Last spring on a trip to Erfurt Germany, the medieval university town famous for the Augustinian cloister where Martin Luther was ordained to the priesthood, I learned that only twenty percent of the population professed adherence to Christianity. When the topic of religion came up in a conversation with a young woman in a hotel lounge I asked her whether she was a member of a church. Without hesitation she replied: Ich bin Heide. I am a heathen.
It is hardly news to discover pagans in the heart of western Europe where once Christianity flourished. The steep decline in the number of Christians has been underway for generations, even centuries. What surprised me was the complete absence of embarrassment in her use of the term “heathen”. She did not say she no longer went to Church, nor that she was not a believer. For her, Christianity, no doubt the religion of her grandparents if not her parents, was absent from her horizon. Two days earlier my train had stopped at Fulda where St. Boniface, the apostle to the Germans, was buried. Boniface had gone to Germany to convert the heathen, and in a spectacular and courageous gesture felled the sacred oak at Geismar. The astonished onlookers soon hearkened to Boniface’s preaching and received Baptism. It would seem that if Christianity is ever to flourish again in the land between the Rhine and the Elbe a new Boniface will have to appear to fell the sacred oaks of European secularism.
Yet what made an even deeper impression on me in Europe was the debate over the preface to the new constitution of the European Union. I was living in Italy at the time and had been following the discussion in the Italian press. All the nations of the European union are historically Christian, and the very idea of Europe””which is not the doings of nature””was the work of Christian civilization. The Carolingians, Christians kings, first brought together the peoples west and the east of the Rhine to form a political alliance with the blessing of the bishop of Rome. The story of Europe is a spiritual drama fueled by religious convictions, not geography, economics or technology. Yet the framers of the EU constitution refuse even to invoke the name of Christianity in its preface. While readily acknowledging the inheritance of Greece and Rome, and even the Enlightenment, in a wilful act of amnesia, they excise any mention of Christianity from Europe’s history. Not only is Christianity excluded from a role in Europe’s future, it has been banished from Europe’s past. One wonders whether the new Europe, uprooted from its Christian soil, will continue to promote the spiritual values that have made western civilization so unique.
Talking to the young woman in Erfurt and listening in on the debate about the EU constitution I found myself musing on the future of Christian culture. In my lifetime and in the lifetime of others in this room we have seen the collapse of Christian civilization. At first the process of disintegration was slow, a gradual and persistent attrition, but today it has moved into overdrive, and more troubling, it has become deliberate and intentional, promoted not only by the cultured despisers of Christianity, but often aided and abetted by Christians themselves.
So good. Please do read.
What elements of the Christian culture do we seek to preserve and how far can we go in seeking to evangelize the pagans?
Outstanding.
A great article. Thanks for posting.
# 2–
“And by culture, I do not mean high culture, Bach’s B Minor Mass or Caravaggio’s, The Calling of St. Matthew, but the ‘total harvest of thinking and feeling,’ to use T.S.Eliot’s phrase, the pattern of inherited meanings and sensibilities encoded in rituals, law, language, practices, stories, et al. that order, inspire, and guide the behavior, thoughts and affections of the Christian people.”