From Saturday’s Wall Street Journal
In Europe, God Is (Not) Dead
Christian groups are growing, faith is more public.
Is supply-side economics the explanation?
By ANDREW HIGGINS
July 14, 2007; Page A1
Stockholm
Late last year, a Swedish hotel guest named Stefan Jansson grew upset when he found a Bible in his room. He fired off an email to the hotel chain, saying the presence of the Christian scriptures was “boring and stupefying.” This spring, the Scandic chain, Scandinavia’s biggest, ordered the New Testaments removed.
In a country where barely 3% of the population goes to church each week, the affair seemed just another step in Christian Europe’s long march toward secularism. Then something odd happened: A national furor erupted. A conservative bishop announced a boycott. A leftist radical who became a devout Christian and talk-show host denounced the biblical purge in newspaper columns and on television. A young evangelical Christian organized an electronic letter-writing campaign, asking Scandic: Why are you removing Bibles but not pay-porn on your TVs?
Scandic, which had started keeping its Bibles behind the front desk, put the New Testament back in guest rooms.
“Sweden is not as secular as we thought,” says Christer Sturmark, head of Sweden’s Humanist Association, a noisy assembly of nonbelievers to which the Bible-protesting hotel guest belongs.
After decades of secularization, religion in Europe has slowed its slide toward what had seemed inevitable oblivion. There are even nascent signs of a modest comeback. Most church pews are still empty. But belief in heaven, hell and concepts such as the soul has risen in parts of Europe, especially among the young, according to surveys. Religion, once a dead issue, now figures prominently in public discourse.
Yes, on the pages of the WSJ the free markets saves everything, even the Church itself.
“Is supply-side economics the explanation?”
Absolutely not. But competition among Christian churches is no doubt part of the explanation. Scholars and other observers have long suggested that competition among churches underlies the vibrancy of Christianity in America as compared with Western Europe.
I think the explanation has less to do with economics and more to do with psychology.
Nothing kills a vibrant personal faith like having that faith associated cheek by jowl with the state. The state screws everything up. The state can never satisfy. The state must do and be certain things that faith can never be associated with.
This is especially so with Christianity. It is an underdog faith at creative and peaceful odds with the state, at its best in intimate and personal settings and when practiced with a radical personal committment. Its coming to be associated with the state is responsible for a majority of the crimes committed in its name. It was never meant to be so. So it can’t but be good for that association to be finally dissolved for good whereever is found (esp in England ;-))
[blockquote]Nothing kills a vibrant personal faith like having that faith associated cheek by jowl with the state. The state screws everything up. The state can never satisfy. The state must do and be certain things that faith can never be associated with.[/blockquote]
Bravo, StayinAnglican.
It is evidence such as this and the better evidence from Italy that makes some kind of disestablishment of the CofE thought provoking from a missional perspective.
For evidence from Italy see the .pdf article [url=http://www.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1001&context=ijrr]Religious Competition and Revival in Italy: Exploring European Exceptionalism[/url] by Massimo Introvigne and Rodney Stark
By the Swede hotel guest’s inane protest, he seems to have already been bored and stupefied when he checked in, having nothing better to do than to demand that he never be exposed to anything decent that differed from his opinion and his freedom to watch cable porn in his room.
#3 … but what does it mean to be Anglican if not the CofE by another name??
#3, 4
Part of me agrees with you. From one point of view, the Constantinian settlement was a disaster. So was the C of E settlement. But there is an intrinsic power struggle between religion and the state. This power struggle always threatens to become unmanageable. So which is best? Theocracy never works. Church-state separation comes under its own pressures. Mild association of church and state (England, Sweden) can enervate but has pluses (Establishment is supported by many Muslims, Jews etc., who find in it a sort of umbrella guarantor for religion in general) – and I don’t believe the enervation of the C of E has as much to do with Establishment as the obsession with absurdities – like the gay issue or the Covenant.
I don’t trust the “competition” theory to explain religion in America. One can’t exclude the American predilection for millennial thought, always an energy-source for religious foment; as well as the American belief in the primacy of individual religious experience, where anyone with a Bible and a soap-box can start his own church — competition or no competition.