modern population claimed that to be the case, whilst in Cyprus, Poland and Italy, that figure is greater than 70%.
A survey by the Institut Français d'Opinion Publique (IFOP) for Le Croix in April 2010 concluded that religion was still a private affair in England whilst in France the policy of laïcité excludes religion from the political domain. However, in Germany the churches fulfil important social functions as a quasi ‘state organisation’.
Secularisation and the governments of Europe
Politics are a largely secular affair across the institutions of the EU. With its mandate for cultural policy, the Council of Europe has managed to establish and retain a place for the participation of religious communities in civil society and cultural activism. Ironically, across Europe, secular governments have generally done better at granting religious and other personal freedoms to minority religious traditions than have governments allied closely to dominant religious communities, whether Christian or Islamic. For this reason, evangelicals have traditionally welcomed secular forms of government. Perhaps surprisingly, there are a number of national Constitutions that still allow a notional space for mentions of either God and the Christian Church or tradition.
“the divide between secular political institutions and religious communities is far from being unbridgeable”
Some European political leaders appear nervous about the growing contribution of religious communities to civil society, fearing a return to Christendom values and practices. In the face of this, an increasingly vocal, confident and active European Islam might seem to presage an imminent ‘clash of civilisations’ and this fact helps to explain the political rush to promote intercultural and inter-religious dialogue in Europe. Whether the religious communities are content to be constrained to the intercultural space that has been allotted for their inter-religious dialogues is a question that secular politicians are bound to monitor closely. It appears to at least hint at the fact that the divide between secular political institutions and religious communities is far from being unbridgeable.
Is secularisation Europe’s past or its future?
Secular assumptions and attitudes provide hard ground for nurturing the fruits of Christian mission. However, the 1990s experienced a ‘great reversal’ of the sociological predictions of the 1960s regarding secularisation. The rise of global Pentecostalism and global Islam have chastened the ‘prophets of religious demise’ and led to revisions of their projections. Frustratingly, traditional indicators of secularisation still tend downwards in Europe: church attendance and the professing of orthodox Christian beliefs and practices. Encouragement can be found in the lively engagement and contribution of Christian communities to civil society, community welfare, educational, and charitable or philanthropic projects. This engagement is not only a mark of the Church in mission, it may yet hold one key to a reversal in its declining fortunes in Europe.
Whether Europe’s future is a faith-free or a faith-filled future remains to be seen. The witness of Christian history is that faith has persevered through persecution and opposition. The mission of the Churches of Europe is to journey into a future that exists within God’s future.
Darrell Jackson